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2064

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio%20Canova

Antonio Canova

{{Infobox artist | name = Antonio Canova | image = Antonio Canova Selfportrait 1792.jpg | alt = | caption = Self-portrait, 1792 | birth_name = Antonio Canova | birth_date = 1 November 1757 | birth_place = Possagno, Republic of Venice | death_date = | death_place = Venice, Lombardy–Venetia | nationality = Republic of Venice (1757–1798)Austria (territory ceded to Austria) (1798–1805)Kingdom of Italy (1805–1814) Austrian Empire (1814–1822) | field = Sculpture | training = | movement = Neoclassicism | works = {{unbulleted list|Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss|The Three Graces|Napoleon as Mars the Peacemaker|Venus Victrix|George Washington}} | patrons = | influenced = | awards = | elected = | website = }} Antonio Canova (; 1 November 1757 – 13 October 1822) was an Italian Neoclassical sculptor, famous for his marble sculptures. Often regarded as the greatest of the Neoclassical artists, his sculpture was inspired by the Baroque and the classical revival, and has been characterised as having avoided the melodramatics of the former, and the cold artificiality of the latter. Life Possagno In 1757, Antonio Canova was born in the Venetian Republic city of Possagno to Pietro Canova, a stonecutter, and Maria Angela Zardo Fantolini. In 1761, his father died. A year later, his mother remarried. As such, in 1762, he was put into the care of his paternal grandfather Pasino Canova, who was a stonemason, owner of a quarry, and was a "sculptor who specialized in altars with statues and low reliefs in late Baroque style". He led Antonio into the art of sculpting. Before the age of ten, Canova began making models in clay, and carving marble. Indeed, at the age of nine, he executed two small shrines of Carrara marble, which are still extant. After these works, he appears to have been constantly employed under his grandfather. Venice In 1770, he was an apprentice for two years to Giuseppe Bernardi, who was also known as 'Torretto'. Afterwards, he was under the tutelage of Giovanni Ferrari until he began his studies at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia. At the Academy, he won several prizes. During this time, he was given his first workshop within a monastery by some local monks. The Senator Giovanni Falier commissioned Canova to produce statues of Orpheus and Eurydice for his garden – the Villa Falier at Asolo. The statues were begun in 1775, and both were completed by 1777. The pieces exemplify the late Rococo style. On the year of their completion, both works were exhibited for the Feast of the Ascension in Piazza San Marco. Widely praised, the works won Canova his first renown among the Venetian elite. Another Venetian who is said to have commissioned early works from Canova was the abate Filippo Farsetti, whose collection at Ca' Farsetti on the Grand Canal he frequented. In 1779, Canova opened his own studio at Calle Del Traghetto at S. Maurizio,. At this time, Procurator Pietro Vettor Pisani commissioned Canova's first marble statue: a depiction of Daedalus and Icarus. The statue inspired great admiration for his work at the annual art fair; Canova was paid 100 gold zecchini for the completed work. At the base of the statue, Daedalus' tools are scattered about; these tools are also an allusion to Sculpture, of which the statue is a personification. With such an intention, there is suggestion that Daedalus is a portrait of Canova's grandfather Pasino. Rome Canova arrived in Rome, on 28 December 1780. Prior to his departure, his friends had applied to the Venetian Senate for a pension. Successful in the application, the stipend allotted amounted to three hundred ducats, limited to three years. While in Rome, Canova spent time studying and sketching the works of Michelangelo. In 1781, Girolamo Zulian – the Venetian ambassador to Rome – hired Canova to sculpt Theseus and the Minotaur. Zulian played a fundamental role in Canova's rise to fame, turning some rooms of his palace into a studio for the artist and placing his trust in him despite Canova's early critics in Rome. The statue depicts the victorious Theseus seated on the lifeless body of a Minotaur. The initial spectators were certain that the work was a copy of a Greek original, and were shocked to learn it was a contemporary work. The highly regarded work is now in the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum, in London. Between 1783 and 1785, Canova arranged, composed, and designed a funerary monument dedicated to Clement XIV for the Church of Santi Apostoli. After another two years, the work met completion in 1787. The monument secured Canova's reputation as the pre-eminent living artist. In 1792, he completed another cenotaph, this time commemorating Clement XIII for St. Peter's Basilica. Canova harmonized its design with the older Baroque funerary monuments in the basilica. In 1790, he began to work on a funerary monument for Titian, which was eventually abandoned by 1795. During the same year, he increased his activity as a painter. Canova was notoriously disinclined to restore sculptures. However, in 1794 he made an exception for his friend and early patron Zulian, restoring a few sculptures that Zulian had moved from Rome to Venice. The following decade was extremely productive, beginning works such as Hercules and Lichas, Cupid and Psyche, Hebe, Tomb of Duchess Maria Christina of Saxony-Teschen, and The Penitent Magdalene. In 1797, he went to Vienna, but only a year later, in 1798, he returned to Possagno for a year. France and England By 1800, Canova was the most celebrated artist in Europe. He systematically promoted his reputation by publishing engravings of his works and having marble versions of plaster casts made in his workshop. He became so successful that he had acquired patrons from across Europe including France, England, Russia, Austria and Holland, as well as several members from different royal lineages, and prominent individuals. Among his patrons were Napoleon and his family, for whom Canova produced much work, including several depictions between 1803 and 1809. The most notable representations were that of Napoleon as Mars the Peacemaker, and Venus Victrix which was portrayal of Pauline Bonaparte.Napoleon as Mars the Peacemaker had its inception after Canova was hired to make a bust of Napoleon in 1802. The statue was begun in 1803, with Napoleon requesting to be shown in a French General's uniform, Canova rejected this, insisting on an allusion to Mars, the Roman god of War. It was completed in 1806. In 1811, the statue arrived in Paris, but not installed; neither was its bronze copy in the Foro Napoleonico in Milan. In 1815, the original went to the Duke of Wellington, after his victory at Waterloo against Napoleon.Venus Victrix was originally conceived as a robed and recumbent sculpture of Pauline Borghese in the guise of Diana. Instead, Pauline ordered Canova to make the statue a nude Venus. The work was not intended for public viewing. Other works for the Napoleon family include, a bust of Napoleon, a statue of Napoleon's mother, and Marie Louise as Concordia. In 1802, Canova was assigned the post of 'Inspector-General of Antiquities and Fine Art of the Papal State', a position formerly held by Raphael. One of his activities in this capacity was to pioneer the restoration of the Appian Way by restoring the tomb of Servilius Quartus. In 1808 Canova became an associated member of the Royal Institute of Sciences, Literature and Fine Arts of the Kingdom of Holland. In 1814, he began his The Three Graces. In 1815, he was named 'Minister Plenipotentiary of the Pope,' and was tasked with recovering various works of art that were taken to Paris by Napoleon under the terms of the Treaty of Paris (1815). Also in 1815, he visited London, and met with Benjamin Haydon. It was after the advice of Canova that the Elgin Marbles were acquired by the British Museum, with plaster copies sent to Florence, according to Canova's request. Returning to Italy In 1816, Canova returned to Rome with some of the art Napoleon had taken. He was rewarded with several marks of distinction: he was appointed President of the Accademia di San Luca, inscribed into the "Golden Book of Roman Nobles" by the Pope's own hands, and given the title of Marquis of Ischia, alongside an annual pension of 3,000 crowns. In 1819, he commenced and completed his commissioned work Venus Italica as a replacement for the Venus de' Medici. After his 1814 proposal to build a personified statue of Religion for St. Peter's Basilica was rejected, Canova sought to build his own temple to house it. This project came to be the Tempio Canoviano. Canova designed, financed, and partly built the structure himself. The structure was to be a testament to Canova's piety. The building's design was inspired by combining the Parthenon and the Pantheon together. On 11 July 1819, Canova laid the foundation stone dressed in red Papal uniform and decorated with all his medals. It first opened in 1830, and was finally completed in 1836. After the foundation-stone of this edifice had been laid, Canova returned to Rome; but every succeeding autumn he continued to visit Possagno to direct the workmen and encourage them with rewards. During the period that intervened between commencing operations at Possagno and his death, he executed or finished some of his most striking works. Among these were the group Mars and Venus, the colossal figure of Pius VI, the Pietà, the St John, and a colossal bust of his friend, the Count Leopoldo Cicognara. In 1820, he made a statue of George Washington for the state of North Carolina. As recommended by Thomas Jefferson, the sculptor used the marble bust of Washington by Giuseppe Ceracchi as a model. It was delivered on 24 December 1821. The statue and the North Carolina State House where it was displayed were later destroyed by fire in 1831. A plaster replica was sent by King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy in 1910, now on view at the North Carolina Museum of History. A marble copy was sculpted by Romano Vio in 1970, now on view in the rotunda of the capitol building. In 1822, he journeyed to Naples, to superintend the construction of wax moulds for an equestrian statue of Ferdinand VII. The adventure was disastrous to his health, but soon became healthy enough to return to Rome. From there, he voyaged to Venice; however, on 13 October 1822, he died there at the age of 64. As he never married, the name became extinct, except through his stepbrothers' lineage of Satori-Canova. On 12 October 1822, Canova instructed his brother to use his entire estate to complete the Tempio in Possagno. On 25 October 1822, his body was placed in the Tempio Canoviano. His heart was interred at the Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in Venice, and his right hand preserved in a vase at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia. His memorial service was so grand that it rivaled the ceremony that the city of Florence held for Michelangelo in 1564. In 1826, Giovanni Battista Sartori sold Canova's Roman studio and took every plaster model and sculpture to Possagno, where they were installed in the gypsotheque of the Tempio Canoviano. Works Among Canova's most notable works are: Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss (1787)Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss was commissioned in 1787 by Colonel John Campbell. It is regarded as a masterpiece of Neoclassical sculpture, but shows the mythological lovers at a moment of great emotion, characteristic of the emerging movement of Romanticism. It represents the god Cupid in the height of love and tenderness, immediately after awakening the lifeless Psyche with a kiss. Napoleon as Mars the Peacemaker (1802–1806)Napoleon as Mars the Peacemaker had its inception after Canova was hired to make a bust of Napoleon in 1802. The statue was begun in 1802, with Napoleon requesting to be shown in a French General's uniform, Canova rejected this, insisting on an allusion to Mars, the Roman god of War. It was completed in 1806. In 1811, the statue arrived in Paris, but not installed; neither was its bronze copy in the Foro Napoleonico in Milan. In 1815, the original went to the Duke of Wellington, after his victory at Waterloo against Napoleon and is on display at Apsley House. Perseus Triumphant (1804–1806)Perseus Triumphant, sometimes called Perseus with the Head of Medusa, was a statue commissioned by tribune Onorato Duveyriez. It depicts the Greek hero Perseus after his victory over the Gorgon Medusa. The statue was based freely to the Apollo Belvedere and the Medusa Rondanini. Napoleon, after his 1796 Italian Campaign, took the Apollo Belvedere to Paris. In the statue's absence, Pope Pius VII acquired Canova's Perseus Triumphant and placed the work upon the Apollo's pedestal. The statue was so successful that when the Apollo was returned, Perseus remained as a companion piece. One replica of the statue was commissioned from Canova by the Polish countess Waleria Tarnowska; it's now displayed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Karl Ludwig Fernow said of the statue that "every eye must rest with pleasure on the beautiful surface, even when the mind finds its hopes of high and pure enjoyment disappointed." Venus Victrix (1805–1808)Venus Victrix ranks among the most famous of Canova's works. Originally, Canova wished the depiction to be of a robed Diana, but Pauline Borghese insisted to appear as a nude Venus. The work was not intended for public viewing. The Three Graces (1814–1817) John Russell, the 6th Duke of Bedford, commissioned a version of the now famous work. He had previously visited Canova in his studio in Rome in 1814 and had been immensely impressed by a carving of the Graces the sculptor had made for the Empress Joséphine. When the Empress died in May of the same year he immediately offered to purchase the completed piece, but was unsuccessful as Josephine's son Eugène de Beauharnais claimed it (his son Maximilian, Duke of Leuchtenberg brought it to St. Petersburg, where it can now be found in the Hermitage Museum). Undeterred, the Duke commissioned another version for himself. The sculpting process began in 1814 and was completed in 1817. Finally in 1819 it was installed at the Duke's residence in Woburn Abbey. Canova even made the trip over to England to supervise its installation, choosing for it to be displayed on a pedestal adapted from a marble plinth with a rotating top. This version is now owned jointly by the Victoria and Albert Museum and the National Galleries of Scotland, and is alternately displayed at each. Artistic process Canova had a distinct, signature style in which he combined Greek and Roman art practices with early stirrings of romanticism to delve into a new path of Neoclassicism. Canova's sculptures fall into three categories: Heroic compositions, compositions of grace, and sepulchral monuments. In each of these, Canova's underlying artistic motivations were to challenge, if not compete, with classical statues. Canova refused to take in pupils and students, but would hire workers to carve the initial figure from the marble. According to art historian Giuseppe Pavanello, "Canova's system of work concentrated on the initial idea, and on the final carving of the marble". He had an elaborate system of comparative pointing so that the workers were able to reproduce the plaster form in the selected block of marble. These workers would leave a thin veil over the entire statue so Canova's could focus on the surface of the statue. While he worked, he had people read to him select literary and historical texts. Last touch During the last quarter of the eighteenth century, it became fashionable to view art galleries at night by torchlight. Canova was an artist that leapt on the fad and displayed his works of art in his studio by candlelight. As such, Canova would begin to finalize the statue with special tools by candlelight, to soften the transitions between the various parts of the nude. After a little recarving, he began to rub the statue down with pumice stone, sometimes for periods longer than weeks or months. If that was not enough, he would use tripoli (rottenstone) and lead. He then applied a now unknown chemical-composition of patina onto the flesh of the figure to lighten the skin tone. Importantly, his friends also denied any usage of acids in his process. Criticisms Conversations revolving around the justification of art as superfluous usually invoked the name of Canova. Karl Ludwig Fernow believed that Canova was not Kantian enough in his aesthetic, because emphasis seemed to have been placed on agreeableness rather than Beauty. Canova was faulted for creating works that were artificial in complexity. Legacy Although the Romantic period artists buried Canova's name soon after he died, he is slowly being rediscovered. Giuseppe Pavanello wrote in 1996 that "the importance and value of Canova's art is now recognized as holding in balance the last echo of the Ancients and the first symptom of the restless experimentation of the modern age". Canova spent large parts of his fortune helping young students and sending patrons to struggling sculptors, including Sir Richard Westmacott and John Gibson. He was introduced into various orders of chivalry. A number of his works, sketches, and writings are collected in the Sala Canoviana of the Museo Civico of Bassano del Grappa. Other works, including plaster casts are the Museo Canoviano in Asolo. In 2018, a crater on Mercury was named in his honor. Literary inspirations Two of Canova's works appear as engravings in Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap Book, 1834, with poetical illustrations by Letitia Elizabeth Landon. These are of The Dancing Girl and Hebe''. Commemorations Canova, South Dakota Via Antonio Canova, in Treviso Aeroporto di Treviso A. Canova The Museo Canova in Possagno Tempio Canoviano, in Possagno Gallery Notes References Sources . . External links Canova's Three Graces (second version) in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2000). One of three Flickr photos by ketrin 1407. Canova's Perseus and Medusa in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2009). Part of Flickr set by ketrin1407. Europe in the age of enlightenment and revolution, a catalog from The Metropolitan Museum of Art Libraries (fully available online as PDF), which contains material on Canova (see index) Antonio Canova: Photo Gallery Canova's death mask at Princeton Canova museum and plaster cast gallery Canova 2009 Exhibition in Forlì, Italy 1757 births 1822 deaths People from the Province of Treviso 18th-century Italian sculptors Italian male sculptors 19th-century Italian sculptors Neoclassical sculptors Members of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Artists of the Boston Public Library 19th-century male artists Burials at Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari Elgin Marbles

2065

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auguste%20Rodin

Auguste Rodin

François Auguste René Rodin (12 November 184017 November 1917) was a French sculptor generally considered the founder of modern sculpture. He was schooled traditionally and took a craftsman-like approach to his work. Rodin possessed a unique ability to model a complex, turbulent, and deeply pocketed surface in clay. He is known for such sculptures as The Thinker, Monument to Balzac, The Kiss, The Burghers of Calais, and The Gates of Hell. Many of Rodin's most notable sculptures were criticized, as they clashed with predominant figurative sculpture traditions in which works were decorative, formulaic, or highly thematic. Rodin's most original work departed from traditional themes of mythology and allegory. He modeled the human body with naturalism, and his sculptures celebrate individual character and physicality. Although Rodin was sensitive to the controversy surrounding his work, he refused to change his style, and his continued output brought increasing favor from the government and the artistic community. From the unexpected naturalism of Rodin's first major figure – inspired by his 1875 trip to Italy – to the unconventional memorials whose commissions he later sought, his reputation grew, and Rodin became the preeminent French sculptor of his time. By 1900, he was a world-renowned artist. Wealthy private clients sought Rodin's work after his World's Fair exhibit, and he kept company with a variety of high-profile intellectuals and artists. His student, Camille Claudel, became his associate, lover, and creative rival. Rodin's other students included Antoine Bourdelle, Constantin Brâncuși, and Charles Despiau. He married his lifelong companion, Rose Beuret, in the last year of both their lives. His sculptures suffered a decline in popularity after his death in 1917, but within a few decades his legacy solidified. Rodin remains one of the few sculptors widely known outside the visual arts community. Biography Formative years Rodin was born in 1840 into a working-class family in Paris, the second child of Marie Cheffer and Jean-Baptiste Rodin, who was a police department clerk. He was largely self-educated, and began to draw at age 10. Between ages 14 and 17, he attended the Petite École, a school specializing in art and mathematics where he studied drawing and painting. His drawing teacher Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran believed in first developing the personality of his students so that they observed with their own eyes and drew from their recollections, and Rodin expressed appreciation for his teacher much later in life. It was at Petite École that he met Jules Dalou and Alphonse Legros. In 1857, Rodin submitted a clay model of a companion to the École des Beaux-Arts in an attempt to win entrance; he did not succeed, and two further applications were also denied. Entrance requirements were not particularly high at the Grande École, so the rejections were considerable setbacks. Rodin's inability to gain entrance may have been due to the judges' Neoclassical tastes, while Rodin had been schooled in light, 18th-century sculpture. He left the Petite École in 1857 and earned a living as a craftsman and ornamenter for most of the next two decades, producing decorative objects and architectural embellishments. Rodin's sister Maria, two years his senior, died of peritonitis in a convent in 1862, and Rodin was anguished with guilt because he had introduced her to an unfaithful suitor. He turned away from art and joined the Catholic order of the Congregation of the Blessed Sacrament as a laybrother. Saint Peter Julian Eymard, founder and head of the congregation, recognized Rodin's talent and sensed his lack of suitability for the order, so he encouraged Rodin to continue with his sculpture. Rodin returned to work as a decorator while taking classes with animal sculptor Antoine-Louis Barye. The teacher's attention to detail and his finely rendered musculature of animals in motion significantly influenced Rodin. In 1864, Rodin began to live with a young seamstress named Rose Beuret (born in June 1844), with whom he stayed for the rest of his life, with varying commitment. The couple had a son named Auguste-Eugène Beuret (1866–1934). That year, Rodin offered his first sculpture for exhibition and entered the studio of Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse, a successful mass producer of objets d'art. Rodin worked as Carrier-Belleuse' chief assistant until 1870, designing roof decorations and staircase and doorway embellishments. With the arrival of the Franco-Prussian War, Rodin was called to serve in the French National Guard, but his service was brief due to his near-sightedness. Decorators' work had dwindled because of the war, yet Rodin needed to support his family, as poverty was a continual difficulty for him until about the age of 30. Carrier-Belleuse soon asked him to join him in Belgium, where they worked on ornamentation for the Brussels Stock Exchange. Rodin planned to stay in Belgium a few months, but he spent the next six years outside of France. It was a pivotal time in his life. He had acquired skill and experience as a craftsman, but no one had yet seen his art, which sat in his workshop since he could not afford castings. His relationship with Carrier-Belleuse had deteriorated, but he found other employment in Brussels, displaying some works at salons, and his companion Rose soon joined him there. Having saved enough money to travel, Rodin visited Italy for two months in 1875, where he was drawn to the work of Donatello and Michelangelo. Their work had a profound effect on his artistic direction. Rodin said, "It is Michelangelo who has freed me from academic sculpture." Returning to Belgium, he began work on The Age of Bronze, a life-size male figure whose naturalism brought Rodin attention but led to accusations of sculptural cheatingits naturalism and scale was such that critics alleged he had cast the work from a living model. Much of Rodin's later work was explicitly larger or smaller than life, in part to demonstrate the folly of such accusations. Artistic independence Rose Beuret and Rodin returned to Paris in 1877, moving into a small flat on the Left Bank. Misfortune surrounded Rodin: his mother, who had wanted to see her son marry, was dead, and his father was blind and senile, cared for by Rodin's sister-in-law, Aunt Thérèse. Rodin's eleven-year-old son Auguste, possibly developmentally delayed, was also in the ever-helpful Thérèse's care. Rodin had essentially abandoned his son for six years, and would have a very limited relationship with him throughout his life. Father and son joined the couple in their flat, with Rose as caretaker. Charges of fakery surrounding The Age of Bronze continued. Rodin increasingly sought soothing female companionship in Paris, and Rose stayed in the background. Rodin earned his living collaborating with more established sculptors on public commissions, primarily memorials and neo-baroque architectural pieces in the style of Carpeaux. In competitions for commissions he submitted models of Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Lazare Carnot, all to no avail. On his own time, he worked on studies leading to the creation of his next important work, St. John the Baptist Preaching. In 1880, Carrier-Belleuse – then art director of the Sèvres national porcelain factory – offered Rodin a part-time position as a designer. The offer was in part a gesture of reconciliation, and Rodin accepted. That part of Rodin which appreciated 18th-century tastes was aroused, and he immersed himself in designs for vases and table ornaments that brought the factory renown across Europe. The artistic community appreciated his work in this vein, and Rodin was invited to Paris Salons by such friends as writer Léon Cladel. During his early appearances at these social events, Rodin seemed shy; in his later years, as his fame grew, he displayed the loquaciousness and temperament for which he is better known. French statesman Leon Gambetta expressed a desire to meet Rodin, and the sculptor impressed him when they met at a salon. Gambetta spoke of Rodin in turn to several government ministers, likely including , the Undersecretary of the Ministry of Fine Arts, whom Rodin eventually met. Rodin's relationship with Turquet was rewarding. Through Turquet , he won the 1880 commission to create a portal for a planned museum of decorative arts. Rodin dedicated much of the next four decades to his elaborate Gates of Hell, an unfinished portal for a museum that was never built. Many of the portal's figures became sculptures in themselves, including Rodin's most famous, The Thinker and The Kiss. With the museum commission came a free studio, granting Rodin a new level of artistic freedom. Soon, he stopped working at the porcelain factory in 1882; his income came from private commissions. In 1883, Rodin agreed to supervise a course for sculptor Alfred Boucher in his absence, where he met the 18-year-old Camille Claudel. The two formed a passionate but stormy relationship and influenced each other artistically. Claudel inspired Rodin as a model for many of his figures, and she was a talented sculptor, assisting him on commissions as well as creating her own works. Her Bust of Rodin was displayed to critical acclaim at the 1892 Salon. Although busy with The Gates of Hell, Rodin won other commissions. He pursued an opportunity to create a historical monument for the town of Calais. For a monument to French author Honoré de Balzac, Rodin was chosen in 1891. His execution of both sculptures clashed with traditional tastes and met with varying degrees of disapproval from the organizations that sponsored the commissions. Still, Rodin was gaining support from diverse sources that propelled him toward fame. In 1889, the Paris Salon invited Rodin to be a judge on its artistic jury. Though Rodin's career was on the rise, Claudel and Beuret were becoming increasingly impatient with Rodin's "double life". Claudel and Rodin shared an atelier at a small old castle (the Château de l'Islette in the Loire), but Rodin refused to relinquish his ties to Beuret, his loyal companion during the lean years, and mother of his son. During one absence, Rodin wrote to Beuret, "I think of how much you must have loved me to put up with my caprices...I remain, in all tenderness, your Rodin." Claudel and Rodin parted in 1898. Claudel suffered an alleged nervous breakdown several years later and was confined to an institution for 30 years by her family, until her death in 1943, despite numerous attempts by doctors to explain to her mother and brother that she was sane. In 1904, Rodin was introduced to the Welsh artist, Gwen John, who modelled for him and became his lover after being introduced by Hilda Flodin. John had a fervent attachment to Rodin and would write to him thousands of times over the next ten years. As their relationship came to a close, despite his genuine feeling for her, Rodin eventually resorted to the use of concièrges and secretaries to keep her at a distance. Works In 1864, Rodin submitted his first sculpture for exhibition, The Man with the Broken Nose, to the Paris Salon. The subject was an elderly neighborhood street porter. The unconventional bronze piece was not a traditional bust, but instead the head was "broken off" at the neck, the nose was flattened and crooked, and the back of the head was absent, having fallen off the clay model in an accident. The work emphasized texture and the emotional state of the subject; it illustrated the "unfinishedness" that would characterize many of Rodin's later sculptures. The Salon rejected the piece. Early figures: the inspiration of Italy In Brussels, Rodin created his first full-scale work, The Age of Bronze, having returned from Italy. Modeled after a Belgian soldier, the figure drew inspiration from Michelangelo's Dying Slave, which Rodin had observed at the Louvre. Attempting to combine Michelangelo's mastery of the human form with his own sense of human nature, Rodin studied his model from all angles, at rest and in motion; he mounted a ladder for additional perspective, and made clay models, which he studied by candlelight. The result was a life-size, well-proportioned nude figure, posed unconventionally with his right hand atop his head, and his left arm held out at his side, forearm parallel to the body. In 1877, the work debuted in Brussels and then was shown at the Paris Salon. The statue's apparent lack of a theme was troubling to critics – commemorating neither mythology nor a noble historical event – and it is not clear whether Rodin intended a theme. He first titled the work The Vanquished, in which form the left hand held a spear, but he removed the spear because it obstructed the torso from certain angles. After two more intermediary titles, Rodin settled on The Age of Bronze, suggesting the Bronze Age, and in Rodin's words, "man arising from nature". Later, however, Rodin said that he had had in mind "just a simple piece of sculpture without reference to subject". Its mastery of form, light, and shadow made the work look so naturalistic that Rodin was accused of surmoulage – having taken a cast from a living model. Rodin vigorously denied the charges, writing to newspapers and having photographs taken of the model to prove how the sculpture differed. He demanded an inquiry and was eventually exonerated by a committee of sculptors. Leaving aside the false charges, the piece polarized critics. It had barely won acceptance for display at the Paris Salon, and criticism likened it to "a statue of a sleepwalker" and called it "an astonishingly accurate copy of a low type". Others rallied to defend the piece and Rodin's integrity. The government minister Turquet admired the piece, and The Age of Bronze was purchased by the state for 2,200 francs – what it had cost Rodin to have it cast in bronze. A second male nude, St. John the Baptist Preaching, was completed in 1878. Rodin sought to avoid another charge of surmoulage by making the statue larger than life: St. John stands almost . While The Age of Bronze is statically posed, St. John gestures and seems to move toward the viewer. The effect of walking is achieved despite the figure having both feet firmly on the ground – a technical achievement that was lost on most contemporary critics. Rodin chose this contradictory position to, in his words, "display simultaneously...views of an object which in fact can be seen only successively". Despite the title, St. John the Baptist Preaching did not have an obviously religious theme. The model, an Italian peasant who presented himself at Rodin's studio, possessed an idiosyncratic sense of movement that Rodin felt compelled to capture. Rodin thought of John the Baptist and carried that association into the title of the work. In 1880, Rodin submitted the sculpture to the Paris Salon. Critics were still mostly dismissive of his work, but the piece finished third in the Salon's sculpture category. Regardless of the immediate receptions of St. John and The Age of Bronze, Rodin had achieved a new degree of fame. Students sought him at his studio, praising his work and scorning the charges of surmoulage. The artistic community knew his name. The Gates of Hell A commission to create a portal for Paris' planned Museum of Decorative Arts was awarded to Rodin in 1880. Although the museum was never built, Rodin worked throughout his life on The Gates of Hell, a monumental sculptural group depicting scenes from Dante's Inferno in high relief. Often lacking a clear conception of his major works, Rodin compensated with hard work and a striving for perfection. He conceived The Gates with the surmoulage controversy still in mind: "...I had made the St. John to refute [the charges of casting from a model], but it only partially succeeded. To prove completely that I could model from life as well as other sculptors, I determined...to make the sculpture on the door of figures smaller than life." Laws of composition gave way to the Gates''' disordered and untamed depiction of Hell. The figures and groups in this, Rodin's meditation on the condition of man, are physically and morally isolated in their torment.The Gates of Hell comprised 186 figures in its final form. Many of Rodin's best-known sculptures started as designs of figures for this composition, such as The Thinker, The Three Shades, and The Kiss, and were only later presented as separate and independent works. Other well-known works derived from The Gates are Ugolino, Fallen Caryatid Carrying her Stone, Fugit Amor, She Who Was Once the Helmet-Maker's Beautiful Wife, The Falling Man, and The Prodigal Son. The ThinkerThe Thinker (originally titled The Poet, after Dante) was to become one of the best-known sculptures in the world. The original was a high bronze piece created between 1879 and 1889, designed for the Gates' lintel, from which the figure would gaze down upon Hell. While The Thinker most obviously characterizes Dante, aspects of the Biblical Adam, the mythological Prometheus, and Rodin himself have been ascribed to him. Other observers de-emphasize the apparent intellectual theme of The Thinker, stressing the figure's rough physicality and the emotional tension emanating from it. The Burghers of Calais The town of Calais had contemplated a historical monument for decades when Rodin learned of the project. He pursued the commission, interested in the medieval motif and patriotic theme. The mayor of Calais was tempted to hire Rodin on the spot upon visiting his studio, and soon the memorial was approved, with Rodin as its architect. It would commemorate the six townspeople of Calais who offered their lives to save their fellow citizens. During the Hundred Years' War, the army of King Edward III besieged Calais, and Edward ordered that the town's population be killed en masse. He agreed to spare them if six of the principal citizens would come to him prepared to die, bareheaded and barefooted and with ropes around their necks. When they came, he ordered that they be executed, but pardoned them when his queen, Philippa of Hainault, begged him to spare their lives. The Burghers of Calais depicts the men as they are leaving for the king's camp, carrying keys to the town's gates and citadel. Rodin began the project in 1884, inspired by the chronicles of the siege by Jean Froissart. Though the town envisioned an allegorical, heroic piece centered on Eustache de Saint-Pierre, the eldest of the six men, Rodin conceived the sculpture as a study in the varied and complex emotions under which all six men were laboring. One year into the commission, the Calais committee was not impressed with Rodin's progress. Rodin indicated his willingness to end the project rather than change his design to meet the committee's conservative expectations, but Calais said to continue. In 1889, The Burghers of Calais was first displayed to general acclaim. It is a bronze sculpture weighing , and its figures are tall. The six men portrayed do not display a united, heroic front; rather, each is isolated from his brothers, individually deliberating and struggling with his expected fate. Rodin soon proposed that the monument's high pedestal be eliminated, wanting to move the sculpture to ground level so that viewers could "penetrate to the heart of the subject". At ground level, the figures' positions lead the viewer around the work, and subtly suggest their common movement forward. The committee was incensed by the untraditional proposal, but Rodin would not yield. In 1895, Calais succeeded in having Burghers displayed in their preferred form: the work was placed in front of a public garden on a high platform, surrounded by a cast-iron railing. Rodin had wanted it located near the town hall, where it would engage the public. Only after damage during the First World War, subsequent storage, and Rodin's death was the sculpture displayed as he had intended. It is one of Rodin's best-known and most acclaimed works. Commissions and controversy Commissioned to create a monument to French writer Victor Hugo in 1889, Rodin dealt extensively with the subject of artist and muse. Like many of Rodin's public commissions, Monument to Victor Hugo was met with resistance because it did not fit conventional expectations. Commenting on Rodin's monument to Victor Hugo, The Times in 1909 expressed that "there is some show of reason in the complaint that [Rodin's] conceptions are sometimes unsuited to his medium, and that in such cases they overstrain his vast technical powers". The 1897 plaster model was not cast in bronze until 1964. The Société des Gens des Lettres, a Parisian organization of writers, planned a monument to French novelist Honoré de Balzac immediately after his death in 1850. The society commissioned Rodin to create the memorial in 1891, and Rodin spent years developing the concept for his sculpture. Challenged in finding an appropriate representation of Balzac given the author's rotund physique, Rodin produced many studies: portraits, full-length figures in the nude, wearing a frock coat, or in a robe – a replica of which Rodin had requested. The realized sculpture displays Balzac cloaked in the drapery, looking forcefully into the distance with deeply gouged features. Rodin's intent had been to show Balzac at the moment of conceiving a work – to express courage, labor, and struggle. When Monument to Balzac was exhibited in 1898, the negative reaction was not surprising. The Société rejected the work, and the press ran parodies. Criticizing the work, Morey (1918) reflected, "there may come a time, and doubtless will come a time, when it will not seem outre to represent a great novelist as a huge comic mask crowning a bathrobe, but even at the present day this statue impresses one as slang." A modern critic, indeed, claims that Balzac is one of Rodin's masterpieces. The monument had its supporters in Rodin's day; a manifesto defending him was signed by Monet, Debussy, and future Premier Georges Clemenceau, among many others. In the BBC series Civilisation, art historian Kenneth Clark praised the monument as "the greatest piece of sculpture of the 19th Century, perhaps, indeed, the greatest since Michelangelo." Rather than try to convince skeptics of the merit of the monument, Rodin repaid the Société his commission and moved the figure to his garden. After this experience, Rodin did not complete another public commission. Only in 1939 was Monument to Balzac cast in bronze and placed on the Boulevard du Montparnasse at the intersection with Boulevard Raspail. Other works The popularity of Rodin's most famous sculptures tends to obscure his total creative output. A prolific artist, he created thousands of busts, figures, and sculptural fragments over more than five decades. He painted in oils (especially in his thirties) and in watercolors. The Musée Rodin holds 7,000 of his drawings and prints, in chalk and charcoal, and thirteen vigorous drypoints. He also produced a single lithograph. Portraiture was an important component of Rodin's oeuvre, helping him to win acceptance and financial independence. His first sculpture was a bust of his father in 1860, and he produced at least 56 portraits between 1877 and his death in 1917. Early subjects included fellow sculptor Jules Dalou (1883) and companion Camille Claudel (1884). Later, with his reputation established, Rodin made busts of prominent contemporaries such as English politician George Wyndham (1905), Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw (1906), socialist (and former mistress of the Prince of Wales who became King Edward VII) Countess of Warwick (1908), Austrian composer Gustav Mahler (1909), former Argentine president Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and French statesman Georges Clemenceau (1911). His undated drawing Study of a Woman Nude, Standing, Arms Raised, Hands Crossed Above Head is one of the works seized in 2012 from the collection of Cornelius Gurlitt. Aesthetic Rodin was a naturalist, less concerned with monumental expression than with character and emotion. Departing with centuries of tradition, he turned away from the idealism of the Greeks, and the decorative beauty of the Baroque and neo-Baroque movements. His sculpture emphasized the individual and the concreteness of flesh, and suggested emotion through detailed, textured surfaces, and the interplay of light and shadow. To a greater degree than his contemporaries, Rodin believed that an individual's character was revealed by his physical features. Rodin's talent for surface modeling allowed him to let every part of the body speak for the whole. The male's passion in The Thinker is suggested by the grip of his toes on the rock, the rigidness of his back, and the differentiation of his hands. Speaking of The Thinker, Rodin illuminated his aesthetic: "What makes my Thinker think is that he thinks not only with his brain, with his knitted brow, his distended nostrils and compressed lips, but with every muscle of his arms, back, and legs, with his clenched fist and gripping toes." Sculptural fragments to Rodin were autonomous works, and he considered them the essence of his artistic statement. His fragments – perhaps lacking arms, legs, or a head – took sculpture further from its traditional role of portraying likenesses, and into a realm where forms existed for their own sake. Notable examples are The Walking Man, Meditation without Arms, and Iris, Messenger of the Gods. Rodin saw suffering and conflict as hallmarks of modern art. "Nothing, really, is more moving than the maddened beast, dying from unfulfilled desire and asking in vain for grace to quell its passion." Charles Baudelaire echoed those themes and was among Rodin's favorite poets. Rodin enjoyed music, especially the opera composer Gluck, and wrote a book about French cathedrals. He owned a work by the as-yet-unrecognized Van Gogh and admired the forgotten El Greco. Method Instead of copying traditional academic postures, Rodin preferred his models to move naturally around his studio (despite their nakedness). The sculptor often made quick sketches in clay that were later fine-tuned, cast in plaster, and cast in bronze or carved from marble. Rodin's focus was on the handling of clay. George Bernard Shaw sat for a portrait and gave an idea of Rodin's technique: "While he worked, he achieved a number of miracles. At the end of the first fifteen minutes, after having given a simple idea of the human form to the block of clay, he produced by the action of his thumb a bust so living that I would have taken it away with me to relieve the sculptor of any further work." He described the evolution of his bust over a month, passing through "all the stages of art's evolution": first, a "Byzantine masterpiece", then "Bernini intermingled", then an elegant Houdon. "The hand of Rodin worked not as the hand of a sculptor works, but as the work of Elan Vital. The Hand of God is his own hand." After he completed his work in clay, he employed highly skilled assistants to re-sculpt his compositions at larger sizes (including any of his large-scale monuments such as The Thinker), to cast the clay compositions into plaster or bronze, and to carve his marbles. Rodin's major innovation was to capitalize on such multi-staged processes of 19th century sculpture and their reliance on plaster casting. Since clay deteriorates rapidly if not kept wet or fired into a terra-cotta, sculptors used plaster casts as a means of securing the composition they would make from the fugitive material that is clay. This was common practice amongst Rodin's contemporaries, and sculptors would exhibit plaster casts with the hopes that they would be commissioned to have the works made in a more permanent material. Rodin, however, would have multiple plasters made and treat them as the raw material of sculpture, recombining their parts and figures into new compositions, and new names. As Rodin's practice developed into the 1890s, he became more and more radical in his pursuit of fragmentation, the combination of figures at different scales, and the making of new compositions from his earlier work. A prime example of this is the bold The Walking Man (1899–1900), which was exhibited at his major one-person show in 1900. This is composed of two sculptures from the 1870s that Rodin found in his studio – a broken and damaged torso that had fallen into neglect and the lower extremities of a statuette version of his 1878 St. John the Baptist Preaching he was having re-sculpted at a reduced scale. Without finessing the join between upper and lower, between torso and legs, Rodin created a work that many sculptors at the time and subsequently have seen as one of his strongest and most singular works. This is despite the fact that the object conveys two different styles, exhibits two different attitudes toward finish, and lacks any attempt to hide the arbitrary fusion of these two components. It was the freedom and creativity with which Rodin used these practices – along with his activation surfaces of sculptures through traces of his own touch and with his more open attitude toward bodily pose, sensual subject matter, and non-naturalistic surface – that marked Rodin's re-making of traditional 19th century sculptural techniques into the prototype for modern sculpture. Later years (1900–1917) By 1900, Rodin's artistic reputation was established. Gaining exposure from a pavilion of his artwork set up near the 1900 World's Fair (Exposition Universelle) in Paris, he received requests to make busts of prominent people internationally, while his assistants at the atelier produced duplicates of his works. His income from portrait commissions alone totaled probably 200,000 francs a year. As Rodin's fame grew, he attracted many followers, including the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and authors Octave Mirbeau, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and Oscar Wilde. Rilke stayed with Rodin in 1905 and 1906 and did administrative work for him; he would later write a laudatory monograph on the sculptor. Rodin and Beuret's modest country estate in Meudon, purchased in 1897, was a host to such guests as King Edward, dancer Isadora Duncan, and harpsichordist Wanda Landowska. A British journalist who visited the property noted in 1902 that in its complete isolation, there was "a striking analogy between its situation and the personality of the man who lives in it". Rodin moved to the city in 1908, renting the main floor of the Hôtel Biron, an 18th-century townhouse. He left Beuret in Meudon and began an affair with the American-born Duchesse de Choiseul. From 1910, he mentored the Russian sculptor, Moissey Kogan. United States While Rodin was beginning to be accepted in France by the time of The Burghers of Calais, he had not yet conquered the American market. Because of his technique and the frankness of some of his work, he did not have an easy time selling his work to American industrialists. However, he came to know Sarah Tyson Hallowell (1846–1924), a curator from Chicago who visited Paris to arrange exhibitions at the large Interstate Expositions of the 1870s and 1880s. Hallowell was not only a curator but an adviser and a facilitator who was trusted by a number of prominent American collectors to suggest works for their collections, the most prominent of these being the Chicago hotelier Potter Palmer and his wife, Bertha Palmer (1849–1918). The next opportunity for Rodin in America was the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. Hallowell wanted to help promote Rodin's work and he suggested a solo exhibition, which she wrote him was beaucoup moins beau que l'original but impossible, outside the rules. Instead, she suggested he send a number of works for her loan exhibition of French art from American collections and she told him she would list them as being part of an American collection. Rodin sent Hallowell three works, Cupid and Psyche, Sphinx and Andromeda. All nudes, these works provoked great controversy and were ultimately hidden behind a drape with special permission given for viewers to see them.Bust of Dalou and Burgher of Calais were on display in the official French pavilion at the fair and so between the works that were on display and those that were not, he was noticed. However, the works he gave Hallowell to sell found no takers, but she soon brought the controversial Quaker-born financier Charles Yerkes (1837–1905) into the fold and he purchased two large marbles for his Chicago manse; Yerkes was likely the first American to own a Rodin sculpture. Other collectors soon followed including the tastemaking Potter Palmers of Chicago and Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840–1924) of Boston, all arranged by Sarah Hallowell. In appreciation for her efforts at unlocking the American market, Rodin eventually presented Hallowell with a bronze, a marble and a terra cotta. When Hallowell moved to Paris in 1893, she and Rodin continued their warm friendship and correspondence, which lasted to the end of the sculptor's life. After Hallowell's death, her niece, the painter Harriet Hallowell, inherited the Rodins and after her death, the American heirs could not manage to match their value in order to export them, so they became the property of the French state. Great Britain After the start of the 20th century, Rodin was a regular visitor to Great Britain, where he developed a loyal following by the beginning of the First World War. He first visited England in 1881, where his friend, the artist Alphonse Legros, had introduced him to the poet William Ernest Henley. With his personal connections and enthusiasm for Rodin's art, Henley was most responsible for Rodin's reception in Britain. (Rodin later returned the favor by sculpting a bust of Henley that was used as the frontispiece to Henley's collected works and, after his death, on his monument in London.) Through Henley, Rodin met Robert Louis Stevenson and Robert Browning, in whom he found further support. Encouraged by the enthusiasm of British artists, students, and high society for his art, Rodin donated a significant selection of his works to the nation in 1914. After the revitalization of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1890, Rodin served as the body's vice-president. In 1903, Rodin was elected president of the International Society of Painters, Sculptors, and Engravers. He replaced its former president, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, upon Whistler's death. His election to the prestigious position was largely due to the efforts of Albert Ludovici, father of English philosopher Anthony Ludovici, who was private secretary to Rodin for several months in 1906, but the two men parted company after Christmas, "to their mutual relief." During his later creative years, Rodin's work turned increasingly toward the female form, and themes of more overt masculinity and femininity. He concentrated on small dance studies, and produced numerous erotic drawings, sketched in a loose way, without taking his pencil from the paper or his eyes from the model. Rodin met American dancer Isadora Duncan in 1900, attempted to seduce her, and the next year sketched studies of her and her students. In July 1906, Rodin was also enchanted by dancers from the Royal Ballet of Cambodia and produced some of his most famous drawings from the experience. Fifty-three years into their relationship, Rodin married Rose Beuret. They married on 29 January 1917, and Beuret died two weeks later, on 16 February. Rodin was ill that year; in January, he suffered weakness from influenza, and on 16 November his physician announced that "congestion of the lungs has caused great weakness. The patient's condition is grave." Rodin died the next day, age 77, at his villa in Meudon, Île-de-France, on the outskirts of Paris. A cast of The Thinker was placed next to his tomb in Meudon; it was Rodin's wish that the figure served as his headstone and epitaph. In 1923, Marcell Tirel, Rodin's secretary, published a book alleging that Rodin's death was largely due to cold, and the fact that he had no heat at Meudon. Rodin requested permission to stay in the Hotel Biron, a museum of his works, but the director of the museum refused to let him stay there. Legacy Rodin willed to the French state his studio and the right to make casts from his plasters. Because he encouraged the edition of his sculpted work, Rodin's sculptures are represented in many public and private collections. The Musée Rodin was founded in 1916 and opened in 1919 at the Hôtel Biron, where Rodin had lived, and it holds the largest Rodin collection, with more than 6,000 sculptures and 7,000 works on paper. The French order made him a Commander, and he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Oxford. During his lifetime, Rodin was compared to Michelangelo, and was widely recognized as the greatest artist of the era. In the three decades following his death, his popularity waned with changing aesthetic values. Since the 1950s, Rodin's reputation has re-ascended; he is recognized as the most important sculptor of the modern era, and has been the subject of much scholarly work. The sense of incompletion offered by some of his sculpture, such as The Walking Man, influenced the increasingly abstract sculptural forms of the 20th century. Rodin restored an ancient role of sculpture – to capture the physical and intellectual force of the human subject – and he freed sculpture from the repetition of traditional patterns, providing the foundation for greater experimentation in the 20th century. His popularity is ascribed to his emotion-laden representations of ordinary men and women – to his ability to find the beauty and pathos in the human animal. His most popular works, such as The Kiss and The Thinker, are widely used outside the fine arts as symbols of human emotion and character. To honor Rodin's artistic legacy, the Google search engine homepage displayed a Google Doodle featuring The Thinker to celebrate his 172nd birthday on 12 November 2012. Rodin had enormous artistic influence. A whole generation of sculptors studied in his workshop. These include Gutzon Borglum, Antoine Bourdelle, Constantin Brâncuși, Camille Claudel, Charles Despiau, Malvina Hoffman, Carl Milles, François Pompon, Rodo, Gustav Vigeland, Clara Westhoff and Margaret Winser, even though Brancusi later rejected his legacy. Rodin also promoted the work of other sculptors, including Aristide Maillol and Ivan Meštrović whom Rodin once called "the greatest phenomenon amongst sculptors." Other sculptors whose work has been described as owing to Rodin include Joseph Csaky, Alexander Archipenko, Joseph Bernard, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Georg Kolbe, Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Jacques Lipchitz, Pablo Picasso, Adolfo Wildt, and Ossip Zadkine. Henry Moore acknowledged Rodin's seminal influence on his work. Several films have been made featuring Rodin as a prominent character or presence. These include Camille Claudel, a 1988 film in which Gérard Depardieu portrays Rodin, Camille Claudel 1915 from 2013, and Rodin, a 2017 film starring Vincent Lindon as Rodin. Furthermore, the Rodin Studios artists' cooperative housing in New York City, completed in 1917 to designs by Cass Gilbert, was named after Rodin. Forgeries The relative ease of making reproductions has also encouraged many forgeries: a survey of expert opinion placed Rodin in the top ten most-faked artists. Rodin fought against forgeries of his works as early as 1901, and since his death, many cases of organized, large-scale forgeries have been revealed. A massive forgery was discovered by French authorities in the early 1990s and led to the conviction of art dealer Guy Hain. To deal with the complexity of bronze reproduction, France has promulgated several laws since 1956 which limit reproduction to twelve casts – the maximum number that can be made from an artist's plasters and still be considered his work. As a result of this limit, The Burghers of Calais, for example, is found in fourteen cities. In the market for sculpture, plagued by fakes, the value of a piece increases significantly when its provenance can be established. A Rodin work with a verified history sold for US$4.8 million in 1999, and Rodin's bronze Ève, grand modele – version sans rocher sold for $18.9 million at a 2008 Christie's auction in New York. Art critics concerned about authenticity have argued that taking a cast does not equal reproducing a Rodin sculpture – especially given the importance of surface treatment in Rodin's work. A number of drawings previously attributed to Rodin are now known to have been forged by Ernest Durig. See also List of sculptures by Auguste Rodin Auguste Rodin left many sculptural traces in Brussels | Focus on Belgium FRENCH SCULPTURE CENSUS - French sculpture 1500-1960 in North American public collections Citations General sources (Online Essay) Further reading Corbett, Rachel (2016). You Must Change Your Life: the Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin, New York: W. W. Norton and Company. . Sanyal, Narayan (1984). Rodin, Dey's Publishing Company, Kolkata. . Vincent, Clare. "Auguste Rodin (1840–1917)". In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. (October 2004) Tobias G. Natter, Max Hollein (Eds.): Klimt & Rodin: An Artistic Encounter.'' DelMonico Books – Prestel Publishing, Munich e. a. 2017, ISBN 978-3-7913-5708-9. External links Musée Rodin, Paris Friends of Rodin, association organizing for its members events around Auguste Rodin Rodin Museum, Philadelphia Rodin Wing - Guide at the Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art, Shizuoka City, Japan Auguste Rodin at the National Gallery of Art Rodin Collection, Stanford University Auguste Rodin: Timeline of Art History Metropolitan Museum of Art Rodin Exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum Nov 1987 – Jan 1988 Rodin at the Victoria and Albert Museum Correspondence with Walter Butterworth held at the University of Salford Public Art Fund: Rodin at Rockefeller Center Video documentary about Rodin's work Works by Rodin in the Simonow Collection - Abbaye de Flaran, France (by Ranier Maria Rilke, trans. by Jessie Lemont & Hans Trausil) Portrait of Auguste Rodin by Alphonse Legros at University of Michigan Museum of Art 1840 births 1917 deaths 19th-century French sculptors 20th-century French sculptors Sculptors from Paris French male sculptors French printmakers Grand Officers of the Legion of Honour French modern sculptors People of the French Third Republic People of the July Monarchy

2070

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act%20of%20Settlement%201701

Act of Settlement 1701

The Act of Settlement is an Act of the Parliament of England that settled the succession to the English and Irish crowns to only Protestants, which passed in 1701. More specifically, anyone who became a Roman Catholic, or who married one, became disqualified to inherit the throne. This had the effect of deposing the remaining descendants of Charles I, other than his Protestant granddaughter Anne, as the next Protestant in line to the throne was Sophia of Hanover. Born into the House of Wittelsbach, she was a granddaughter of James VI and I from his most junior surviving line, with the crowns descending only to her non-Catholic heirs. Sophia died shortly before the death of Queen Anne, and Sophia's son succeeded to the throne as King George I, starting the Hanoverian dynasty in Britain. The Act of Supremacy 1558 had confirmed the independence of the Church of England from Roman Catholicism under the English monarch. One of the principal factors which contributed to the Glorious Revolution was the perceived assaults made on the Church by King James II, a Roman Catholic, who was deposed in favour of his Protestant daughter Mary II and her husband William III. The need for this Act of Settlement was prompted by the inability of William and Mary, as well as of Mary's Protestant sister (the future Queen Anne), to produce any surviving children, and by the perceived threat posed by the pretensions to the throne by remaining Roman Catholic members of the House of Stuart. The Act played a key role in the formation of the Kingdom of Great Britain as, though England and Scotland had shared a monarch since 1603, they had remained separately governed countries, with the Act catalysing the Union of England and Scotland. However, the Parliament of Scotland was more reluctant to abandon the House of Stuart, members of which had been Scottish monarchs long before they became English. Moreover, the Act also placed limits on both the role of foreigners in the British government and the power of the monarch with respect to the Parliament of England, though some of those provisions have been altered by subsequent legislation. Along with the Bill of Rights 1689, the Act of Settlement remains today one of the main constitutional laws governing the succession not only to the throne of the United Kingdom, but to those of the other Commonwealth realms, whether by assumption or by patriation. The Act of Settlement cannot be altered in any realm except by that realm's own parliament and, by convention, only with the consent of all the other realms, as it touches on the succession to the shared crown. On 26 March 2015, following the Perth Agreement, legislation amending the Act came into effect across the Commonwealth realms that removed the disqualification arising from marriage to a Roman Catholic and instituted absolute primogeniture. Background Following the Glorious Revolution, the line of succession to the English throne was governed by the Bill of Rights 1689, which declared that the flight of James II from England to France during the revolution amounted to an abdication of the throne and that James's daughter Mary II and her husband/cousin, William III (William of Orange, who was also James's nephew), were James's successors. The Bill of Rights also provided that the line of succession would go through Mary's Protestant descendants by William and any possible future husband should she outlive him, then through Mary's sister Anne and her Protestant descendants, and then to the Protestant descendants of William III by a possible later marriage should he outlive Mary. During the debate, the House of Lords had attempted to append Sophia and her descendants to the line of succession, but the amendment failed in the Commons. Mary II died childless in 1694, after which William III did not remarry. In 1700, Prince William, Duke of Gloucester, who was Anne's only child to survive infancy, died of what may have been smallpox at the age of 11. Thus, Anne was left as the only person in line to the throne. The Bill of Rights excluded Catholics from the throne, which ruled out James II and his children (as well as their descendants) sired after he converted to Catholicism in 1668. However, it did not provide for the further succession after Anne. Parliament thus saw the need to settle the succession on Sophia and her descendants, and thereby guarantee the continuity of the Crown in the Protestant line. With religion and lineage initially decided, the ascendancy of William of Orange in 1689 would also bring his partiality to his foreign favourites that followed. By 1701 English jealousy of foreigners was rampant, and action was considered necessary. The Act The Act of Settlement provided that the throne would pass to the Electress Sophia of Hanover – a granddaughter of James VI and I and a niece of King Charles I – and her descendants, but it excluded "for ever" "all and every Person and Persons who ... is are or shall be reconciled to or shall hold Communion with the See or Church of Rome or shall profess the Popish Religion or shall marry a Papist". Thus, those who were Roman Catholics, and those who married Roman Catholics, were barred from ascending the throne. Conditional provisions The Act contained eight additional provisions that were to only come into effect upon the death of both William and Anne: Firstly, the monarch "shall join in communion with the Church of England". This was intended to ensure the exclusion of a Roman Catholic monarch. Along with James II's perceived despotism, his religion was the main cause of the Glorious Revolution, and of the previous linked religious and succession problems which had been resolved by the joint monarchy of William III and Mary II. Second, if a person not native to England comes to the throne, England will not wage war for "any dominions or territories which do not belong to the Crown of England, without the consent of Parliament". This would become relevant when a member of the House of Hanover ascended the British throne, as he would retain the territories of the Electorate of Hanover in what is now Lower Saxony (Germany), then part of the Holy Roman Empire. This provision has been dormant since Queen Victoria ascended the throne, because she did not inherit Hanover under the Salic Laws of the German-speaking states. Third, no monarch may leave "the dominions of England, Scotland, or Ireland", without the consent of Parliament. This provision was repealed in 1716, at the request of George I who was also the Elector of Hanover and Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg within the Holy Roman Empire; because of this, and also for personal reasons, he wished to visit Hanover from time to time. Fourth, all government matters within the jurisdiction of the Privy Council were to be transacted there, and all council resolutions were to be signed by those who advised and consented to them. This was because Parliament wanted to know who was deciding policies, as sometimes councillors' signatures normally attached to resolutions were absent. This provision was repealed early in Queen Anne's reign, as many councillors ceased to offer advice and some stopped attending meetings altogether. Fifth, no foreigner ("no Person born out of the Kingdoms of England Scotland or Ireland or the Dominions thereunto belonging"), even if naturalised or made a denizen (unless born of English parents), can be a Privy Councillor or a member of either House of Parliament, or hold "any Office or Place of Trust, either Civill or Military, or to have any Grant of Lands, Tenements or Hereditaments from the Crown, to himself or to any other or others in Trust for him". Subsequent nationality laws (today primarily the British Nationality Act 1981) made naturalised citizens the equal of those native born, and excluded Commonwealth citizens from the definition of foreigners, and citizens of the Irish Republic from the definition of aliens, but otherwise this provision still applies. It has however been disapplied in particular cases by a number of other statutes. Sixth, no person who has an office under the monarch, or receives a pension from the Crown, was to be a Member of Parliament. This provision was inserted to avoid unwelcome royal influence over the House of Commons. It remains in force, but with several exceptions; ministers of the Crown were exempted early on before Anne's death in order to continue some degree of royal patronage, but had to stand for a by-election to re-enter the House upon such appointment until 1926. As a side effect, this provision means that members of the Commons seeking to resign from parliament can get around the prohibition on resignation by obtaining a sinecure in the control of the Crown; while several offices have historically been used for this purpose, two are currently in use: appointments generally alternate between the stewardships of the Chiltern Hundreds and of the Manor of Northstead. Seventh, Judges' commissions are valid quamdiu se bene gesserint (during good behaviour) and if they do not behave themselves, they can be removed only by both Houses of Parliament (or in other Commonwealth realms the one House of Parliament, depending on the legislature's structure). This provision was the result of various monarchs influencing judges' decisions, and its purpose was to assure judicial independence. This patent was used prior to 1701 but did not prevent Charles I from removing Sir John Walter as Chief Baron of the Exchequer. Eighth, that "no Pardon under the Great Seal of England be pleadable to an Impeachment by the Commons in Parliament". This meant in effect that no pardon by the monarch was to save someone from being impeached by the House of Commons. Family tree Opposition The Tory administration that replaced the Whig Junto in 1699 took responsibility for steering the Act through Parliament. As a result, it passed with little opposition, although five peers voted against it in the House of Lords, including the Earl of Huntingdon, his brother-in-law the Earl of Scarsdale and three others. While many shared their opposition to a 'foreign' king, the general feeling was summed up as 'better a German prince than a French one.' Legacy For different reasons, various constitutionalists have praised the Act of Settlement: Henry Hallam called the Act "the seal of our constitutional laws" and David Lindsay Keir placed its importance above the Bill of Rights of 1689. Naamani Tarkow wrote: "If one is to make sweeping statements, one may say that, save Magna Carta (more truly, its implications), the Act of Settlement is probably the most significant statute in English history". Union of Scotland with England and Wales The Act of Settlement was, in many ways, the major cause of the union of Scotland with England and Wales to form the Kingdom of Great Britain. The Parliament of Scotland was not happy with the Act of Settlement and, in response, passed the Act of Security in 1704, through which Scotland reserved the right to choose its own successor to Queen Anne. Stemming from this, the Parliament of England decided that, to ensure the stability and future prosperity of Great Britain, full union of the two parliaments and nations was essential before Anne's death. It used a combination of exclusionary legislation (the Alien Act 1705), politics, and bribery to achieve this within three years under the Act of Union 1707. This success was in marked contrast to the four attempts at political union between 1606 and 1689, which all failed owing to a lack of political will in both kingdoms. By virtue of Article II of the Treaty of Union, which defined the succession to the throne of Great Britain, the Act of Settlement became part of Scots law as well. Succession to the Crown In addition to excluding James II, who died a few months after the Act received royal assent, and his Roman Catholic children, Prince James (The Old Pretender) and the Princess Royal, the Act also excluded the descendants of Princess Henrietta, the youngest sister of James II. Henrietta's daughter was Anne, Queen of Sardinia, a Roman Catholic, from whom descend all Jacobite pretenders after 1807. With the legitimate descendants of Charles I either childless (in the case of his two grand-daughters the late Queen Mary II and her successor Queen Anne) or Roman Catholic, Parliament's choice was limited to Sophia of Hanover, the Protestant daughter of the late Elizabeth of Bohemia, the only other child of King James I to have survived childhood. Elizabeth had borne nine children who reached adulthood, of whom Sophia was the youngest daughter. However in 1701 Sophia was the senior Protestant one, therefore with a legitimate claim to the English throne; Parliament passed over her Roman Catholic siblings, namely her sister Louise Hollandine of the Palatinate, and their descendants, who included Elizabeth Charlotte, Duchess of Orléans; Louis Otto, Prince of Salm, and his aunts; Anne Henriette, Princess of Condé, and Benedicta Henrietta, Duchess of Brunswick-Lüneburg. Removal from the succession due to Catholicism Since the Act's passing the most senior living member of the royal family to have married a Roman Catholic, and thereby to have been removed from the line of succession, is Prince Michael of Kent, who married Baroness Marie-Christine von Reibnitz in 1978; he was fifteenth in the line of succession at the time. He was restored to the line of succession in 2015 when the Succession to the Crown Act 2013 came into force, and became 34th in line. The next most senior living descendant of the Electress Sophia who had been ineligible to succeed on this ground is George Windsor, Earl of St Andrews, the elder son of Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, who married the Roman Catholic Sylvana Palma Tomaselli in 1988. His son, Lord Downpatrick, converted to Roman Catholicism in 2003 and is the most senior descendant of Sophia to be barred as a result of his religion. In 2008 his daughter, Lady Marina Windsor, also converted to Catholicism and was removed from the line of succession. More recently, Peter Phillips, the son of Anne, Princess Royal, and eleventh in line to the throne, married Autumn Kelly; Kelly had been brought up as a Roman Catholic, but she converted to Anglicanism prior to the wedding. Had she not done so, Phillips would have forfeited his place in the succession upon their marriage, only to have it restored in 2015. Excluding those princesses who have married into Roman Catholic royal families, such as Marie of Edinburgh, Victoria Eugenie of Battenberg and Princess Beatrice of Edinburgh, one member of the Royal Family (that is, with the style of Royal Highness) has converted to Roman Catholicism since the passage of the Act: the Duchess of Kent, wife of Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, who converted on 14 January 1994, but her husband did not lose his place in the succession because she was an Anglican at the time of their marriage. Present status As well as being part of the law of the United Kingdom, the Act of Settlement was received into the laws of all the countries and territories over which the British monarch reigned. It remains part of the laws of the 15 Commonwealth realms and the relevant jurisdictions within those realms. In accordance with established convention, the Statute of Westminster 1931 and later laws, the Act of Settlement (along with the other laws governing the succession of the Commonwealth realms) may only be changed with the agreement of all the realms (and, in some federal realms, the constituent members of those federations). The Succession to the Crown Act 2013 changed many provisions of this Act. Amendment proposals Challenges have been made against the Act of Settlement, especially its provisions regarding Roman Catholics and preference for males. However, changing the Act is a complex process, since the Act governs the shared succession of all the Commonwealth realms. The Statute of Westminster 1931 acknowledges by established convention that any changes to the rules of succession may be made only with the agreement of all of the states involved, with concurrent amendments to be made by each state's parliament or parliaments. Further, as the current monarch's eldest child and, in turn, his eldest child, are Anglican males, any change to the succession laws would have no immediate implications. Consequently, there was little public concern with the issues and debate had been confined largely to academic circles until the November 2010 announcement that Prince William was to marry. This raised the question of what would happen if he were to produce first a daughter and then a son. The Times reported on 6 November 1995 that Prince Charles had said on that day to Tony Blair and Paddy Ashdown that "Catholics should be able to ascend to the British throne". Ashdown claimed the Prince said: "I really can't think why we can't have Catholics on the throne". In 1998, during debate on a Succession to the Crown Bill, Junior Home Office Minister Lord Williams of Mostyn informed the House of Lords that the Queen had "no objection to the Government's view that in determining the line of succession to the throne, daughters and sons should be treated in the same way." Australia In October 2011 the Australian federal government was reported to have reached an agreement with all of the states on potential changes to their laws in the wake of amendments to the Act of Settlement. The practice of the Australian states—for example, New South Wales and Victoria—has been, when legislating to repeal some imperial statutes so far as they still applied in Australia, to provide that imperial statutes concerning the royal succession remain in force. The legal process required at the federal level remains, theoretically, unclear. The Australian constitution, as was noted during the crisis of 1936, contains no power for the federal parliament to legislate with respect to the monarchy. Everything thus turns upon the status and meaning of clause 2 in the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act 1900, which provides: "The provisions of this Act referring to the Queen shall extend to Her Majesty's heirs and successors in the sovereignty of the United Kingdom." Anne Twomey reviews three possible interpretations of the clause. First: it "mandates that whoever is the sovereign of the United Kingdom is also, by virtue of this external fact, sovereign of Australia"; accordingly, changes to British succession laws would have no effect on Australian law, but if the British amendment changed the sovereign, then the new sovereign of the United Kingdom would automatically become the new sovereign of Australia. Second, it is "merely an interpretative provision", operating to ensure that references to "the Queen" in the Constitution are references to whoever may at the time be the incumbent of the "sovereignty of the United Kingdom" as determined with regard to Australia, following the Australia Act 1986, by Australian law. Or, third, it incorporates the United Kingdom rules of succession into the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act, which itself can now be altered only by Australia, according to the Australia Act 1986; in that way, the British rules of succession have been patriated to Australia and, with regard to Australia, are subject to amendment or repeal solely by Australian law. However, Twomey expresses confidence that, if the High Court of Australia were to be faced with the problems of covering clause 2, it would find some way to conclude that, with regard to Australia, the clause is subject solely to Australian law. Canadian scholar Richard Toporoski theorised in 1998 that "if, let us say, an alteration were to be made in the United Kingdom to the Act of Settlement 1701, providing for the succession of the Crown... [i]t is my opinion that the domestic constitutional law of Australia or Papua New Guinea, for example, would provide for the succession in those countries of the same person who became Sovereign of the United Kingdom." In practice, when legislating for the Perth Agreement (see below), the Australian governments took the approach of the states requesting, and referring power to, the federal government to enact the legislation on behalf of the states (under paragraph 51(xxxviii) of the Australian Constitution) and the Commonwealth of Australia. Canada In Canada, where the Act of Settlement () is now a part of Canadian constitutional law, Tony O'Donohue, a Canadian civic politician, took issue with the provisions that exclude Roman Catholics from the throne, and which make the monarch of Canada the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, requiring him or her to be an Anglican. This, he claimed, discriminated against non-Anglicans, including Catholics, who are the largest faith group in Canada. In 2002, O'Donohue launched a court action that argued the Act of Settlement violated the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but, the case was dismissed by the court. It found that, as the Act of Settlement is part of the Canadian constitution, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, as another part of the same constitution, does not have supremacy over it. Also, the court noted that, while Canada has the power to amend the line of succession to the Canadian throne, the Statute of Westminster stipulates that the agreement of the governments of the fifteen other Commonwealth realms that share the Crown would first have to be sought if Canada wished to continue its relationship with these countries. An appeal of the decision was dismissed on 16 March 2005. Some commentators state that, as a result of this, any single provincial legislature could hinder any attempts to change this Act, and by extension, to the line of succession for the shared crown of all 16 Commonwealth realms. Others contend that that is not the case, and changes to the succession instituted by an Act of the Parliament of Canada "[in accord] with the convention of symmetry that preserves the personal unity of the British and Dominion Crowns". With the announcement in 2007 of the engagement of Peter Phillips to Autumn Kelly, a Roman Catholic and a Canadian, discussion about the Act of Settlement was revived. Norman Spector called in The Globe and Mail for Prime Minister Stephen Harper to address the issue of the Act's bar on Catholics, saying Phillips' marriage to Kelly would be the first time the provisions of the Act would bear directly on Canada—Phillips would be barred from acceding to the Canadian throne because he married a Roman Catholic Canadian. (In fact, Lord St Andrews had already lost his place in the line of succession when he married the Roman Catholic Canadian Sylvana Palma Tomaselli in 1988. But St Andrews' place in the line of succession was significantly lower than Phillips'.) Criticism of the Act of Settlement due to the Phillips–Kelly marriage was muted when Autumn Kelly converted to Anglicanism shortly before her marriage, thus preserving her husband's place in the line of succession. United Kingdom From time to time there has been debate over repealing the clause that prevents Roman Catholics, or those who marry one, from ascending to the British throne. Proponents of repeal argue that the clause is a bigoted anachronism; Cardinal Winning, who was leader of the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland, called the act an "insult" to Catholics. Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England, pointed out that Prince William (later the Duke of Cambridge) "can marry by law a Hindu, a Buddhist, anyone, but not a Roman Catholic." Opponents of repeal, such as Enoch Powell and Adrian Hilton, believe that it would lead to the disestablishment of the Church of England as the state religion if a Roman Catholic were to come to the throne. They also note that the monarch must swear to defend the faith and be a member of the Anglican Communion, but that a Roman Catholic monarch would, like all Roman Catholics, owe allegiance to the Pope. This would, according to opponents of repeal, amount to a loss of sovereignty for the Anglican Church. When in December 1978 there was media speculation that Prince Charles might marry a Roman Catholic, Powell defended the provision that excludes Roman Catholics from ascending the throne, stating his objection was not rooted in religious bigotry but in political considerations. He said a Roman Catholic monarch would mean the acceptance of a source of authority external to the realm and "in the literal sense, foreign to the Crown-in-Parliament ... Between Roman Catholicism and royal supremacy there is, as Saint Thomas More concluded, no reconciliation." Powell concluded that a Roman Catholic crown would be the destruction of the Church of England because "it would contradict the essential character of that church." He continued: When Thomas Hobbes wrote that "the Papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire sitting crowned upon the grave thereof", he was promulgating an enormously important truth. Authority in the Roman Church is the exertion of that imperium from which England in the 16th century finally and decisively declared its national independence as the alter imperium, the "other empire", of which Henry VIII declared "This realm of England is an empire" ... It would signal the beginning of the end of the British monarchy. It would portend the eventual surrender of everything that has made us, and keeps us still, a nation. The Scottish Parliament unanimously passed a motion in 1999 calling for the complete removal of any discrimination linked to the monarchy and the repeal of the Act of Settlement. The following year, The Guardian challenged the succession law in court, claiming that it violated the European Convention on Human Rights, which provides, The enjoyment of the rights and freedoms set forth in this Convention shall be secured without discrimination on any ground such as sex, race, colour, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, association with a national minority, property, birth, or other status. As the Convention nowhere lists the right to succeed to the Crown as a human right, the challenge was rejected. Adrian Hilton, writing in The Spectator in 2003, defended the Act of Settlement as not "irrational prejudice or blind bigotry", but claimed that it was passed because "the nation had learnt that when a Roman Catholic monarch is upon the throne, religious and civil liberty is lost." He points to the Pope's claiming universal jurisdiction, and Hilton argues that "it would be intolerable to have, as the sovereign of a Protestant and free country, one who owes any allegiance to the head of any other state" and contends that, if such situation came about, "we will have undone centuries of common law." He said that because the Roman Catholic Church does not recognise the Church of England as an apostolic church, a Roman Catholic monarch who abided by their faith's doctrine would be obliged to view Anglican and Church of Scotland archbishops, bishops, and clergy as part of the laity and therefore "lacking the ordained authority to preach and celebrate the sacraments." (Hilton noted that the Church of Scotland's Presbyterian polity does not include bishops or archbishops.) Hilton said a Roman Catholic monarch would be unable to be crowned by the Archbishop of Canterbury and notes that other European states have similar religious provisions for their monarchs: Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, whose constitutions compel their monarchs to be Lutherans; the Netherlands, which has a constitution requiring its monarchs be members of the Protestant House of Orange; and Belgium, which has a constitution that provides for the succession to be through Roman Catholic houses. In December 2004, a private member's bill—the Succession to the Crown Bill—was introduced in the House of Lords. The government, headed by Tony Blair, blocked all attempts to revise the succession laws, claiming it would raise too many constitutional issues and it was unnecessary at the time. In the British general election the following year, Michael Howard promised to work towards having the prohibition removed if the Conservative Party gained a majority of seats in the House of Commons, but the election was won by Blair's Labour Party. Four years later, plans drawn up by Chris Bryant were revealed that would end the exclusion of Catholics from the throne and end the doctrine of male-preference primogeniture in favour of absolute primogeniture, which governs succession solely on birth order and not on sex. The issue was raised again in January 2009, when a private member's bill to amend the Act of Succession was introduced in parliament. Across the realms In early 2011 Keith Vaz, a Labour Member of Parliament, introduced to the House of Commons at Westminster a private member's bill which proposed that the Act of Settlement be amended to remove the provisions relating to Roman Catholicism and change the primogeniture governing the line of succession to the British throne from male-preference to absolute cognatic. Vaz sought support for his project from the Canadian Cabinet and Prime Minister Stephen Harper, but the Office of the Prime Minister of Canada responded that the issue was "not a priority for the government or for Canadians without further elaboration on the merits or drawbacks of the proposed reforms". Stephenson King, Prime Minister of Saint Lucia, said he supported the idea and it was reported that the government of New Zealand did, as well. The Monarchist League of Canada said at the time to the media that it "supports amending the Act of Settlement in order to modernize the succession rules." Later the same year, the Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Nick Clegg, announced that the government was considering a change in the law. At approximately the same time, it was reported that British Prime Minister David Cameron had written to each of the prime ministers of the other fifteen Commonwealth realms, asking for their support in changing the succession to absolute primogeniture and notifying them he would raise his proposals at that year's Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Perth, Australia. Cameron reportedly also proposed removing the restriction on successors being or marrying Roman Catholics; however, potential Roman Catholic successors would be required to convert to Anglicanism prior to acceding to the throne. In reaction to the letter and media coverage, Harper stated that, this time, he was "supportive" of what he saw as "reasonable modernizations". At the 2011 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting on 28 October 2011, the prime ministers of the other Commonwealth realms agreed to support Cameron's proposed changes to the Act. The bill put before the Parliament of the United Kingdom would act as a model for the legislation required to be passed in at least some of the other realms, and any changes would only first take effect if the Duke of Cambridge were to have a daughter before a son. The British group Republic asserted that succession reform would not make the monarchy any less discriminatory. As it welcomed the gender equality reforms, the British newspaper The Guardian criticized the lack of a proposal to remove the ban on Catholics sitting on the throne, as did Alex Salmond, First Minister of Scotland, who pointed out that "It is deeply disappointing that the reform [of the Act of Settlement of 1701] has stopped short of removing the unjustifiable barrier on a Catholic becoming monarch." On the subject, Cameron asserted: "Let me be clear, the monarch must be in communion with the Church of England because he or she is the head of that Church." The disqualification arising from marriage to a Roman Catholic was removed by the Succession to the Crown Act 2013. See also Jacobitism List of British monarchs List of Canadian monarchs List of New Zealand monarchs List of Australian monarchs Royal Succession Bills and Acts Succession to the British throne Alternative successions of the English and British crown References Citations Notes Bibliography External links Text of the Act of Settlement as originally passed, The Statutes at Large: vol X: 1696/7–1703 (1764), pp. 357–60. Official text of the "Act of Settlement 1700" as currently in force in the Australian Capital Territory British Monarchy web page on the Act of Settlement Image of original act from the Parliamentary Archives website Australian constitutional law Constitution of Canada Constitutional laws of England Constitution of the United Kingdom Acts of the Parliament of England Acts of the Parliament of England still in force 1701 in law 1701 in England Monarchy in Canada Monarchy of Australia Monarchy of New Zealand Succession acts Succession to the British crown Succession to the Canadian Crown Law about religion in the United Kingdom History of Christianity in Canada History of Catholicism in England Anti-Catholicism in England Sophia of Hanover

2075

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft%20hijacking

Aircraft hijacking

Aircraft hijacking (also known as airplane hijacking, skyjacking, plane hijacking, plane jacking, air robbery, air piracy, or aircraft piracy, with the last term used within the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States) is the unlawful seizure of an aircraft by an individual or a group. Dating from the earliest of hijackings, most cases involve the pilot being forced to fly according to the hijacker's demands. There have also been incidents where the hijackers have overpowered the flight crew, made unauthorized entry into the cockpit and flown them into buildingsmost notably in the September 11 attacksand in several cases, planes have been hijacked by the official pilot or co-pilot; e.g., Ethiopian Airlines Flight 702. Unlike carjacking or sea piracy, an aircraft hijacking is not usually committed for robbery or theft. Individuals driven by personal gain often divert planes to destinations where they are not planning to go themselves. Some hijackers intend to use passengers or crew as hostages, either for monetary ransom or for some political or administrative concession by authorities. Various motives have driven such occurrences, such as demanding the release of certain high-profile individuals or for the right of political asylum (notably Flight ET 961), but sometimes a hijacking may have been affected by a failed private life or financial distress, as in the case of Aarno Lamminparras in the Oulu Aircraft Hijacking. Hijackings involving hostages have produced violent confrontations between hijackers and the authorities, during negotiation and settlement. In the case of Lufthansa Flight 181 and Air France Flight 139, the hijackers were not satisfied and showed no inclination to surrender, resulting in attempts by special forces to rescue passengers. In most jurisdictions of the world, aircraft hijacking is punishable by life imprisonment or a long prison sentence. In most jurisdictions where the death penalty is a legal punishment, aircraft hijacking is a capital crime, including in China, India, Liberia and the U.S. states of Georgia and Mississippi. History Airplane hijackings have occurred since the early days of flight. These can be classified in the following eras: 1929–1957, 1958–1979, 1980–2000 and 2001–present. Early incidents involved light planes, but this later involved passenger aircraft as commercial aviation became widespread. 1929–1957 Between 1929 and 1957, there were fewer than 20 incidents of reported hijackings worldwide; several occurred in Eastern Europe. One of the first unconfirmed hijackings occurred in December 1929. J. Howard "Doc" DeCelles was flying a postal route for a Mexican firm, Transportes Aeras Transcontinentales, ferrying mail from San Luis Potosí to Torreon and then on to Guadalajara. Saturnino Cedillo, the governor of the state of San Luis Potosí, ordered him to divert. Several other men were also involved, and through an interpreter, DeCelles had no choice but to comply. He was allegedly held captive for several hours under armed guard before being released. The first recorded aircraft hijack took place on February 21, 1931, in Arequipa, Peru. Byron Richards, flying a Ford Tri-Motor, was approached on the ground by armed revolutionaries. He refused to fly them anywhere during a 10-day standoff. Richards was informed that the revolution was successful and he could be freed in return for flying one of the men to Lima. The following year, in September 1932, a Sikorsky S-38 with registration P-BDAD, registered to Nyrba do Brasil, was seized in the company's hangar by three men, who took a hostage. Despite having no flying experience, they managed to take off. However, the aircraft crashed in São João de Meriti, killing the four men. Apparently, the hijack was related to the events of the Constitutionalist Revolution in São Paulo; it is considered to be the first hijack that took place in Brazil. On October 28, 1939, the first murder on a plane took place in Brookfield, Missouri, US. The victim was Carl Bivens, a flight instructor, who was teaching a man named Earnest P. "Larry" Pletch. While airborne in a Taylor Cub monoplane, Pletch shot Bivens twice in the back of the head. Pletch later told prosecutors, "Carl was telling me I had a natural ability and I should follow that line", adding, "I had a revolver in my pocket and without saying a word to him, I took it out of my overalls and I fired a bullet into the back of his head. He never knew what struck him." The Chicago Daily Tribune stated it was one of the most spectacular crimes of the 20th century. Pletch pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison. However, he was released on March 1, 1957, after serving 17 years, and lived until June 2001. In 1942 near Malta, two New Zealanders, a South African and an Englishman achieved the first confirmed in-air hijack when they overpowered their captors aboard an Italian seaplane that was flying them to a prisoner-of-war camp. As they approached an Allied base, they were strafed by Supermarine Spitfires unaware of the aircraft's true operators and forced to land on the water. However, all on board survived to be picked up by a British boat. In the years following World War II, Philip Baum, an aviation security expert suggests that the development of a rebellious youth "piggybacking on to any cause which challenged the status quo or acted in support of those deemed oppressed", may have been a contributor to attacks against the aviation field. The first hijacking of a commercial flight occurred on the Cathay Pacific Miss Macao on July 16, 1948. After this incident and others in the 1950s, airlines recommended that flight crews comply with the hijackers' demands rather than risk a violent confrontation. There were also various hijacking incidents and assaults on planes in China and the Middle East. On 23 July 1956, in the Hungarian People's Republic, seven passengers hijacked a domestic flight of Malév Hungarian Airlines, a Lisunov Li-2 (registration HA-LIG), to escape from behind the Iron Curtain, and flew it to West Germany. The aircraft landed safely at Ingolstadt Air Base without injuries. An aircraft belonging to the airline Lloyd Aereo Boliviano was hijacked in Bolivia on September 26, 1956. The DC-4 was carrying 47 prisoners who were being transported from Santa Cruz, Bolivia, to El Alto, in La Paz. A political group was waiting to take them to a concentration camp located in Carahuara de Carangas, Oruro. The 47 prisoners overpowered the crew and gained control of the aircraft while airborne and diverted the plane to Tartagal, Argentina. Prisoners took control of the aircraft and received instructions to again fly to Salta, Argentina, as the airfield in Tartagal was not big enough. Upon landing, they told the government of the injustice they were subjected to, and received political asylum. On October 22, 1956, French forces hijacked a Moroccan airplane carrying leaders of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) during the ongoing Algerian War. The plane, which was carrying Ahmed Ben Bella, Hocine Aït Ahmed, and Mohamed Boudiaf, was destined to leave from Palma de Mallorca for Tunis where the FLN leaders were to conference with Prime Minister Habib Bourguiba, but French forces redirected the flight to occupied Algiers, where the FLN leaders were arrested. 1958–1979 Between 1958 and 1967, there were approximately 40 hijackings worldwide. Beginning in 1958, hijackings from Cuba to other destinations started to occur; in 1961, hijackings from other destinations to Cuba became prevalent. The first happened on May 1, 1961, on a flight from Miami to Key West. The perpetrator, armed with a knife and gun, forced the captain to land in Cuba. Australia was relatively untouched by the threat of hijackings until July 19, 1960. On that evening, a 22-year-old Russian man attempted to divert Trans Australia Airlines Flight 408 to Darwin or Singapore. The crew were able to subdue the man after a brief struggle. According to the FAA, in the 1960s, there were 100 attempts of hijackings involving U.S. aircraft: 77 successful and 23 unsuccessful. Recognizing the danger early, the FAA issued a directive on July 28, 1961, which prohibits unauthorized persons from carrying concealed firearms and interfering with crew member duties. The Federal Aviation Act of 1958 was amended to impose severe penalties for those seizing control of a commercial aircraft. Airlines could also refuse to transport passengers who were likely to cause danger. That same year, the FAA and Department of Justice created the Peace Officers Program which put trained marshals on flights. A few years later, on May 7, 1964, the FAA adopted a rule requiring that cockpit doors on commercial aircraft be kept locked at all times. In a five-year period (1968–1972) the world experienced 326 hijack attempts, or one every 5.6 days. The incidents were frequent and often just an inconvenience, which resulted in television shows creating parodies. Time magazine even ran a lighthearted comedy piece called "What to Do When the Hijacker Comes". Most incidents occurred in the United States. There were two distinct types: hijackings for transportation elsewhere and hijackings for extortion with the threat of harm. Between 1968 and 1972, there were 90 recorded transport attempts to Cuba. In contrast, there were 26 extortion attempts (see table on the right). The longest and first transcontinental (Los Angeles, Denver, New York, Bangor, Shannon and Rome) hijacking from the US started on 31 October 1969. The Eastern Air Lines Shuttle flight 1320 on May 17, 1970, witnessed the first fatality in the course of a U.S. hijacking. Incidents also became problematic outside of the U.S. For instance, in 1968, El Al Flight 426 was seized by Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) militants on 23 July, an incident which lasted 40 days, making it one of the longest. This record was later beaten in 1999. As a result of the evolving threat, President Nixon issued a directive in 1970 to promote security at airports, electronic surveillance and multilateral agreements for tackling the problem. The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) issued a report on aircraft hijacking in July 1970. Beginning in 1969 until the end of June 1970, there were 118 incidents of unlawful seizure of aircraft and 14 incidents of sabotage and armed attacks against civil aviation. This involved airlines of 47 countries and more than 7,000 passengers. In this period, 96 people were killed and 57 were injured as a result of hijacking, sabotage and armed attacks. The ICAO stated that this is not isolated to one nation or one region, but a worldwide issue to the safe growth of international civil aviation. Incidents also became notoriousin 1971, a man known as D. B. Cooper hijacked a plane and extorted US$200,000 in ransom before parachuting over Oregon. He was never identified. On August 20, 1971, a Pakistan Air Force T-33 military plane was hijacked prior the Indo-Pakistani war of 1971 in Karachi. Lieutenant Matiur Rahman attacked Officer Rashid Minhas and attempted to land in India. Minhas deliberately crashed the plane into the ground near Thatta to prevent the diversion. Countries around the world continued their efforts to tackle crimes committed on-board planes. The Tokyo Convention, drafted in 1958, established an agreement between signatories that the "state in which the aircraft is registered is competent to exercise jurisdiction over crimes committed on board that aircraft while it is in flight". While the Convention does not make hijacking an international crime, it does contain provisions which obligate the country in which a hijacked aircraft lands to restore the aircraft to its responsible owner, and allow the passengers and crew to continue their journey. The Convention came into force in December 1969. A year later, in December 1970, the Hague Convention was drafted which punishes hijackers, enabling each state to prosecute a hijacker if that state does not extradite them, and to deprive them from asylum from prosecution. On December 5, 1972, the FAA issued emergency rules requiring all passengers and their carry-on baggage to be screened. Airports slowly implemented walk-through metal detectors, hand-searches and X-ray machines, to prohibit weapons and explosive devices. These rules came into effect on January 5, 1973, and were welcomed by most of the public. In 1974, Congress enacted a statute which provided for the death penalty for acts of aircraft piracy resulting in death. Between 1968 and 1977, there were approximately 41 hijackings per year. In the 1970s, in pursuit of their demands for Croatia's independence from the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia, Croatian nationalists hijacked several civilian airliners, such as Scandinavian Airlines System Flight 130 and TWA Flight 355. 1980–2000 By 1980, airport screening and greater cooperation from the international community led to fewer successful hijackings; the number of events had significantly dropped below the 1968 level. Between 1978 and 1988, there were roughly 26 incidents of hijackings a year. A new threat emerged in the 1980s: organised terrorists destroying aircraft to draw attention. For instance, terrorist groups were responsible for the bombing of Air India Flight 182 over the Irish coast. In 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 was bombed flying over Scotland. Terrorist activity which included hijack attempts in the Middle East were also a cause of concern. During the 1990s, there was relative peace in the United States airspace as the threat of domestic hijacking was seen as a distant memory. Globally, however, hijackings still persisted. Between 1993 and 2003, the highest number of hijackings occurred in 1993 (see table below). This number can be attributed to events in China where hijackers were trying to gain political asylum in Taiwan. Europe and the rest of East Asia were not immune either. On December 26, 1994, Air France Flight 8969 with 172 passengers and crew was hijacked after leaving Algiers. Authorities believed that the goal was to crash the plane into the Eiffel Tower. On June 21, 1995, All Nippon Airways Flight 857 was hijacked by a man claiming to be a member of the Aum Shinrikyo religious cult, demanding the release of its imprisoned leader Shoko Asahara. The incident was resolved when the police stormed the plane. On October 17, 1996, the first hijacking that was brought to an end while airborne was carried out by four operatives of the Austrian special law enforcement unit Cobra on a Russian Aeroflot flight from Malta to Lagos, Nigeria, aboard a Tupolev Tu-154. The operatives escorted inmates detained for deportation to their homelands and were equipped with weapons and gloves. On 12 April 1999, six ELN members hijacked a Fokker 50 of Avianca Flight 9463, flying from Bucaramanga to Bogotá. Many hostages were held for more than a year, and the last hostage was finally freed 19 months after the hijacking. 2001–present On September 11, 2001, four airliners were hijacked by 19 Al-Qaeda extremists: American Airlines Flight 11, United Airlines Flight 175, American Airlines Flight 77 and United Airlines Flight 93. The first two planes were deliberately crashed into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City and the third was crashed into The Pentagon in Arlington County, Virginia. The fourth crashed in a field in Stonycreek Township near Shanksville, Pennsylvania after crew and passengers attempted to overpower the hijackers. Authorities believe that the intended target was the U.S. Capitol or the White House in Washington DC. In total, 2,996 people (2,977 if excluding the perpetrators) perished and more than 6,000 were injured in the attacks, making the hijackings the deadliest in modern history. Following the attacks, the U.S. government formed the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to handle airport screening at U.S. airports. Government agencies around the world tightened their airport security, procedures and intelligence gathering. Until the September 11 attacks, there had never been an incident whereby a passenger aircraft was used as a weapon of mass destruction. The 9/11 Commission report stated that it was always assumed that a "hijacking would take the traditional form"; therefore, airline crews never had a contingency plan for a suicide-hijacking. As Patrick Smith, an airline pilot, summarizes: Throughout the mid-2000s, hijackings still occurred but there were much fewer incidents and casualties. The number of incidents had been declining, even before the September 11 attacks. One notable incident in 2006 was the hijacking of Turkish Airlines Flight 1476, flying from Tirana to Istanbul, which was seized by a man named Hakan Ekinci. The aircraft, with 107 passengers and 6 crew, made distress calls to air traffic control and the plane was escorted by military aircraft before landing safely at Brindisi, Italy. In 2007, several incidents occurred in the Middle East and Northern Africa; hijackers in one of these incidents claimed to be affiliated with Al-Qaeda. Towards the end of the decade, AeroMexico experienced its first terror incident when Flight 576 was hijacked by a man demanding to speak with President Calderón. Between 2010 and 2019, the Aviation Safety Network estimates there have been 15 hijackings worldwide with three fatalities. This is a considerably lower figure than in previous decades which can be attributed to greater security enhancements and awareness of September 11–style attacks. On June 29, 2012, an attempt was made to hijack Tianjin Airlines Flight GS7554 from Hotan to Ürümqi in China. More recently was the 2016 hijacking of EgyptAir Flight MS181, involving an Egyptian man who claimed to have a bomb and ordered the plane to land in Cyprus. He surrendered several hours later, after freeing the passengers and crew. Countermeasures As a result of the large number of U.S.–Cuba hijackings in the late 1960s to early 1970s, international airports introduced screening technology such as metal detectors, X-ray machines and explosive detection tools. In the U.S, these rules were enforced starting from January 1973 and were eventually copied around the world. These security measures did make hijacking a "higher-risk proposition" and deter criminals in later decades. Until September 2001, the FAA set and enforced a "layered" system of defense: hijacking intelligence, passenger pre-screening, checkpoint screening and on-board security. The idea was that if one layer were later to fail, another would be able stop a hijacker from boarding a plane. However, the 9/11 Commission found that this layered approach was flawed and unsuitable to prevent the September 11 attacks. The U.S Transportation Security Administration has since strengthened this approach, with a greater emphasis on intelligence sharing. On-board security In the history of hijackings, most incidents involved planes being forced to land at a certain destination with demands. As a result, commercial airliners adopted a "total compliance" rule which taught pilots and cabin crew to comply with the hijackers' demands. Crews advise passengers to sit quietly to increase their chances of survival. The ultimate goal is to land the plane safely and let the security forces handle the situation. The FAA suggested that the longer a hijacking persisted, the more likely it would end peacefully with the hijackers reaching their goal. Although total compliance is still relevant, the events of September 11 changed this paradigm as this technique cannot prevent a murder-suicide hijacking. After the September 11 attacks, it became evident that each hijacking situation needs to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Cabin crew, now aware of the severe consequences, have a greater responsibility for maintaining control of their aircraft. Most airlines also give crew members training in self-defense tactics. Ever since the 1970s, crew are taught to be vigilant for suspicious behaviour. For example, passengers who have no carry-on luggage, or are standing next to the cockpit door with fidgety movements. There have been various incidents when crew and passengers intervened to prevent attacks: on December 22, 2001, Richard Reid attempted to ignite explosives on American Airlines Flight 63. In 2009, on Northwest Flight 253, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab attempted to detonate explosives sewn into his underwear. In 2012, the attempted hijacking of Tianjin Airlines Flight 7554 was stopped when cabin crew placed a trolley in-front of the cockpit door and asked passengers for help. Cockpit security As early as 1964, the FAA required cockpit doors on commercial aircraft be kept locked during flight. In 2002, U.S. Congress passed the Arming Pilots Against Terrorism Act, allowing pilots at U.S. airlines to carry guns in the cockpit. Since 2003, these pilots are known as Federal Flight Deck Officers. It is estimated that one in 10 of the 125,000 commercial pilots are trained and armed. Also in 2002, aircraft manufacturers such as Airbus introduced a reinforced cockpit door which is resistant to gunfire and forced entry. Shortly afterwards, the FAA required operators of more than 6,000 aircraft to install tougher cockpit doors by April 9, 2003. Rules were also tightened to restrict cockpit access and make it easier for pilots to lock the doors. In 2015, Germanwings Flight 9525 was seized by the co-pilot and deliberately crashed, while the captain was out. The captain was unable to re-enter the cockpit, because the airline had already reinforced the cockpit door. The European Aviation Safety Agency issued a recommendation for airlines to ensure that at least two people, one pilot and a member of cabin crew, occupy the cockpit during flight. The FAA in the United States enforce a similar rule. Air marshal service Some countries operate a marshal service, which puts members of law enforcement on high-risk flights based on intelligence. Their role is to keep passengers safe, by preventing hijackings and other criminal acts committed on a plane. Federal marshals in the U.S. are required to identify themselves before boarding a plane; marshals of other countries often are not. According to the Congressional Research Service, the budget for the U.S. Federal Air Marshal Service was US$719 million in 2007. Marshals often sit as regular passengers, at the front of the plane to allow observation of the cockpit. Despite the expansion of the marshal service, they cannot be on every plane, and they rarely face a real threat on a flight. Critics have questioned the need for them. Air traffic control There is no generic or set of rules for handling a hijacking situation. Air traffic controllers are expected to exercise their best judgement and expertise when dealing with the apparent consequences of an unlawful interference or hijack. Depending on the jurisdiction, the controller will inform authorities, such as the military, who will escort the hijacked plane. Controllers are expected to keep communications to a minimum and clear the runway for a possible landing. Legislation for downing hijacked aircraft Germany In January 2005, a federal law came into force in Germany, called the , which allows "direct action by armed force" against a hijacked aircraft to prevent a September 11–style attack. However, in February 2006 the Federal Constitutional Court struck down these provisions of the law, stating such preventive measures were unconstitutional and would essentially be state-sponsored murder, even if such an act would save many more lives on the ground. The main reason behind this decision was that the state would effectively be killing innocent hostages in order to avoid a terrorist attack. The Court also ruled that the Minister of Defense is constitutionally not entitled to act in terrorism matters, as this is the duty of the state and federal police forces. President of Germany Horst Köhler urged judicial review of the constitutionality of the Luftsicherheitsgesetz after he signed it into law in 2005. India India published its new anti-hijacking policy in August 2005. The policy came into force after approval from the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS). The main points of the policy are: Any attempt to hijack will be considered an act of aggression against the country and will prompt a response fit for an aggressor. Hijackers, if captured alive, will be put on trial, convicted, and sentenced to death. Hijackers will be engaged in negotiations only to bring the incident to an end, to comfort passengers and to prevent loss of lives. The hijacked plane will be shot down if it is deemed to become a missile heading for strategic targets. The hijacked plane will be escorted by armed fighter aircraft and will be forced to land. A hijacked grounded plane will not be allowed to take off under any circumstance. United States Prior to the September 11 attacks, countermeasures were focused on "traditional" hijackings. As such, there were no specific rules for handling suicide hijackings, where aircraft would be used as a weapon. Moreover, military response at the time consisted of multiple uncoordinated units, each with its own set of rules of engagement with no unified command structure. Soon after the attacks, however, new rules of engagement were introduced, authorizing the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD)the Air Force command tasked with protecting U.S. airspaceto shoot down hijacked commercial airliners if the plane is deemed a threat to strategic targets. In 2003, the military stated that fighter pilots exercise this scenario several times a week. Other countries Poland and Russia are among other countries that have had laws or directives for shooting down hijacked planes. However, in September 2008 the Polish Constitutional Court ruled that the Polish rules were unconstitutional, and voided them. International law Tokyo Convention The Convention on Offences and Certain Other Acts Committed on Board Aircraft, known as the Tokyo Convention, is an international treaty which entered force on December 4, 1969. , it has been ratified by 186 parties. Article 11 of the Tokyo Convention states the following: The signatories agree that if there is unlawful takeover of an aircraft, or a threat of it on their territory, then they will take all necessary measures to regain or keep control over an aircraft. The captain can also disembark a suspected person on the territory of any country, where the aircraft lands, and that country must agree to it, as stated in Articles 8 and 12 of the convention. Hague Convention The Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Seizure of Aircraft (known as the Hague Convention) went into effect on October 14, 1971. , the convention has 185 signatories. Montreal Convention The Montreal Convention is a multilateral treaty adopted by a diplomatic meeting of ICAO member states in 1999. It amended important provisions of the Warsaw Convention's regime concerning compensation for the victims of air disasters. In popular culture Superman saves Metropolis from a bombardier hijacked by Japanese spies in the short animated film Japoteurs (1942). The 1997 Hollywood film Air Force One is based on the fictional hijacking of Air Force One. Hijacking is a central theme in the Turbulence movie trilogy. In Mission: Impossible 2, one of the film's antagonists hijacks a plane at the start of the movie. The 2006 film United 93 is based on the real events onboard United Airlines Flight 93 one of the four airlines hijacked during the September 11 attacks. The 2012 film The Dark Knight Rises features an opening sequence of hijacking and crashing an aircraft for the purpose of kidnapping a man and faking his death. The film Con Air features a U.S. Marshals aircraft being hijacked by the maximum-security prisoners on board. The Taking of Flight 847: The Uli Derickson Story was a made-for-TV film based on the actual hijacking of TWA Flight 847, as seen through the eyes of the chief flight attendant Uli Derickson. Passenger 57 depicts an airline security expert trapped on a passenger jet when terrorists seize control. Executive Decision depicts a Boeing 747 carrying 400 passengers being hijacked by Algerian terrorists, and U.S. marine and Army special forces use a reconnaissance aircraft to re-take the plane. Skyjacked is a 1972 film about a crazed Vietnam War veteran hijacking an airliner, demanding to be taken to the Soviet Union. The 1986 film The Delta Force depicted a Special Forces squad tasked with retaking a plane hijacked by Lebanese terrorists, loosely based on the hijacking of TWA Flight 847. The 2004 film The Assassination of Richard Nixon, based on a true incident, depicts a disillusioned tire salesman who attempts to hijack a plane in 1974 and crash it into the White House. His attempt failed and he was mortally wounded by an airport policeman. He killed himself before police stormed the plane. The 2006 film Snakes On a Plane is a fictional story about aircraft piracy through the in-flight release of venomous snakes. In Harold and Kumar 2, two U.S. Air Marshals subdue Harold and Kumar on board a plane after mistaking them for terrorists. The 2011 film Payanam is a movie entirely based on the negotiations and rescue operations done by the Indian security forces in response to a flight hijacking incident. In the 2013 video game Grand Theft Auto V the player is tasked with hijacking a cargo plane carrying a large shipment of weapons by crashing a crop duster into the cargo bay mid-flight and fighting to seize control of the aircraft. The cargo plane is later shot down by the US Air Force, requiring the player to bail out. The 2014 film Non-Stop depicts an aircraft hijacking. The Indian film Neerja is based on the hijacking of Pan Am Flight 73 in Karachi. In 2016, German television broadcast the film , in which a Bundeswehr military pilot shoots down a hijacked passenger plane with 164 people on board that was heading towards a stadium filled with 70,000 people. Following the broadcast, a public vote was called for in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and 86.9% of viewers voted that the pilot was not guilty of murder. The 2019 film 7500 depicts the struggle of a pilot to land an aircraft and maintain control of its cockpit during a hijacking. The 2023 Apple TV+ original series Hijack stars Idris Elba as Sam, a talented business negotiator, who embarks on a mission to broker a peaceful end to a hijacking of his 7-hour flight from Dubai to London. See also Air pirate Airport security Canadian Air Transport Security Authority Dymshits–Kuznetsov hijacking affair El Al Federal Air Marshal Service Federal Bureau of Investigation Federal crime in the United States List of aircraft hijackings List of Cuba–United States aircraft hijackings Palestinian political violence Terrorism Transportation Security Administration (TSA) United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) References External links "The First Hijacking Myth" at Fortnight Journal "America's first highjacking" at A Blast From the Past Aviation risks Aviation security Terrorism tactics

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acropolis%20of%20Athens

Acropolis of Athens

The Acropolis of Athens (; ) is an ancient citadel located on a rocky outcrop above the city of Athens, Greece, and contains the remains of several ancient buildings of great architectural and historical significance, the most famous being the Parthenon. The word Acropolis is from the Greek words (akron, "highest point, extremity") and (polis, "city"). The term acropolis is generic and there are many other acropoleis in Greece. During ancient times the Acropolis of Athens was also more properly known as Cecropia, after the legendary serpent-man Cecrops, the supposed first Athenian king. While there is evidence that the hill was inhabited as early as the fourth millennium BC, it was Pericles (–429 BC) in the fifth century BC who coordinated the construction of the buildings whose present remains are the site's most important ones, including the Parthenon, the Propylaea, the Erechtheion and the Temple of Athena Nike. The Parthenon and the other buildings were seriously damaged during the 1687 siege by the Venetians during the Morean War when gunpowder being stored by the then Turkish rulers in the Parthenon was hit by a Venetian bombardment and exploded. History Early settlement The Acropolis is located on a flattish-topped rock that rises above sea level in the city of Athens, with a surface area of about . While the earliest artifacts date to the Middle Neolithic era, there have been documented habitations in Attica from the Early Neolithic period (6th millennium BC). There is little doubt that a Mycenaean megaron palace stood upon the hill during the late Bronze Age. Nothing of this structure survives except, probably, a single limestone column base and pieces of several sandstone steps. Soon after the palace was constructed, a Cyclopean massive circuit wall was built, 760 meters long, up to 10 meters high, and ranging from 3.5 to 6 meters thick. From the end of the Helladic IIIB (1300–1200 BC) on, this wall would serve as the main defense for the acropolis until the 5th century. The wall consisted of two parapets built with large stone blocks and cemented with an earth mortar called emplekton (Greek: ἔμπλεκτον). The wall uses typical Mycenaean conventions in that it followed the natural contour of the terrain and its gate, which was towards the south, was arranged obliquely, with a parapet and tower overhanging the incomers' right-hand side, thus facilitating defense. There were two lesser approaches up the hill on its north side, consisting of steep, narrow flights of steps cut in the rock. Homer is assumed to refer to this fortification when he mentions the "strong-built house of Erechtheus" (Odyssey 7.81). At some time before the 13th century BC, an earthquake caused a fissure near the northeastern edge of the Acropolis. This fissure extended some 35 meters to a bed of soft marl in which a well was dug. An elaborate set of stairs was built and the well served as an invaluable, protected source of drinking water during times of siege for some portion of the Mycenaean period. Archaic Acropolis Not much is known about the architectural appearance of the Acropolis until the Archaic era. During the 7th and the 6th centuries BC, the site was controlled by Kylon during the failed Kylonian revolt, and twice by Peisistratos; each of these was attempts directed at seizing political power by coups d'état. Apart from the Hekatompedon mentioned later, Peisistratos also built an entry gate or propylaea. Nevertheless, it seems that a nine-gate wall, the Enneapylon, had been built around the acropolis hill and incorporated the biggest water spring, the Clepsydra, at the northwestern foot. A temple to Athena Polias, the tutelary deity of the city, was erected between 570 and 550 BC. This Doric limestone building, from which many relics survive, is referred to as the Hekatompedon (Greek for "hundred–footed"), Ur-Parthenon (German for "original Parthenon" or "primitive Parthenon"), H–Architecture or Bluebeard temple, after the pedimental three-bodied man-serpent sculpture, whose beards were painted dark blue. Whether this temple replaced an older one or just a sacred precinct or altar is not known. Probably, the Hekatompedon was built where the Parthenon now stands. Between 529 and 520 BC yet another temple was built by the Pisistratids, the Old Temple of Athena, usually referred to as the Arkhaios Neōs (ἀρχαῖος νεώς, "ancient temple"). This temple of Athena Polias was built upon the Dörpfeld foundations, between the Erechtheion and the still-standing Parthenon. The Arkhaios Neōs was destroyed as part of the Achaemenid destruction of Athens during the Second Persian invasion of Greece during 480–479 BC; however, the temple was probably reconstructed during 454 BC, since the treasury of the Delian League was transferred in its opisthodomos. The temple may have been burnt down during 406/405 BC as Xenophon mentions that the old temple of Athena was set afire. Pausanias does not mention it in his 2nd century AD Description of Greece. Around 500 BC the Hekatompedon was dismantled to make place for a new grander building, the Older Parthenon (often referred to as the Pre-Parthenon or Early Parthenon). For this reason, Athenians decided to stop the construction of the Olympieion temple which was connoted with the tyrant Peisistratos and his sons, and, instead, used the Piraeus limestone destined for the Olympieion to build the Older Parthenon. To accommodate the new temple, the south part of the summit was cleared, made level by adding some 8,000 two-ton blocks of limestone, a foundation deep at some points, and the rest was filled with soil kept in place by the retaining wall. However, after the victorious Battle of Marathon in 490 BC, the plan was revised and marble was used instead. The limestone phase of the building is referred to as Pre-Parthenon I and the marble phase as Pre-Parthenon II. In 485 BC, construction stalled to save resources as Xerxes became king of Persia, and war seemed imminent. The Older Parthenon was still under construction when the Persians invaded and sacked the city in 480 BC. The building was burned and looted, along with the Ancient Temple and practically everything else on the rock. After the Persian crisis had subsided, the Athenians incorporated many architectural parts of the unfinished temple (unfluted column drums, triglyphs, metopes, etc.) into the newly built northern curtain wall of the Acropolis, where they served as a prominent "war memorial" and can still be seen today. The devastated site was cleared of debris. Statuary, cult objects, religious offerings, and unsalvageable architectural members were buried ceremoniously in several deeply dug pits on the hill, serving conveniently as a fill for the artificial plateau created around the Classical Parthenon. This "Persian debris" was the richest archaeological deposit excavated on the Acropolis by 1890. The Periclean building program After winning at Eurymedon during 468 BC, Cimon and Themistocles ordered the reconstruction of the southern and northern walls of the Acropolis. Most of the major temples, including the Parthenon, were rebuilt by order of Pericles during the so-called Golden Age of Athens (460–430 BC). Phidias, an Athenian sculptor, and Ictinus and Callicrates, two famous architects, were responsible for the reconstruction. During 437 BC, Mnesicles started building the Propylaea, a monumental gate at the western end of the Acropolis with Doric columns of Pentelic marble, built partly upon the old Propylaea of Peisistratos. These colonnades were almost finished during 432 BC and had two wings, the northern one decorated with paintings by Polygnotus. About the same time, south of the Propylaea, building started on the small Ionic Temple of Athena Nike in Pentelic marble with tetrastyle porches, preserving the essentials of Greek temple design. After an interruption caused by the Peloponnesian War, the temple was finished during the time of Nicias' peace, between 421 BC and 409 BC. Construction of the elegant temple of Erechtheion in Pentelic marble (421–406 BC) was by a complex plan which took account of the extremely uneven ground and the need to circumvent several shrines in the area. The entrance, facing east, is lined with six Ionic columns. Unusually, the temple has two porches, one on the northwest corner borne by Ionic columns, the other, to the southwest, supported by huge female figures or caryatids. The eastern part of the temple was dedicated to Athena Polias, while the western part, serving the cult of the archaic king Poseidon-Erechtheus, housed the altars of Hephaestus and Voutos, brother of Erechtheus. Little is known about the original plan of the interior, which was destroyed by fire during the first century BC and has been rebuilt several times. During the same period, a combination of sacred precincts including the temples of Athena Polias, Poseidon, Erechtheus, Cecrops, Herse, Pandrosos and Aglauros, with its Kore Porch (Porch of the Maidens) or Caryatids' Balcony was begun. Between the temple of Athena Nike and the Parthenon, there was the Sanctuary of Artemis Brauronia (or the Brauroneion), the goddess represented as a bear and worshipped in the deme of Brauron. According to Pausanias, a wooden statue or xoanon of the goddess and a statue of Artemis made by Praxiteles during the 4th century BC were both in the sanctuary. Behind the Propylaea, Phidias' gigantic bronze statue of Athena Promachos ("Athena who fights in the front line"), built between 450 BC and 448 BC, dominated. The base was high, while the total height of the statue was . The goddess held a lance, the gilt tip of which could be seen as a reflection by crews on ships rounding Cape Sounion, and a giant shield on the left side, decorated by Mys with images of the fight between the Centaurs and the Lapiths. Other monuments that have left almost nothing visible to the present day are the Chalkotheke, the Pandroseion, Pandion's sanctuary, Athena's altar, Zeus Polieus's sanctuary and, from Roman times, the circular Temple of Roma and Augustus. Hellenistic and Roman Period During the Hellenistic and Roman periods, many of the existing buildings in the area of the Acropolis were repaired to remedy damage from age and occasionally war. Monuments to foreign kings were erected, notably those of the Attalid kings of Pergamon Attalos II (in front of the NW corner of the Parthenon), and Eumenes II, in front of the Propylaea. These were rededicated during the early Roman Empire to Augustus or Claudius (uncertain) and Agrippa, respectively. Eumenes was also responsible for constructing a stoa on the south slope, similar to that of Attalos in the agora below. During the Julio-Claudian period, the Temple of Roma and Augustus, a small, round edifice about 23 meters from the Parthenon, was to be the last significant ancient construction on the summit of the rock. Around the same time, on the north slope, in a cave next to the one dedicated to Pan since the Classical period, a sanctuary was founded where the archons dedicated to Apollo on assuming office. During 161 AD, on the south slope, the Roman Herodes Atticus built his grand amphitheater or odeon. It was destroyed by the invading Herulians a century later but was reconstructed during the 1950s. During the 3rd century, under threat from a Herulian invasion, repairs were made to the Acropolis walls, and the Beulé Gate was constructed to restrict entrance in front of the Propylaea, thus returning the Acropolis to use as a fortress. Byzantine, Latin, and Ottoman Period During the Byzantine period, the Parthenon was used as a church dedicated to the Virgin Mary. During the Latin Duchy of Athens, the Acropolis functioned as the city's administrative center, with the Parthenon as its cathedral, and the Propylaea as part of the ducal palace. A large tower was added, the Frankopyrgos (Frankish Tower), demolished during the 19th century. After the Ottoman conquest of Greece, the Propylaea were used as the garrison headquarters of the Turkish army, the Parthenon was converted into a mosque and the Erechtheum was turned into the governor's private harem. The buildings of the Acropolis suffered significant damage during the 1687 siege by the Venetians in the Morean War. The Parthenon, which was being used as a gunpowder magazine, was hit by artillery and damaged severely. During subsequent years, the Acropolis was a site of bustling human activity with many Byzantine, Frankish, and Ottoman structures. The dominant feature during the Ottoman period was a mosque inside the Parthenon, complete with a minaret. The Acropolis was besieged thrice during the Greek War of Independence—two sieges from the Greeks in 1821–1822 and one from the Ottomans in 1826–1827. A new bulwark named after Odysseas Androutsos was built by the Greeks between 1822 and 1825 to protect the recently rediscovered Klepsydra spring, which became the sole fresh water supply of the fortress. Independent Greece After independence, most features that dated from the Byzantine, Frankish, and Ottoman periods were cleared from the site in an attempt to restore the monument to its original form, "cleansed" of all later additions. The Parthenon mosque was demolished in 1843, and the Frankish Tower in 1875. German Neoclassicist architect Leo von Klenze was responsible for the restoration of the Acropolis in the 19th century, according to German historian Wolf Seidl, as described in his book Bavarians in Greece. Some antiquities from the Acropolis were exhibited in the old Acropolis Museum, which was built in the second half of the 19th century. At the beginning of the Axis occupation of Greece in 1941, German soldiers raised the Nazi German War Flag over the Acropolis. It would be taken down by Manolis Glezos and Apostolos Santas in one of the first acts of resistance. In 1944 Greek Prime Minister Georgios Papandreou arrived on the Acropolis to celebrate liberation from the Nazis. Archaeological remains The entrance to the Acropolis was a monumental gateway termed the Propylaea. To the south of the entrance is the tiny Temple of Athena Nike. At the centre of the Acropolis is the Parthenon or Temple of Athena Parthenos (Athena the Virgin). East of the entrance and north of the Parthenon is the temple known as the Erechtheum. South of the platform that forms the top of the Acropolis there are also the remains of the ancient, though often remodelled, Theatre of Dionysus. A few hundred metres away, there is the now partially reconstructed Odeon of Herodes Atticus. All the valuable ancient artifacts are situated in the Acropolis Museum, which resides on the southern slope of the same rock, 280 metres from the Parthenon. Site plan Site plan of the Acropolis at Athens showing the major archaeological remains. Parthenon Old Temple of Athena Erechtheum Statue of Athena Promachos Propylaea Temple of Athena Nike Eleusinion Sanctuary of Artemis Brauronia or Brauroneion Chalkotheke Pandroseion Arrephorion Altar of Athena Sanctuary of Zeus Polieus Sanctuary of Pandion Odeon of Herodes Atticus Stoa of Eumenes Sanctuary of Asclepius or Asclepieion Theatre of Dionysus Eleuthereus Odeon of Pericles Temenos of Dionysus Eleuthereus Mycenaean fountain The Acropolis Restoration Project The Acropolis Restoration Project began in 1975 to reverse the decay of centuries of attrition, pollution, destruction from military actions, and misguided past restorations. The project included the collection and identification of all stone fragments, even small ones, from the Acropolis and its slopes, and the attempt was made to restore as much as possible using reassembled original material (anastylosis), with new marble from Mount Pentelicus used sparingly. All restoration was made using titanium dowels and is designed to be completely reversible, in case future experts decide to change things. A combination of cutting-edge modern technology and extensive research and reinvention of ancient techniques were used. The Parthenon colonnades, largely destroyed by Venetian bombardment during the 17th century, were restored, with many wrongly assembled columns now properly placed. The roof and floor of the Propylaea were partly restored, with sections of the roof made of new marble and decorated with blue and gold inserts, as in the original. Restoration of the Temple of Athena Nike was completed in 2010. A total of 2,675 tons of architectural members were restored, with 686 stones reassembled from fragments of the originals, 905 patched with new marble, and 186 parts made entirely of new marble. A total of 530 cubic meters of new Pentelic marble were used. In 2021, the addition of new reinforced concrete paths to the site to improve accessibility caused controversy among archaeologists. Cultural significance Every four years, the Athenians had a festival called the Great Panathenaea that rivaled the Olympic Games in popularity. During the festival, a procession (believed to be depicted on the Parthenon frieze) traveled through the city via the Panathenaic Way and culminated on the Acropolis. There, a new robe of woven wool (peplos) was placed on either the statue of Athena Polias in the Erechtheum (during the annual Lesser Panathenaea) or the statue of Athena Parthenos in the Parthenon (during the Great Panathenaea, held every four years). Within the later tradition of Western civilization and Classical revival, the Acropolis, from at least the mid-18th century on, has often been invoked as a critical symbol of the Greek legacy and of the glories of Classical Greece. Most of the artifacts from the temple are housed today in the Acropolis Museum at the foot of the ancient rock. Geology The Acropolis is a klippe consisting of two lithostratigraphic units: the Athens schist and the overlying Acropolis limestone. The Athens schist is a soft reddish rock dating from the late Cretaceous period. The original sediments were deposited in a river delta approximately 72 million years ago. The Acropolis limestone dates from the late Jurassic period, predating the underlying Athens schist by about 30 million years. The Acropolis limestone was thrust over the Athens schist by compressional tectonic forces, forming a nappe or overthrust sheet. Erosion of the limestone nappe led to the eventual detachment of the Acropolis, forming the present-day feature. Where the Athens schist and the limestone meet there are springs and karstic caves. Many of the hills in the Athens region were formed by the erosion of the same nappe as the Acropolis. These include the hills of Lykabettos, Areopagus, and Mouseion. The marble used for the buildings of the Acropolis was sourced from the quarries of Mount Pentelicus, a mountain to the northeast of the city. Geological instability The limestone that the Acropolis is built upon is unstable because of the erosion and tectonic shifts that the region is prone to. This instability can cause rock slides that cause damage to the historic site. Various measures have been implemented to protect the site including retaining walls, drainage systems, and rock bolts. These measures work to counter the natural processes that threaten the historic site. Gallery See also Landscaping of the Acropolis of Athens References Notes Bibliography Cohen, Beth. (2010). "Deconstructing the Acropolis: The Acropolis Museum, Athens, opened 20 June 2009 by Bernard Tschumi Architects." American Journal of Archaeology 114:745–753. Goette, Hans Rupprecht. (2001). Athens, Attica, and the Megarid: An Archaeological Guide. London and New York: Routledge. Harris, Diane. (1995). The Treasures of the Parthenon and Erechtheion. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. Neils, Jenifer, ed. (1996). Worshipping Athena: Panathenaia and Parthenon. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press. Pollitt, Jerome J. (1990). The Art of Ancient Greece: Sources and Documents. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press. External links Videos Ancient Greek sanctuaries in Greece Art of ancient Attica Buildings and structures completed in the 5th century BC Culture of ancient Greece Culture of Greece Former populated places in Greece Landmarks in Athens Tourist attractions in Athens World Heritage Sites in Greece

2077

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam%20Weishaupt

Adam Weishaupt

Johann Adam Weishaupt (; 6 February 1748 – 18 November 1830) was a German philosopher, professor of civil law and later canon law, and founder of the Illuminati. Early life Adam Weishaupt was born on 6 February 1748 in Ingolstadt in the Electorate of Bavaria. Weishaupt's father Johann Georg Weishaupt (1717–1753) died when Adam was five years old. After his father's death he came under the tutelage of his godfather Johann Adam von Ickstatt who, like his father, was a professor of law at the University of Ingolstadt. Ickstatt was a proponent of the philosophy of Christian Wolff and of the Enlightenment, and he influenced the young Weishaupt with his rationalism. Weishaupt began his formal education at age seven at a Jesuit school. He later enrolled at the University of Ingolstadt and graduated in 1768 at age 20 with a doctorate of law. In 1772 he became a professor of law after conversion to Protestantism. The following year he married Afra Sausenhofer of Eichstätt. After Pope Clement XIV's suppression of the Society of Jesus in 1773, Weishaupt became a professor of canon law, a position that was held exclusively by the Jesuits until that time. In 1775 Weishaupt was introduced to the empirical philosophy of Johann Georg Heinrich Feder of the University of Göttingen. Both Feder and Weishaupt would later become opponents of Kantian idealism. Foundation of the Illuminati On 1 May 1776 Johann Adam Weishaupt founded the "Illuminati" in the Electorate of Bavaria. Initially, Illumination was designated for a group of outstanding and enlightened individuals in society. Indeed, the word was adapted from a Latin root, Iluminatus, which directly translates to "enlightened." He also adopted the name of "Brother Spartacus" within the order. Even encyclopedia references vary on the goal of the order, such as Catholic Encyclopedia (1910) saying the Order was not egalitarian or democratic internally, but sought to promote the doctrines of equality and freedom throughout society; while others such as Collier's have said the aim was to combat religion and foster rationalism in its place. The Illuminati was formed with the vision of liberating humans from religious bondage and undermining corrupted governments. The actual character of the society was an elaborate network of spies and counter-spies. Each isolated cell of initiates reported to a superior, whom they did not know: a party structure that was effectively adopted by some later groups. Weishaupt was initiated into the Masonic lodge "Theodor zum guten Rath", at Munich in 1777. His project of "illumination, enlightening the understanding by the sun of reason, which will dispel the clouds of superstition and of prejudice" was an unwelcome reform. He used Freemasonry to recruit for his own quasi-masonic society, with the goal of "perfecting human nature" through re-education to achieve a communal state with nature, freed of government and organized religion. Presenting their own system as pure masonry, Weishaupt and Adolph Freiherr Knigge, who organized his ritual structure, greatly expanded the secret organization. Contrary to Immanuel Kant's famous dictum that Enlightenment (and Weishaupt's Order was in some respects an expression of the Enlightenment Movement) was the passage by a man out of his 'self-imposed immaturity' through daring to 'make use of his own reason, without the guidance of another,' Weishaupt's Order of Illuminati prescribed in great detail everything which the members had obediently to read and think so that Dr. Wolfgang Riedel has commented that this approach to illumination or enlightenment constituted a degradation and twisting of the Kantian principle of Enlightenment. Riedel writes: ' The independence of thought and judgment required by Kant ... was specifically prevented by the Order of the Illuminati's rules and regulations. Enlightenment takes place here, if it takes place at all, precisely under the direction of another, namely under that of the "Superiors" [of the Order]. Weishaupt's radical rationalism and vocabulary were not likely to succeed. Writings that were intercepted in 1784 were interpreted as seditious, and the Society was banned by the government of Karl Theodor, Elector of Bavaria, in 1784. Weishaupt lost his position at the University of Ingolstadt and fled Bavaria. Activities in exile He received the assistance of Duke Ernest II of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg (1745–1804), and lived in Gotha writing a series of works on illuminism, including A Complete History of the Persecutions of the Illuminati in Bavaria (1785), A Picture of Illuminism (1786), An Apology for the Illuminati (1786), and An Improved System of Illuminism (1787). Adam Weishaupt died in Gotha on 18 November 1830. He was survived by his second wife, Anna Maria (née Sausenhofer), and his children Nanette, Charlotte, Ernst, Karl, Eduard, and Alfred. His body was buried next to that of his son Wilhelm, who preceded him in death (in 1802), at Friedhof II der Sophiengemeinde Berlin, a Protestant cemetery. After Weishaupt's Order of Illuminati was banned and its members dispersed, it left behind no enduring traces of influence, not even on its own erstwhile members, who went on to develop in quite different directions. Assessment of character and intentions Weishaupt's character and intentions have been variously assessed. Some took a negative view, such as Augustin Barruel, who despite writing that Weishaupt's goals were that "Equality and Liberty, together with the most absolute independence, are to be the substitutes for all rights and all property" saw this as more dangerous than beneficial, and John Robison, who regarded Weishaupt as a 'human devil' and saw his mission as one of malevolent destructiveness. Others took a more positive view, including Thomas Jefferson, who wrote in a letter to James Madison that "Barruel’s own parts of the book are perfectly the ravings of a Bedlamite" and considered Weishaupt to be an "enthusiastic Philanthropist" who believed in the indefinite perfectibility of man, and believed that the intention of Jesus Christ was simply to "reinstate natural religion, and by diffusing the light of his morality, to teach us to govern ourselves". In his defence, Weishaupt wrote a Kurze Rechtfertigung meiner Absichten (A Brief Justification of my Intentions) in 1787. Author Tony Page comments: "Weishaupt’s plan was to educate Illuminati followers in the highest levels of humanity and morality (basing his teachings on the supremacy of Reason, allied with the spirit of the Golden Rule of not doing to others what one would not wish done to oneself), so that if Illuminati alumni subsequently attained positions of significance and power (such as in the fields of education and politics), they could exert a benevolent and uplifting influence upon society at large. His project was utopian and naively optimistic, and he himself was certainly not without flaws of character – but neither he nor his plan was evil or violent in and of themselves. It is one of the deplorable and tragic ironies of history that a man who tried to inculcate virtue, philanthropy, social justice and morality has become one of the great hate-figures of 21st-century 'conspiracy' thinking." Works Philosophical works (1775) De Lapsu Academiarum Commentatio Politica. (1786) Über die Schrecken des Todes – eine philosophische Rede. Discours Philosophique sur les Frayeurs de la Mort (1788). Gallica (1786) Über Materialismus und Idealismus. Torino (1788) Geschichte der Vervollkommnung des menschlichen Geschlechts. (1788) Über die Gründe und Gewißheit der Menschlichen Erkenntniß. (1788) Über die Kantischen Anschauungen und Erscheinungen. (1788) Zweifel über die Kantischen Begriffe von Zeit und Raum. (1793) Über Wahrheit und sittliche Vollkommenheit. (1794) Über die Lehre von den Gründen und Ursachen aller Dinge. (1794) Über die Selbsterkenntnis, ihre Hindernisse und Vorteile. (1797) Über die Zwecke oder Finalursachen. (1802) Über die Hindernisse der baierischen Industrie und Bevölkerung. (1804) Die Leuchte des Diogenes. (1817) Über die Staats-Ausgaben und Auflagen. Google Books (1818) Über das Besteuerungs-System. Works relating to the Illuminati (1786) Apologie der Illuminaten, . (1786) Vollständige Geschichte der Verfolgung der Illuminaten in Bayern. (1786) Schilderung der Illuminaten. (1787) Einleitung zu meiner Apologie. (1787) Einige Originalschriften des Illuminatenordens... (1787) Nachtrage von weitern Originalschriften... (1787) Kurze Rechtfertigung meiner Absichten. (1787) Nachtrag zur Rechtfertigung meiner Absichten. (1787) Apologie des Mißvergnügens und des Übels. (1787) Das Verbesserte System der Illuminaten. (1788) Der ächte Illuminat, oder die wahren, unverbesserten Rituale der Illuminaten. (1795) Pythagoras, oder Betrachtungen über die geheime Welt- und Regierungs-Kunst. Source Works by Adam Weishaupt in English translation (2008) Diogenes' Lamp, or an Examination of Our Present Day Morality and Enlightenment, translated by Amelia Gill, The Masonic Book Club. Internet Archive (2015) The Secret School of Wisdom: The Authentic Rituals and Doctrines of the Illuminati, translated by Jeva Singh-Anand, edited by Josef Wäges and Reinhard Markner, London: Lewis Masonic, 447 pp., Notes External links Biography in Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie Vol. 41, pp. 539–550 by Daniel Jacoby. A Bavarian Illuminati primer by Trevor W. McKeown. Illuminati entry in The Catholic Encyclopedia, hosted by New Advent. 1748 births 1830 deaths People from Ingolstadt People from the Electorate of Bavaria Enlightenment philosophers 19th-century German philosophers 18th-century German philosophers University of Ingolstadt alumni Academic staff of the University of Ingolstadt German Freemasons 18th-century German male writers Empiricists

2078

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn%20Electron

Acorn Electron

The Acorn Electron (nicknamed the Elk inside Acorn and beyond) was a lower-cost alternative to the BBC Micro educational/home computer, also developed by Acorn Computers Ltd, to provide many of the features of that more expensive machine at a price more competitive with that of the ZX Spectrum. It had 32 kilobytes of RAM, and its ROM included BBC BASIC II together with the operating system. Announced in 1982 for a possible release the same year, it was eventually introduced on 25 August 1983 priced at £199. The Electron was able to save and load programs onto audio cassette via a supplied cable that connected it to any standard tape recorder that had the correct sockets. It was capable of bitmapped graphics, and could use either a television set, a colour (RGB) monitor or a monochrome monitor as its display. Several expansions were made available to provide many of the capabilities omitted from the BBC Micro. Acorn introduced a general-purpose expansion unit, the Plus 1, offering analogue joystick and parallel ports, together with cartridge slots into which ROM cartridges, providing software, or other kinds of hardware expansions, such as disc interfaces, could be inserted. Acorn also produced a dedicated disc expansion, the Plus 3, featuring a disc controller and 3.5-inch floppy drive. For a short period, the Electron was reportedly the best selling micro in the United Kingdom, with an estimated 200,000 to 250,000 machines sold over its entire commercial lifespan. With production effectively discontinued by Acorn as early as 1985, and with the machine offered in bundles with games and expansions, later being substantially discounted by retailers, a revival in demand for the Electron supported a market for software and expansions without Acorn's involvement, with its market for games also helping to sustain the continued viability of games production for the BBC Micro. History After Acorn Computers released the BBC Micro, executives believed that the company needed a less-expensive computer for the mass market. In May 1982, when asked about the recently announced Sinclair ZX Spectrum's potential to hurt sales of the BBC Micro, priced at £125 for the 16K model compared to around twice that price for the 16K BBC Model A, Acorn co-founder Hermann Hauser responded that in the third quarter of that year Acorn would release a new £120–150 computer which "will probably be called the Electron", a form of "miniaturised BBC Micro", having 32 KB of RAM and 32 KB of ROM, with "higher resolution graphics than those offered by the Spectrum". Acorn co-founder Chris Curry also emphasised the Electron's role as being "designed to compete with the Spectrum... to get the starting price very low, but not preclude expansion in the long term." In order to reduce component costs, and to prevent cloning, the company reduced the number of chips in the Electron from the 102 on the BBC Micro's motherboard to "something like 12 to 14 chips" with most functionality on a single 2,400-gate Uncommitted Logic Array (ULA). Reports during the second half of 1982 indicated a potential December release, with Curry providing qualified confirmation of such plans, together with an accurate depiction of the machine's form and capabilities, noting that the "massive ULA" would be the "dominant factor" in any pre-Christmas release. As the end of the year approached, the machine itself was pictured in press reports. With the ULA not ready for "main production", however, the launch of the Electron was to be delayed until the spring. By June 1983, with the planned March release having passed, the launch of the Electron had been rescheduled for the Acorn User Exhibition in August 1983, and the machine was indeed launched at the event. The company expected to ship the Electron before Christmas, and sell 100,000 by February 1984. The price at launch - £199 - remained unchanged from that stated in an announcement earlier in the year, with the machine's nickname within Acorn - the "Elk" - also being reported publicly for perhaps the first time. Reviews were generally favourable, starting with positive impressions based on the physical design of the computer, with one reviewer noting, "The Electron is beautifully designed and built — quite a shock compared to the BBC. Its designer case will look great on the coffee table." Praise was also forthcoming for the Electron's keyboard which was regarded as being better than most of its low-cost peers, with only the VIC-20 being comparable. In one review, the keyboard was even regarded as better than the one in the BBC Micro. The provision of rapid BASIC keyword entry though the combination of the key with various letter keys was also welcomed as a helpful aid to prevent typing errors by "most users", while "touch typists" were still able to type out the keywords in full. Reviewers also welcomed the machine's excellent graphics compared to its rivals, noting that "the graphics are much more flexible and the maximum resolution is many times that of the Spectrum's". The provision of screen modes supporting 80 columns of readable text and graphics resolutions of was described as "unrivalled by every machine up to the BBC Model B itself", although the absence of a teletext mode was considered regrettable. Although valued for its low memory usage characteristics in the BBC Micro, one reviewer considered the absence of a "software simulation of a teletext screen" to be a "lazy omission" even if it would have to be "awfully slow and take up piles of memory". While its speed was acceptable compared to its immediate competition, the Electron was, however, rather slower than the BBC Micro with one review noting that games designed for the BBC Micro ran "at less than half the speed, with very significant effects on their appeal". The reduced performance can be attributed to the use of a 4-bit wide memory system instead of the 8-bit wide memory system of the BBC Micro to reduce cost. Due to needing two accesses to the memory instead of one to fetch each byte, along with contention with the video hardware also needing access, reading or writing RAM was much slower than on the BBC Micro. Reviewers were also disappointed by the single-channel sound, noting that "BBC-style music" and its "imitations of various musical instruments" would not be possible, the latter due to the inability of the sound system to vary the amplitude of sounds. Despite some uncertainty about Acorn's target demographic for the Electron, some noted the potential for the machine in education given its robustness, but also given its price, noting that the high price of BBC Model B machines seemed "rarely justified by their actual practical applications in schools". The introduction of the Electron was seen as potentially leading to competition between Acorn's different models within the schools market rather than creating a broader audience for them, although the potential for more computers in schools, giving more "hands-on" experience for students, was welcomed. Nevertheless, reviewers anticipated that the Electron would sell well at the lower end of the market, with projected sales of 100,000 units by Christmas 1983, helped by the Electron's software compatibility with the BBC Micro and the already established reputation of its predecessor. With parents potentially being convinced of the Electron's educational value, some reviewers foresaw a conflict between parents and "discerning children", the latter merely wanting to play games and preferring models with sound and graphics capabilities more appropriate for gaming. Although Acorn had based its expansion into the United States on the BBC Micro, the company did have plans to introduce the Electron at a later time, with Chris Curry having indicated "a very heavy push overseas" involving both the BBC Micro and Electron. A model for the US market was described in an official book, The Acorn Guide to the Electron, but this model was never produced. Production difficulties at Astec in Malaysia delayed the machine's introduction, forcing Acorn to look to other manufacturers such as AB Electronics in Wales and Wongs in Hong Kong (an original equipment manufacturer making over 30 million circuit boards a year, along with power supplies and plastic housings, for companies such as IBM, Xerox, Atari, and Apple, including units made for Acorn for the BBC Micro). By October 1983, Acorn had received orders for more than 150,000 units, but had production targets of only 25,000 a month before Christmas, meaning that the existing backlog would take more than six months to fulfil. Demand for the Electron was high but only two of WH Smith's London branches had inventory. Ultimately, manufacturing in Malaysia ceased with the anticipated but unspecified number of units having been produced, this having been originally reported as 100,000 units. Acorn's marketing manager, Tom Hohenberg, admitted in early 1984 that "a lot of the trouble stemmed from the ULA" in getting production to the desired levels, but that such difficulties had been resolved, although Acorn faced an order backlog of almost a quarter of a million units. As the company increased production during 1984, however, the British home computer market greatly weakened. Hohenberg later noted that after the 1983 Christmas season, Electron deliveries had increased to meet a demand that was no longer there, with the market having "completely dried up". Acorn's Christmas 1984 sales were greatly below expectations and by March 1985 the company had reduced the Electron's price to £129. With the company's unsuccessful expansion into the United States abandoned, Acorn's financial situation had deteriorated sufficiently to prompt Olivetti to rescue the company by taking a 49.30% ownership stake. Renewed efforts were made to sell the machine, bundling it with Acorn's own expansions and software, such as one package adding the Plus 1 expansion, joysticks and a ROM cartridge game to the base machine for a total price of £219. Acorn committed to supporting the machine "until the end of 1986", continuing to supply it (as the Merlin M2105) to British Telecom as part of the Healthnet communications system, with small-scale manufacturing continuing while existing stocks were being run down. By autumn, retailers appeared eager to discount the computer, with prices in stores as low as £100, reportedly less than the distributor prices of the summer months. As the Christmas season approached, Dixons Retail acquired the remaining Electron inventory to sell, bundled with a cassette recorder and software, at a retail price of £99.95. This deal, from the perspective of a year later, apparently played a significant part in helping to reduce Acorn's unsold inventory from a value of £18 million to around £7.9 million, and in combination with "streamlining corporate activities and reducing overheads", had helped to reduce Acorn's losses from over £20 million to less than £3 million. The deal effectively brought to an end Acorn's interest in the Electron and the lower-cost end of the home computing market, but empowered third-party suppliers whose "inventiveness and initiative" was noted as being in contrast with Acorn's lack of interest in the product and the "false promises" made to its users. However, Acorn subsequently released the Master Compact a model in the Master series of microcomputers with fewer BBC Micro-style ports and a similar expansion connector to that used by the Electron with the home audience specifically in mind. Indeed, prior to its release, the Master Compact had been perceived as the successor to the Electron. Superficial similarities between the Compact and Acorn Communicator, together with technical similarities between the Electron (particularly when expanded in the form of the Merlin M2105) and the Communicator, may also have driven rumours of an updated Electron model. A more substantial emphasis on the "home, music and hobby sectors" came with the appointment of a dedicated marketing manager in 1989 following the launch of the BBC A3000 in the Acorn Archimedes range. Although the Electron presented challenges to developers in terms of the amount of memory available to programs and, particularly for those writing or porting games to the machine, a reduction in hardware features useful for controlling or presenting content on the screen, developers often discovered creative workarounds to deliver commercially successful products, making the business of writing conversions a viable one for some developers. Several features that would later be associated with the BBC Master and Archimedes first appeared as features of Electron expansion units, including ROM cartridge slots and the Advanced Disc Filing System, a hierarchical improvement to the BBC's original Disc Filing System. Having been envisaged as the basis of a portable computer with "a very strong emphasis on communications" during its development, supporting both modem and Econet interfaces, the BT Merlin M2105 product subsequently combined the Electron with communications functionality, and the Acorn Communicator developed such concepts further, introducing networking support. The availability of the Electron at discounted prices from 1985 onwards led to increased demand for third-party software and expansions for the machine. While it may not have been as popular as the Spectrum, Commodore 64 or Amstrad CPC, it did sell in sufficient numbers to ensure that new software titles from established producers were being produced right up until the early 1990s, with mainstream publications dedicated to the machine having effectively supported it for five years beyond the point at which Acorn's own support had ceased. One reviewer concluded that even at this point in 1990, "Electron owners wishing to upgrade their machine will find themselves better served now than at any time in the machine’s history." Hardware expansions Since the Electron provided only a selection of video output ports, a cassette port and the expansion connector, a range of additional expansions were produced to offer ports and connections to various peripherals. The first expansions were largely joystick and printer interfaces or sideways ROM boards. For instance, First Byte Computers developed an interface and software which allowed a "switched" joystick to be used with the majority of software titles. This interface became very popular and was sold by W.H. Smiths, Boots, Comet and hundreds of independent computer dealers, selling as many as 23,000 units over a two-year period, helped by a bundling agreement with Dixons. Acorn's own expansion strategy was led by the Plus 1 which offered a combination of ports and cartridge connectors, followed by the Plus 3 disc drive unit, but by early 1986 the more general range of expansions had broadened to include floppy drive and RS423 interfaces, Teletext adapters, and other fundamental enhancements to the base machine. Multi-function expansions Since the Electron's expansion connector was the basis of practically all external hardware expansions for the machine, unless an expansion propagated this connector to others, as was done by the Acorn Plus 3, the capabilities of any given expansion would limit the capabilities of the expanded machine. Thus, expansions offering a single function, such as joystick ports or a printer port, would need to be disconnected if other capabilities were needed, and then reconnected later. Consequently, multi-function expansions offering a combination of different capabilities offered a significant degree of convenience as well as avoiding wear on the expansion connector. Alongside announcements of Acorn's then-unreleased Plus 1, Solidisk previewed a General Purpose Interface for the Electron in early 1984 offering a Centronics printer port, switched joystick port, user port, sideways ROM sockets, and mini-cartridge sockets supported by the 6522 versatile interface adapter (VIA) chip. The Plus 1 itself was released in mid-1984, introducing the influential cartridge format for expansions ultimately used by several other companies. Acorn Plus 1 The Acorn Plus 1 added two ROM cartridge slots, an analogue interface (supporting four channels) and a Centronics parallel port, priced at £59.90. The analogue interface was normally used for joysticks, although trackball and graphics tablet devices were available, and the parallel interface was typically used to connect a printer. Game ROM cartridges would boot automatically. Languages in paged ROM cartridges would take precedence over BASIC. (The slot at the front of the interface took priority if both were populated.) Access to ROM occurred at 2 MHz until RAM access was required, so theoretically programs released on ROM could run up to twice as fast as those released on tape or disc. Despite this, all of the games released on ROM were packaged as ROM filing system cartridges, from which the micro would load programs into main memory in exactly the same way as if it were loading from tape. This meant that programs did not need to be modified for their new memory location and could be written in BASIC but gave no execution speed benefits. Six ROM cartridge titles were announced for the launch of the Plus 1: three arcade games, one adventure game, one educational title, and the Lisp language implementation, the latter being a genuine language ROM that "takes the place of the BASIC ROM" and is instantly available when switching on. The cartridge slots provided additional control lines (compared to the lines available via the edge connector on the rear of the Electron) to ease implementation of ROM cartridges. Acorn described the hardware extension possibilities in promotional literature, giving an RS423 cartridge as an example of this capability of the Plus 1. Additional peripheral cartridges were produced by companies such as Advanced Computer Products (and subsequently PRES) whose Advanced ROM Adaptor (ARA) and Advanced Sideways RAM (ASR) products provided sideways ROM and RAM capabilities, allowing ROM- or EPROM-based software to be accessed to provide languages, utilities and applications. ROM or EPROM devices containing the software could be physically inserted into empty ZIF sockets, or the software would be loaded from ROM image files (typically provided on disk) into RAM devices fitted in such sockets. Such RAM could potentially be powered by a battery and thus be able to retain its contents when the computer itself was powered off. Both such arrangements exposed the software in the same sideways memory region. Such cartridge support enabled the Electron to provide the same functionality as that offered by the expansion ROM slots under the keyboard and on the bottom-left of the BBC Micro B keyboard. However, the need to use cartridge sockets for other peripherals encouraged PRES to develop the Advanced Plus 6 (AP6): an internal RAM and ROM board for the Plus 1 providing six sockets that could be freely used for ROM, EPROM and RAM devices. Installation of the AP6 unit required some modifications to the Plus 1, undertaken either by the user or by PRES, and the product could also be enhanced with the Advanced Plus 7 offering battery-backed RAM support for two 16 KB banks. The addition of the Plus 1 added a number of new *FX or OSBYTE calls that allowed the OS to read values from the analogue interface and write to the parallel interface. The Plus 1 needed memory page &D for its workspace, and the unit added some processing overhead when enabled, both of these things causing issues with the loading and running of software, particularly cassette-based games. To disable the Plus 1, after pressing BREAK, the following commands could be issued: *FX163,128,1 ?&212=&D6 ?&213=&F1 ?&2AC=0 An official application note described a similar set of commands to "remove the Plus One completely from the address map disabling the Centronics and A/D ports (additionally disabling the RS423 cartridge if fitted)". Further developments After Acorn's change of focus away from the Electron, and with a shortage of Plus 1 units available to purchase, Advanced Computer Products secured the rights to manufacture the unit under licence from Acorn, obtaining the injection moulds and tooling, thus restarting production in 1987 after Acorn's own production of the unit had ceased in November 1985. The Advanced Plus 2 (AP2) ROM was later sold by PRES as a replacement ROM for the Plus 1, of whose 8 KB utility ROM only 3 KB had been used, thus providing an opportunity for a more comprehensive ROM to be developed. The AP2 added ROM management commands familiar from the BBC Master series, support for various sideways RAM products from PRES, disc formatting and verification utilities for different ADFS versions, a command to disable the Plus 1 entirely, and improvements that made tape loading more reliable in "high memory" screen modes. Slogger Rombox Plus Following on from Slogger's earlier Rombox product an expansion similar in profile to the Plus 1 but offering eight ROM sockets and propagating the expansion connector to other units the Rombox Plus was positioned more directly as a competitor to the Plus 1 in that it offered two cartridge slots and a Centronics print port alongside four ROM sockets. Priced at £49.95, the unit was mostly compatible with cartridges designed for the Plus 1 although one reviewer reported physical issues with some expansion cartridges, suggesting some manufacturing inconsistencies given other users' more positive experiences, but indicated that it was still "worth considering as an alternative to the Plus 1". One review reported that the Cumana Electron Filing System cartridge had an edge connector that would not physically fit inside the slot in the Rombox Plus unit; this along with a perceived lack of robustness of the case being their only major reservations about the product. The product's support for utilising 8 KB RAM devices as a printer buffer, with buffer management provided by the built-in EPROM, was noted as a particular advantage over the Plus 1. Slogger Remote Expansion and Plus 2 In early 1989, Slogger announced its "remote expansion" (RX) system for the Electron, providing a separate case with power supply to house expansions and disc drives, able to support the weight of a monitor or television. Intended for the RX system, the Plus 2 offered two ROM cartridge slots compatible with the Plus 1, three ROM sockets, and RS423 and user port capabilities. One application of the user port was to connect a mouse, utilised by Slogger's version of the Stop Press desktop publishing package by Advanced Memory Systems. Software Bargains Plus 1 In mid-1989, Software Bargains announced an expansion providing different levels of Plus 1 functionality, offered as a bare printed circuit board without casing and in three different variants: the basic model offered one cartridge port and was bundled with View and Viewsheet cartridges for £29.95; an extended model offered one cartridge port and a printer port with the two bundled cartridges for £36.95; the full model offered two cartridge ports, printer port and the bundled cartridges for £39.95. Various board upgrade options were also offered between the variants, with the product being described mainly as a vehicle to expose the bundled software packages to as many as 150,000 owners of the estimated 200,000 Electrons in the UK who "have not yet been able to acquire or use View or Viewsheet". The lack of casing was considered the most significant disadvantage, with the absence of the analogue port deemed less critical due to a general lack of support for joysticks in many games. Communications and networking To support connectivity, Acorn announced a Plus 2 network interface with availability scheduled for early 1985, together with a RS423 cartridge for the Plus 1. Neither of these products were delivered as announced. Acorn Plus 2 The Acorn Plus 2 interface was due to provide Econet capability. This interface did not make it to market. However, an Econet interface was produced by Barson Computers in Australia and possibly other individuals and businesses. Acorn Plus 4 The Acorn Plus 4 interface was due to provide a modem communications capability. Andyk RS423 cartridge Andyk announced an RS423 cartridge for the Plus 1 providing a serial port, alongside other products, in late 1985. It was priced at £34.99. Pace Tellstar/Nightingale Originally reported in mid-1985 as a collaboration between Acorn and Pace Micro Technology, but launched in early 1986, Pace offered a communications product consisting of a RS423 cartridge, bundled with a Nightingale modem and Tellstar communications software, offered at a discounted price of £145. Jafa Systems RS423 cartridge Jafa Systems announced an RS423 cartridge in late 1989 to "fill a two year gap in the market", offering a serial connector compatible with the BBC Micro together with an on-board socket for 8 KB or 16 KB EPROM devices or for 32 KB RAM, the latter being configured to present two sideways RAM banks to the system. Write protect functionality was supported to prevent certain ROM software from attempting to overwrite itself if stored in RAM. The cartridge board itself was priced at around £30, with a case costing £5 extra, and an optional 32 KB RAM adding another £20. Support for the E00 ADFS offered by PRES for that company's AP3 disc system was indicated as an application for the sideways RAM. Slogger Plus 2 RS423 interface Slogger provided an RS423 interface as an option for its own Plus 2 expansion, announced in early 1989. Disc interfaces The first disc interface to be announced for the Electron was Pace's Le Box in 1984, offering a single-sided 100 KB floppy drive controlled by the 8271 controller and accessed using the Amcom Disc Filing System, with pricing at £299 plus VAT including the drive or around £199 without. The unit also provided eight sideways ROM sockets and was intended to sit under the Electron itself. The unit was connected via cabling to the expansion edge connector and included its own power supply, and other drives including switchable 40/80 track drives offering up to 400 KB capacity were dealer-supplied options. Although the product was meant to be on sale at the Acorn User Show in August 1984, and had been advertised, it was "discontinued" in early 1985 before getting to market, with a Pace representative indicating that prohibitive pricing of the 8271 chips (each at "over £80 at times") had left the company considering a re-launch of the product should the pricing situation become more favourable. Following on from Acorn's Plus 3 interface, Cumana, Solidisk, Advanced Computer Products and Slogger all offered disc interfaces for the Electron. Unlike disc systems on the BBC Micro and the Acorn Plus 3, many of the systems released for the Electron did not claim RAM workspace (and raise the PAGE variable affecting applications above the default of &E00), making it easier to use cassette-based software transferred to disc and to run larger programs from disc. Low-cost alternatives to disc systems, briefly made fashionable by press coverage of the Sinclair Microdrive, were reportedly under development by expansion suppliers such as Solidisk, and finished products such as the Phloopy looped tape system were offered for the Electron. Reliability issues were described with the Phloopy, and the product was apparently short-lived. Acorn Plus 3 Launched in late 1984 for a price of £229, the Acorn Plus 3 was a hardware module that connected independently of the Plus 1 and provided a "self contained disc interface and 3.5 inch single sided disc drive" offering over 300 KB of storage per disc using the newly introduced Advanced Disc Filing System (ADFS). The Plus 3 was also reportedly produced with a double-sided drive fitted. An expansion connector for a second 3.5- or 5.25-inch drive was also provided by the unit, with such drives needing to provide a Shugart-compatible connector and their own power supply. The original Electron edge connector was repeated on the back of the Plus 3, allowing the Plus 1 or other compatible expansion to be connected in conjunction with the Plus 3. The double-density drive of the Plus 3 was driven using a WD1770 drive controller by the ADFS. (The Plus 3 had been rumoured to offer Acorn's DFS and to feature a 8272 double-density disk controller before its launch.) Because the WD1770 is capable of single-density mode and uses the same IBM360-derived floppy disc format as the Intel 8271 found in the BBC Micro, it was also possible to use the Disc Filing System with an alternate ROM, such as the ACP 1770 DFS. The Plus 3 reset PAGE to &1D00, reducing the amount of free RAM available to the user. The ADFS system could be temporarily disabled (and PAGE reset to &E00) via the command. Later products such as the PRES E00 ADFS remedied the memory demands of the ADFS, along with other issues suffered by the software as delivered with the Plus 3. If using the Plus 3 in screen modes 0–3, the pseudo-variable would be thrown off, as the interrupts were disabled during disk access in these modes. The screen would also blank during disc accesses. Disks had to be manually mounted and dismounted using the / commands, or using the ++ key combination. Disks could also be booted from via the standard + key-combination, if the !BOOT file was present on the disk. This behaviour was the same as on the BBC Micro. The Plus 3 included an uprated square black power supply unit with mains cord, manufactured by STC, designed and manufactured in England to and , that was designed to power the Plus 3, in addition to the Electron and the Plus 1 interface as well. This replaced the original cream-coloured "wall wart" style power supply, designed to and manufactured in Hong Kong. Original Part no: 0201,113; input 220/240 V AC/50 Hz; output 19 V AC/0.737 A/14 W: Usage: Electron, Electron+Plus1 Uprated Part no: 0865,010; input 240 V AC/50 Hz 50 W; output 21 V AC/1.75 A/36.75 W: Usage: Electron+Plus3, Electron+Plus3+Plus1 Repair note: If the internal power-supply connector, used to power the existing internal 3.5-inch drive is damaged, and requires replacement, then the original AMP 800-930 4-pin connector, which was already in short supply during the original production run, may be replaced with a Molex 5264 50-37-5043 "Mini-SPOX" connector as an alternative. Advanced Plus 3 Designed and produced by Baildon Electronics and sold by PRES, the Advanced Plus 3 (AP3) was a Plus 1 cartridge interface using the WD1770 controller, supplied with Acorn's ADFS and a single-sided 3½-inch disc drive for £99 plus VAT, offering equivalent functionality to the Acorn Plus 3. Announced in late 1987, the product was made possible by an agreement between ACP and Acorn to license the ADFS software. As with many disc interfaces for the Electron, since the interface provided a connector for the drive, this made it possible to connect a 5¼" floppy disc drive (more common amongst BBC Micro owners) or the more typical 3½-inch drive. PRES later released a version of ADFS with support for PAGE at &E00, this being achieved by using RAM provided by the Advanced Battery Backed RAM (ABR) cartridge. This version also fixed two notable bugs in Acorn's ADFS, eliminating unreliability when accessing the first tracks on a disc which had previously necessitated the writing of a file (ZYSYSHELP) as a workaround, and switching off the text cursor during disc compaction which had previously caused disc corruption (since the disc data would be processed using screen memory during this operation, and the cursor would modify that data when blinking). The ROM image was supplied on disc for £17.19, whereas a bundle of the ROM and ABR cartridge was £50.95. In 1989, the Advanced Plus 3 Mark 2 was launched, offering a double-sided drive in place of the single-sided drive previously offered. This meant that the storage capacity of each disc was increased from the 320 KB of the original Plus 3 to 640 KB (this being supported by ADFS on the Master Compact). Cumana Floppy Disc System Early in 1985, Cumana released a cartridge-based interface providing support for double-density storage, a real-time clock and calendar for timestamping of files, and a spare ROM socket for user-fitted sideways ROMs. The filing system used was Cumana's own QFS, supporting 89 files per disc, PAGE at &E00, a non-hierarchical catalogue, ten-character filenames, with a format not directly compatible with either of Acorn's DFS or ADFS. The interface itself cost £149.95 when originally announced, but settled at around £115.95 including VAT, also being offered in a promotional bundle with a 5¼-inch drive for £224.15 including VAT. Later pricing put the interface at £74.95 including VAT. Solidisk EFS In mid-1985, Solidisk released a cartridge-based interface with support for single and double density storage and providing Acorn DFS and ADFS compatibility, 16 KB of on-board sideways RAM, and a connector for a Winchester hard drive. The cartridge itself cost £59, with a bundle including a double-sided, double-density, 3½-inch drive costing £200. A 20 MB hard drive was offered at a price of £805. Advanced Plus 4 Announced in early 1986, the Advanced Plus 4 (AP4) from Advanced Computer Products was a cartridge-based interface employing the WD1770 controller and featuring ACP's 1770 DFS product, providing compatibility with Acorn's DFS from the BBC Micro and thereby supporting seven-character filenames and up to 31 files per disc. However, 8 KB of on-board static RAM was used as workspace for the filing system, keeping PAGE at &E00. An extra ROM socket was provided for a user-fitted sideways ROM, and being a 1770-based interface, it was reported that Acorn's ADFS could be used instead, although since it was not aware of the additional RAM, PAGE would be raised to &1D00 as it would be when using Acorn's Plus 3. The interface was priced at £69.55 plus VAT. Slogger Electron Disc System and Pegasus 400 Slogger, an established producer of expansions and a reseller of other disc systems, introduced the Electron Disc System in early 1987, priced at £74.95, featuring the Cumana Floppy Disc System interface, which was combined with an Acorn-compatible DFS, SEDFS, having the capability of reading 40-track discs on 80-track drives plus support for Slogger's tape-to-disc conversion products, and reported as offering "virtual 100 per cent 8271 emulation" for compatibility with traditional DFS software. The SEDFS ROM was also available separately for existing Cumana interface owners, priced at £24.95. The SEDFS was later bundled with Slogger's own cartridge-based interface and a 40/80-track switchable drive offering up to 400 KB storage per disc, with the bundle taking the Pegasus 400 name, introduced as part of a sales tour towards the end of 1987. This package of interface and drive cost £130. The precise DFS variant used by the Pegasus 400 system kept PAGE at &E00 and introduced "typeahead" support, permitting keystroke buffering during disc activity on systems with the Turbo-Driver or Master RAM Board fitted and enabled. Slogger/Elektuur Turbo boards Announced in early 1986, the Slogger Turbo-Driver was a professionally fitted upgrade priced at £42. The board itself plugged into the CPU and BASIC ROM sockets on the main circuit board of the Electron, which merely involved removing socketed components on very early Electron models, but required desoldering work and therefore benefited from a fitting service for later units. The performance benefit of fitting the board was to make some programs, particularly those running in the high bandwidth modes (0 to 3), run up to three times faster. The direct origins of the Slogger product appear to be a board designed by Andyk Limited, announced as the Fast Electron Board in late 1985 with a price of £29.99, whereas the Elektuur modification was described in an article in Dutch Electronics magazine Elektuur and intended for users to perform at home. The Slogger and Elektuur Turbo boards were born out of a hack initially devised at Acorn. By shadowing the lowest 8 KB of RAM with a static RAM chip outside of reach of the ULA, the CPU could always access it at 2 MHz. The tradeoff was that the screen could not be located in that 8 KB. In practice the operating system ROMs always put the screen into the top 20 KB and as a result this probably only broke compatibility with around 2% of software. Speeding up the low portion of memory is particularly useful on 6502 derived machines because that processor has a faster addressing for the first 256 bytes and so it is common for software to put any variables involved in time-critical sections of program into that region. The cost of the 64 Kbit SRAM chip would have been more than that of doubling the four 64 Kbit DRAM chips to give 8-bit RAM access, fixing both the modest memory and poor performance issues of the Electron. Slogger Master RAM Board Introduced at around the start of 1987 and priced at £64.95 fitted or £54.95 as a kit, the Master RAM Board offered the familiar turbo mode from the Slogger Turbo-Driver alongside a shadow mode providing 32 KB of static shadow RAM in addition to the existing 32 KB, thus giving 64 KB in total. So-called "legally written software", this being software using the operating system calls and not writing directly to the screen, could function without significant modification, making substantially more memory available for BASIC, View, Viewsheet, language ROMs and many other applications. By providing extra storage this modification also allowed some games and applications intended for the BBC Micro to function on the Electron despite the lack of a native Mode 7. Applications could not directly address video memory in shadow mode without modification, so it was incompatible with most games, although there is no inherent reason why a game could not be written to function in shadow mode. A switch mounted through the case switched between normal, turbo and shadow modes. Towards the end of the Electron's commercial lifetime, the Turbo-Driver and Master RAM Boards were offered already fitted to new Electrons in an attempt to increase sales. For a time, Jafa Systems manufactured their own equivalent of the Master RAM Board in order to support their own product range. Mode 7 display expansions One of the features of the BBC Micro that was absent in the Electron was the Teletext-style Mode 7 display. The omission of this display mode was remarkable because it had a very low memory requirement (just 1000 bytes) and many BBC programs used it to maximise available memory for program code and data while also providing a colourful 40-column textual display with simple low-resolution graphical decorations. Such display capabilities, desirable in their own right on low-memory computers, were also desirable for delivering content through low-bandwidth communications channels such as that from Teletext and Viewdata services. However, access to such services can be considered to be a separate capability, and the BBC Micro needed to be upgraded to complement its display capability with the Teletext or Prestel adapters to receive such over-the-air or online content. Jafa Systems provided a number of solutions to remedy the absence of a Teletext display capability. Morley Electronics instead chose to offer an expansion combining the display and reception capabilities. Sir Computers In late 1984, Sir Computers announced a Mode 7 adapter unit that plugged into the Electron's expansion connector. Unfortunately, Sir Computers ceased trading before the product was brought to market. Jafa Systems Released in 1987 at a price of £89, the Mode 7 Mark 1 Display Unit was a separate unit "about the size, shape and colour of the Plus One or a Slogger ROMbox" that connected to the Electron's expansion connector and featured a Motorola 6845 display controller and Mullard SAA5050 character generator to replicate the main elements of the BBC Micro's Teletext display solution. This only used 1 KB of memory for the display, with the expansion listening to display memory write accesses and buffering the data in its own memory. A ROM was included to extend the operating system to allow activation of Mode 7 as a genuine screen mode and to provide extra commands and to support keyboard shortcuts used on the BBC Micro to emit Teletext control sequences. To support the output of both the Mode 7 display and the existing video output, a lead connected the Electron's RGB output to the expansion, with the expansion providing only RF (television) output. Conscious of the relatively high price of the Mark 1 unit, John Wike of Jafa devised and, at the end of 1988, introduced a software-based Mode 7 Simulator, priced at £25, supplied on a ROM cartridge that rendered the Mode 7 display in a low-resolution, 8-colour graphics mode. Although cheap and effective in enabling use of some software that only used official operating system routines for text output, this solution proved very slow because the Electron had to be placed into the high-bandwidth Mode 2 display to be able to show eight colours at once. In doing so, the CPU spent a lot of time drawing representations of Mode 7 characters and graphics that in a hardware solution would be achieved without any demand on the CPU. It also used up 20 KB of RAM for the graphics display rather than the 1000 bytes of a hardware Mode 7. A conceptually similar predecessor to the software-based simulator was published by Electron User in early 1987, offering a monochrome Mode 4 simulation of the Teletext display, using the lower 25 character lines of the screen to show the Teletext output, reserving several lines at the top of the screen for a representation of Mode 7 used to prepare the eventual visual output. However, the program did not support direct access to Mode 7 memory locations. The author noted that a Mode 2 version would have been possible but would have required a redesigned character set and "too much memory". A further refinement of the hardware solution was introduced in 1989 with the Mode 7 Mark 2 Display Unit, which retained the SAA5050 character generator but omitted the 6845 display controller, and was fitted internally in the Electron itself instead of being housed in an external unit, although some kind of ROM expansion unit was needed to hold the driver/utilities ROM. It used software to ensure that the SAA5050 was fed with the correct character data. A software ROM would put the machine into a two-colour, 40-column graphics mode (thus providing one byte per character), and as the ULA read display data from memory in the usual fashion, the SAA5050 would listen to the data it was reading and produce a Mode 7 interpretation of the same information, this being achieved by fitting a board on top of the ULA connecting to its pins. When necessary the hardware would switch between the conventional Electron graphics output and the Mode 7 output being produced by the add-on, feeding it to the Electron's built-in video output sockets via the red, green and blue lines on the motherboard. The disadvantage to this system is that while the SAA5050 would expect to be repeatedly fed the same 40 bytes of data for every display scanline of each character row, the ULA would read a different set of 40 bytes for every display scanline in order to produce a full graphics display. A software ROM worked around this by duplicating the data intended for a Mode 7 display in memory. Although this produced a Mode 7 that had less of an impact upon CPU performance than a software solution, gave the same visual quality as the BBC Micro, and supported direct access to Mode 7 screen addresses as well as accesses via operating system routines, it still used 10 KB of memory for the display and reduced the amount of readily-usable application memory (as indicated by HIMEM) by another 6 KB. However, with users increasingly able to rely on expansions such as the Slogger Master RAM board to provide more memory, and with this combination of expansions acknowledged throughout the user manual, the emphasis of the Mode 7 Simulator and Mark 2 Display Unit was arguably to deliver the actual display capabilities for those applications that needed them, instead of using Mode 7 as a way of economising with regard to memory usage, and to do so at a reasonable price. In this latter regard, the Mark 2 model was available as a kit costing £25 or as an assembled product (requiring some soldering) costing £49, with a fitting service available for £10. The Jafa interfaces did not provide a Teletext or Viewdata reception capability, but the Mark 2 was explicitly stated to work in conjunction with the Morley Electronics Teletext Adapter. Meanwhile, the manual for the Mark 2 noted that the product would provide the functionality of a Viewdata terminal if combined with Jafa's RS423 cartridge. Morley Electronics Morley Electronics produced a Teletext Adaptor expansion for the BBC Micro and the Electron. Since the BBC Micro has the Mode 7 display capability, the model aimed at the BBC Micro merely provided the content reception capability needed to receive and decode Teletext signals, connecting to the user port and power supply. However, the Electron models provided both display and reception capabilities, doing so by routing either the RGB or UHF signals (depending on the model) through the unit in order to introduce the Mode 7 output produced by the unit, also connecting via a cartridge. The Teletext display capabilities in the Electron models exceeded those of the BBC Micro, with one reviewer noting that the enhanced capabilities permitted "black text on a coloured background, something I've always wanted to do on my Beeb". The UHF model of the Electron adapter also supported overlaying of Teletext onto video and framing of video. Second Processor expansions Acorn did demonstrate a prototype "Tube" interface for the Electron alongside the Plus 3 interface at the Compec exhibition in November 1984, although this was never brought to market directly by Acorn. Advanced Plus 5 Despite Acorn's withdrawal from the Electron peripheral market, Baildon Electronics developed the Advanced Plus 5 (AP5) expansion, featuring Tube, 1 MHz bus and user port interfaces, which plugged into a Plus 1 cartridge socket. This provided a sufficient level of compatibility that both the 6502 and Z80 second processor products from Acorn were shown to work, providing a Tube implementation that was "as faithful as you can get", with it also being noted that the Electron being available for as little as £50 at that point in its commercial lifespan was a "very cheap way of getting a CP/M machine". Some differences in the memory map of the Electron meant that BBC Micro software would need modifications to work on the Electron with AP5. The price of the unit in late 1986 was £66.70. The additional facilities of the AP5 alongside the Tube interface permitted various expansions for the BBC Micro to be made available for the Electron. These included the Hybrid Music 5000 and the AMX Mouse. PMS Electron Second Processor In 1986, Permanent Memory Systems (PMS) announced a second processor product for the Electron, the PMS-E2P, as a self-contained cartridge for use with the Plus 1 containing a second 2 MHz 6502A processor plus 64 KB of RAM, priced at £89. This was based on a product originally developed by John Wike of Jafa Systems. Available as a kit or in assembled form, it could even be adapted to connect directly to the Electron's expansion connector, thus avoiding the need to even have a Plus 1 expansion, although this would require the user to find other solutions for attaching peripherals. The implementation of the interface between the Electron and second processor was said to adhere closely to Acorn's recommendations, noting that any hardware or software compatibility issues were likely to be the fault of other vendors not similarly adhering to Acorn's guidelines. PMS supplied Acorn's Hi-BASIC with the E2P, permitting the use of as much as 44 KB of the second processor's RAM with BASIC programs. The company also made a version of Computer Concepts' Wordwise Plus available for the E2P, priced at £39.95. Sound system expansions Despite the Electron having only limited sound generation capabilities, few expansions were offered to overcome the machine's limitations. Millsgrade Voxbox Advertised in late 1985, the Voxbox by Millsgrade Limited was an expansion connecting to the Electron's expansion connector that provided allophone-based speech synthesis, with driver software provided on cassette. The supplied software supported the definition of spoken words built up from the allophones these allophones or sounds being stored in the expansion's own ROM and for catalogues of words to be created and saved. A program was supplied that extended BASIC to allow the use of the synthesiser in user programs. The expansion used the General Instrument SP0256A-AL2 speech synthesis chip. Sound Expansion cartridge Originally announced in 1987 by Project Expansions to be priced at around £40, the Sound Expansion cartridge could be fitted in a Plus 1 (or compatible) slot and provide sound output equivalent to that of the BBC Micro, with Superior Software's Speech bundled as a "limited offer". A product of the same name and with similar functionality was subsequently sold by Complex Software for around £55, employing its own adjustable speaker in the cartridge unit. Superior Software had announced a version of Speech for the unexpanded Acorn Electron in 1986, but this was never released. Hybrid Music 5000 Hybrid Technology's Music 5000 was adapted and released by PRES for use with the 1 MHz bus of the Advanced Plus 5 expansion, with the Music 5000 itself priced at £113.85. The only functional differences between the Electron adaptation and the original BBC Micro unit involved the use of Mode 6 for the display and the reduced performance of the Electron imposing some limitations on processing in programs written for the system, although this was not thought to prevent most programs for the system from working on the Electron version. Merlin M2105 An unusual variant of the Electron was sold by British Telecom Business Systems as the BT Merlin M2105 Communications Terminal, being previewed by British Telecom at the Communications '84 show. This consisted of a rebadged Electron plus a large expansion unit containing 32 KB of battery-backed RAM (making up 64 KB of RAM in total), up to 64 KB of ROM resident in four sockets (making up to 96 KB of ROM in total), a Centronics printer port, an RS423 serial port, a modem, and the speech generator previously offered for the BBC Micro. The ROM firmware provided dial-up communications facilities, text editing and text messaging functions. The complete product included a monitor and dot-matrix printer. Initially trialled in a six-month pilot at 50 florists, with the intention of rolling out to all 2,500 members of the UK network, these were used by the Interflora florists network in the UK for over a decade. Used mostly for sending messages, despite providing support for other applications, limited availability of the product led Interflora to look for alternatives after five years, although users appeared to be happy with the product as it was. This generic product combination of the Electron and accompanying expansion was apparently known as the Chain during development, itself having a different board layout, with British Telecom having intended the M2105 to be a product supporting access to an online service known as Healthnet. This service aimed to improve and speed up communications within hospitals so that patients could be treated and discharged more quickly, and to facilitate transfers of information to doctors and health workers outside hospitals, with communications taking place over conventional telephone lines. The service was to be introduced in the Hammersmith and Fulham district health authority, with installation starting at Charing Cross Hospital. The Electron was said to be particularly suitable for deployment in this application in that it had a "large expansion bus", ostensibly making the machine amenable to the necessary adaptations required for the role, together with its "price, and the fact it has a real keyboard". As a Healthnet terminal, the M2105 was intended to support the exchange of forms, letters and memos. The adoption of an Acorn product in this role was perhaps also unusual in that much of BT's Merlin range of this era had been supplied by ICL, notably the M2226 small business computer and M3300 "communicating word processor". Nevertheless, the M2105 offered interoperability with other BT products such as the QWERTYphone which was able to receive messages from the M2105 and the Merlin Tonto. The hardware specifications of the M2105, observed from manufactured units, include the 6502 CPU (SY6502 or R6502), ULA and 32 KB of dynamic RAM fitted in the Electron main unit, plus 32 KB of static RAM, two 6522 VIA devices for interfacing, AM2910PC modem, SCN2681A UART, and TMS5220 plus TMS6100 for speech synthesis. The speech synthesis was used for the "voice response" function which answered incoming voice calls by playing a synthesised message to the caller. The components chosen and the capabilities provided (excluding speech synthesis) are broadly similar to those featured by the Acorn Communicator which was another product of Acorn's custom systems division. The product documentation indicates a specification with 48 KB of RAM plus 16 KB of "non volatile CMOS RAM" and 96 KB of ROM, although this particular composition of RAM is apparently contradicted by the RAM devices present on surviving M2105 machines. However, the earlier Chain variant of the board does appear to provide only 16 KB of static RAM using two HM6264LP-15 chips, also providing an extra 16 KB of dynamic RAM using eight MK4516-15 chips, suggesting that the product evolved during development. Technical information Much of the core functionality of the BBC Micro the video and memory controller, cassette input/output, timers and sound generation was replicated using a single customised ULA chip designed by Acorn in conjunction with Ferranti, albeit with only one sound channel instead of three (and one noise channel), and without the character-based Teletext Mode 7. The edge connector on the rear of the Electron exposes all address and data bus lines from the CPU, including the upper eight bits of the address bus, in contrast to the limited selection available via the BBC Micro's expansion ports, with the One Megahertz Bus as the principal mechanism for general purpose expansion on the BBC Micro only providing the lower eight bits of the address bus. In addition, various control signals provided by the CPU and ULA are exposed via the Electron's expansion connector. For Issue 1–4 motherboards, the ULA had an issue similar to those experienced by other socketed CPUs. Over time, the thermal heating and cooling could cause the ULA to rise slightly out of its socket just enough to cause the machine to start exhibiting 'hanging' or other startup-failure issues, such as a continuous 'startup beep'. This was despite a metal cover, and locking-bar mechanism designed to prevent this from occurring. Pushing down on the metal cover to reseat the ULA was normally sufficient to rectify these issues. Issue 5 and 6 boards utilized a different ULA type, this being known as the Aberdeen ULA (as opposed to the earlier Ferranti ULA) which was mounted on a board that was directly soldered to the main board, with the chip being covered by epoxy resin "insulating material". This arrangement dispensed with the 68-pin socket, and this new type of ULA was expected to be "less prone to failure". This type of ULA was also used on the German release of the Electron mainboard which is designated by the marking "GERMAN ELECTRON Issue 1" on the mainboard rather than just "ELECTRON" as for the UK model. The keyboard includes a form of quick keyword input, similar to that used on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, through use of the key in combination with other keys labelled with BASIC keywords. However, unlike the Spectrum, this method of rapid keyword entry is optional, and keywords can be entered manually if preferred. The ULA mediates access to 32 KB of addressable RAM using four 4164 DRAMs (64 K×1 bit), sharing the RAM between the CPU and the video signal generation (or screen refresh) performed by the ULA itself. Two accesses have to be made to the RAM to get each byte (albeit with a single RAS), delivering a maximum transfer rate to or from RAM of one byte per 2 MHz cycle. In generating the video signal, the ULA is able to take advantage of this 2 MHz bandwidth when producing the picture for the high-bandwidth screen modes. Due to signalling constraints, the CPU can only access RAM at 1 MHz, even when it is not competing with the video system. When the ULA is consuming all of the RAM bandwidth during the active portion of a display line, the CPU is unable to access the RAM. (The Electron uses the Synertek variant of the 6502 processor as that allowed the clock to be stopped for this 40 microsecond period.) In other modes the CPU and video accesses are interleaved with each accessor acquiring bytes at 1 MHz. In contrast, the BBC Micro employs one or two sets of eight 16-kilobit devices, with the RAM running at twice the speed (4 MHz) of the CPU (2 MHz), allowing the video system (screen refresh) and CPU memory accesses to be interleaved, with each accessor able to transfer bytes at 2 MHz. The RAM access limitations imposed by the Electron's ULA therefore reduce the effective CPU speed by as much as a factor of four relative to the BBC Micro in the more demanding display modes, and as much as a factor of two otherwise. Byte transfers from ROM occur at 2 MHz, however. Hardware The hardware specification according to official documentation, combined with more technical documentation and analysis is as follows: CPU: Synertek SY6502A Clock rate: variable. CPU runs at 2 MHz when accessing ROM and 1 MHz when accessing RAM. The CPU is also periodically halted. Glue logic: Ferranti Semiconductor Custom ULA RAM: 32 KB ROM: 32 KB Graphics modes: 160×256 pixels (20×32 characters) in 4 or 16 colours, 320×256 (40×32 characters) in 2 or 4 colours, 640×256 (80x32 characters) in 2 colours Text modes: 40x25 characters in 2 colours, 80x25 characters in 2 colours Colours: 8 colours (TTL combinations of RGB primaries) + 8 flashing versions of the same colours Sound: 1 channel of sound, 7 octaves; built-in speaker. Software emulation of noise channel supported Keyboard: 56 key "full travel QWERTY keyboard" Dimensions: 16×34×6.5 cm I/O ports: Expansion port, tape recorder connector (1200 baud CUTS variation on the Kansas City standard for data encoding, via a 7-pin circular DIN connector), aerial TV connector (RF modulator), composite video and RGB monitor output Power supply: External PSU, 19V AC The composite video output provides a greyscale image on the standard machine, but an internal modification allows a colour image to be produced, albeit with a degradation in picture quality. Acorn ostensibly intended the composite output to be a high-quality output for monochrome monitors, with the RGB output being the preferred high-quality output for colour images. Quirks Like the BBC Micro, the Electron was constrained by limited memory resources. Of the 32 KB RAM, 3½ KB was allocated to the OS at startup and at least 10 KB was taken up by the display buffer in contiguous display modes. Although programs running on the BBC Micro could use the machine's 6522 chip to trigger interrupts at certain points in the update of each display frame, using these events to change the palette and potentially switching all colours to black, thus blanking regions of the screen and hiding non-graphical data that had been stored in screen memory, the Electron lacked such hardware capabilities as standard. However, it was possible to take advantage of the characteristics of interrupts that were provided, permitting palette changes after the top 100 lines of each display frame, thus facilitating the blanking of either the top 100 or bottom 156 lines of the display. Many games took advantage of this, gaining storage by leaving non-graphical data in the disabled area. Other games would simply load non-graphical data into the display and leave it visible as regions of apparently randomly coloured pixels. One notable example is Superior Software's Citadel. Although page flipping was a hardware possibility, the limited memory forced most applications to do all their drawing directly to the visible screen, often resulting in graphical flicker or visible redraw. A notable exception is Players' Joe Blade series. Tricks Firetrack: smooth vertical scrolling Although programs can alter the position of the screen in memory, the non-linear format of the display means that vertical scrolling can only be done in blocks of 8 pixels without further work. Firetrack, released on a compilation by Superior Software, exploits a division in the way the Electron handles its display of the seven available graphics modes, two are configured so that the final two of every ten scanlines are blank and are not based on the contents of RAM. If 16 scanlines of continuous graphical data are written to a character-block-aligned portion of the screen then they will appear as a continuous block in most modes but in the two non-continuous modes they will be displayed as two blocks of eight scanlines, separated in the middle by two blank scanlines. In order to keep track of its position within the display, the Electron maintains an internal display address counter. The same counter is used in both the continuous and non-continuous graphics modes and switching modes mid-frame does not cause any adjustment to the counter. Firetrack switches from a non-continuous to a continuous graphics mode part way down the display. By using the palette to mask the top area of the display and taking care about when it changes mode it can shift the continuous graphics at the bottom of the display down in two pixel increments because the internal display counter is not incremented on blank scanlines during non-continuous graphics modes. Exile: sampled speech Exile turns the Electron's one channel output into a digital speaker for PCM output. The speaker can be programmatically switched on or off at any time but is permanently attached to a hardware counter so is normally only able to output a square wave. But if set to a frequency outside the human audible range then the ear can't perceive the square wave, only the difference between the speaker being switched on and off. This gives the effect of a simple toggle speaker similar to that seen in the 48 KB Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Exile uses this to output 1-bit audio samples. Frak! and Zalaga: Polyphonic music As part of their copy protection, illegal copies of Aardvark Software's Frak! and Zalaga would cause a pseudo-polyphonic rendition of Trumpet Hornpipe, the Captain Pugwash theme tune, to play endlessly rather than loading the game properly (Pugwash being a pirate). On the Electron version of Frak!, the tune was the main theme from "Benny Hill" (Boots Randolph's "Yakety Sax"). The polyphony was achieved via fast note-switching to achieve the necessary chords. Software A range of titles were made available on cassette at the launch of the Electron through the Acornsoft publishing arm of Acorn, including a number of games, the Forth and Lisp languages, and a handful of other educational and productivity titles. Acorn's decision to provide the Electron with a degree of compatibility with the BBC Micro meant that a number of titles already available for the older machine could be expected to run on its new machine, with only minor cosmetic issues occurring when running some titles. Of the Acornsoft languages, the existing Forth and Lisp language releases worked on the Electron (these being re-released specially for the machine), together with BCPL and Microtext (which remained BBC-only releases). Games such as Chess and Snooker, plus a number of other titles were also established as being compatible prior to launch. Various applications in Acornsoft's View suite, together with the languages COMAL, Logo and ISO Pascal, were reported as being compatible with the Electron, as were some titles from BBC Soft and other developers. Languages A significant selling point for the Electron was its built-in BBC BASIC interpreter, providing a degree of familiarity from the BBC Micro along with a level of compatibility with the earlier machine. However, as had been the case with the BBC Micro, support for other languages was quickly forthcoming, facilitated by the common heritage of the two systems. In addition to the early releases, Forth and Lisp, Acornsoft released the Pascal subset, S-Pascal, on cassette and followed up with an ISO Pascal implementation on ROM cartridge, the latter providing two 16 KB ROMs containing a program editor and a Pascal compiler producing intermediate code that required Pascal run-time routines to be loaded. As a more minimal implementation, S-Pascal made use of the machine's built-in BASIC program editing facilities and provided a compiler generating assembly language that would then be assembled, generating machine code for direct execution. ISO Pascal had Oxford Pascal as a direct competitor offering a range of features differentiating it from Acornsoft's product, notably a compiler that could produce a stand-alone "relocatable 6502 machine-code file". Acornsoft later released the ISO Pascal Stand Alone Generator product for the BBC Micro and Master series, permitting the generation of executable programs embedding "sections of the interpreter" required by each program, with such executables being subject to various licensing restrictions. Acornsoft Forth, aiming for compliance with the Forth-79 standard, was regarded as "an excellent implementation of the language". It saw competition from Skywave Software's Multi-Forth 83 which was delivered on a ROM chip, supported the Forth-83 standard, and provided a multitasking environment. Future availability of Multi-Forth 83 on ROM cartridge was advertised. With the launch of the Plus 1, Acornsoft Lisp was also made available on cartridge. This Lisp implementation provided only the "bare essentials" of a Lisp system that "a small micro such as the Electron" could hope to be able to support. However, with the interpreter and initialised workspace being loaded from cassette into RAM in the earlier release, one stated advantage of the ROM version was the availability of more memory for use by programs, with the immediacy of a Lisp system provided as a language ROM being an implicit benefit. Acornsoft provided two products offering different degrees of support for the Logo programming language. Turtle Graphics was a cassette-based product, available alongside Forth, Lisp and S-Pascal amongst the first titles released for the Electron, featuring a subset of Logo focused on the interactive aspects of the language. Acornsoft Logo was provided on ROM cartridge and offered a vocabulary of over 200 commands as part of a more comprehensive implementation of the language, exposing its list processing foundations. Turtle Graphics was substantially cheaper than Logo: by 1987, the former had been reportedly discounted to under £3 whereas the latter cost "less than £30". Unlike other Acornsoft language products, however, Logo was supplied with "two thick manuals". Applications Acornsoft made a number of applications available for the Electron. In early 1985, the View word processor and ViewSheet spreadsheet applications, familiar from the BBC Micro, were released on ROM cartridge for use with the Electron expanded with a Plus 1, priced at £49.50 each. By running directly from ROM, these applications were able to dedicate all of the machine's available RAM to their documents, and using general filing system mechanisms, documents could be loaded from and saved to cassette or disc, although disc users could also use commands that took advantage of that faster, random-access medium. Cassette-based operation was still regarded as "perfectly feasible" since the software itself did not need to be loaded, with loading and saving operations in View achieving about 800 words per minute and in ViewSheet achieving around 200 cells per minute. When using View in Mode 6, providing a 40-column, 25-line display occupying 8 KB of memory, around 20 KB of RAM was available to cassette-based systems or to disc-based systems using products such as the Cumana Floppy Disc System that also maintained PAGE at &E00, this corresponding to about 10 or 11 A4 pages of text. In Mode 3, providing an 80-column, 25-line display occupying 16 KB, around 6 or 7 A4 pages of text could be retained in memory. Acorn's Plus 3 disc system reduced this workspace by a further 4 KB. However, documents could be broken up into sections to be processed individually by View. Operation in the 80-column Mode 0 and Mode 3 was reported as being "sometimes slow" due to the Electron's hardware architecture, but View supported horizontal scrolling across documents, permitting the use of a 40-column mode to edit wider documents. ViewSheet could also operate in different display modes, with spreadsheets of approximately 1600 cells being editable in Mode 6 and around 800 cells in Mode 3. A windowing system was provided that permitted ten different views of a spreadsheet to be displayed on screen at once, and recalculation operations were reported to be "around ten seconds for quite a large model". Reviewers considered the View and ViewSheet applications to be "professional" and to "compare well with similar software sold for much more expensive machines" such as the IBM PC, with WordStar being noted as a broadly similar package to View. Compatibility with the same programs on the BBC Micro made a complete Electron-based system an attractive, low-cost, entry-level word processing and spreadsheet system. However, View's printing support was criticised as inadequate without the use of a companion printer driver program. Acornsoft did not release its ViewStore database program specifically for the Electron, but the software was reported as being compatible, albeit with function key combinations different to those documented for the BBC Micro. However, Acornsoft did release a product, Database, on 3.5-inch diskette for use with the Electron upgraded with the Plus 3 expansion. The product provided a suite of programs for the creation, maintenance and analysis of structured data files, visualising records using a card index user interface metaphor, and supporting sorting and searching operations on the stored data. Slogger, an established provider of expansions, also produced productivity applications such as Starword, a word processor, and Starstore, a database. Starword provided separate command and editing modes familiar from Acornsoft's View, also supporting 132-column documents and horizontal scrolling for the editing of such wider documents. Along with other operations familiar from View, such as search and replace functions, block-based editing, and control over text justification, it had built-in support for customising documents for output using a mail merge function. Available on ROM for fitting to a ROM expansion such as Slogger's Rombox or inside a separately purchased ROM cartridge, and reportedly developed specifically for the Electron, Starword was considered "comprehensive and powerful". Starstore, also available on ROM, provided a database management suite primarily aimed at users of cassette storage, with databases being entirely resident in RAM. It supported database definition, data editing, searching, sorting and printing activities. Various features complemented Starword, such as mail merge integration. Starstore II followed on as an alternative to, as opposed to a direct successor of, the earlier Starstore product by requiring a disc-based system and permitting databases to be as large as the amount of free space on any given disc. Its user interface was improved over the earlier product, offering pop-up menus and cursor-based navigation. Computer Concepts' Wordwise Plus, developed from the company's earlier Wordwise product for the BBC Micro and launched in early 1985, was made available for use with the Electron expanded with the E2P-6502 second processor cartridge. The original Wordwise product was incompatible with the Electron due to its use of Mode 7 (the BBC Micro's 40-column Teletext display mode), and being supplied on a ROM chip, it could also not be readily added to the Electron without appropriate expansions. Available from Permanent Memory Systems, producers of the E2P-6502 cartridge, the Electron version of the software was the Hi-Wordwise Plus variant, supplied on disc instead of ROM, and designed to run on the second processor and to use the expanded memory provided in that environment. The program used the Electron's 40-column Mode 6 display. Expansion manufacturers Advanced Computer Products and Slogger both made solutions available based on products from Advanced Memory Systems. ACP released a bundle of the AMX Mouse and AMX Art software for use with its Advanced Plus 5 expansion, also requiring a DFS-compatible disc system. Slogger produced a version of the desktop publishing package Stop Press for the Electron, requiring a DFS-compatible disc system, two spare ROM sockets, a mouse, and a suitable user port expansion, with Slogger producing its own user port expansion cartridge. Competing with these products but requiring only a disc system, AVP's Pixel Perfect offered a rudimentary desktop publishing solution, utilising the computer's high-resolution Mode 0 display. Games Of the twelve software titles announced by Acornsoft for the Electron at the machine's launch, six were games titles: Snapper, Monsters (a clone of Space Panic), Meteors (a clone of Asteroids), Starship Command, Chess, and the combined title Draughts and Reversi. When the Plus 1 expansion was launched in 1984, three of these titles - Hopper, Snapper and Starship Command - were among the six ROM cartridge titles available at launch, together with the adventure Countdown to Doom. Acornsoft would continue to release games including those based on existing arcade games such as Arcadians (based on Galaxian) and Hopper (based on Frogger), as well as original titles such as Free Fall and Elite. Micro Power, already an established BBC Micro games publisher, also entered the Electron market at a relatively early stage, offering ten initial titles either converted from the BBC Micro, in the case of Escape from Moonbase Alpha and Killer Gorilla, or "completely re-written", in the case of Moonraider (due to differences in the screen handling between the machines). Superior Software, also a significant publisher for the BBC Micro, routinely released games for both machines, notably a licensed version of Atari's Tempest in 1985, but also successful original titles such as the Repton series of games, Citadel, Thrust and Galaforce. Superior's role in games publishing for the Acorn machines expanded in 1986 when the company acquired the right to use the Acornsoft brand, leading to the co-branding of games and compilations released by the company and the re-release of existing Acornsoft titles with this branding, Elite among them. The company would subsequently release another "masterpiece" with bundled novella - the 1988 game Exile - as well as numerous conversions and compilations. By 1988, the "big three" full-price games publishers for the Acorn 8-bit market were identified as Superior Software, Audiogenic (ASL) and Tynesoft, with Top Ten and Alternative Software being the significant budget publishers, and other "strong contenders" being Godax, Mandarin and Bug Byte, this assessment made from the perspective of an established games author evaluating trustworthy publishers for aspiring authors. Commercial considerations motivated authors to make their games available for the Electron due to its importance in sales terms, representing "around half of the Acorn market", with it being regarded as "almost compulsory for any mainstream game" to have an Electron version "unless your game is a state-of-the-art masterpiece", with Revs, Cholo and Sentinel cited as such BBC Micro exclusives. Although the Electron imposed additional technical constraints on authors accustomed to the BBC Micro, some authors were able to use this to their creative advantage. For instance, of Frak! it was noted that the "Electron version is more popular, and considered better than the BBC version because it has a screen designer included". Although not as well supported by the biggest software publishers as rivals like the Commodore 64 and Sinclair ZX Spectrum, a good range of games were available for the Electron including popular multi-format games such as Chuckie Egg. There were also many popular games officially converted to the Electron from arcade machines (including Crystal Castles, Tempest, Commando, Paperboy and Yie Ar Kung-Fu) and other home computer systems (including Impossible Mission, Jet Set Willy, The Way of the Exploding Fist, Tetris, The Last Ninja, Barbarian, Ballistix, Predator, Hostages and SimCity). Despite Acorn themselves effectively shelving the Electron in 1985, games continued to be developed and released by professional software houses until the early 1990s. There were around 1,400 games released for the Acorn Electron, several thousand extra public domain titles were released on disc through Public Domain libraries. Notable enterprises which produced discs of such software are BBC PD, EUG (Electron User Group) and HeadFirst PD. Emulation Several emulators of the machine exist: ElectrEm for Windows/Linux/macOS, Elkulator for Windows/Linux/DOS, ElkJS is a browser-based (JavaScript/HTML5) emulator, and the multi-system emulators MESS and Clock Signal feature support for the Electron. Electron software is predominantly archived in the UEF file format. There are also two known publicly documented FPGA based recreations of the Acorn Electron hardware: ElectronFPGA for the Papilio Duo hardware and the Acorn-Electron core for the FPGA Arcade "Replay" board. In addition, an implementation of the ULA for the Lattice ICE40 series has been made available. Design team The operating system ROM locations 0xFC00-0xFFFF contain the details of some members of the Electron's design team, these differing somewhat from those listed in the corresponding message in the BBC Model B ROM: Additionally, the last bytes of both the BASIC ROM and the Plus 3 interface's ADFS v1.0 ROM include the word "Roger", thought to be a reference to Roger Wilson. The case was designed by industrial designer Allen Boothroyd of Cambridge Product Design Ltd. See also Electron User, the most popular Acorn Electron focused magazine References Notes External links Stairway To Hell Acorn Electron tape archive - playUEF@8bitkick Acorn Electron World Electron MODE 7 Photos Electron 6502-based home computers Home computers Computer-related introductions in 1983 Computers designed in the United Kingdom

2080

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A%20Fire%20Upon%20the%20Deep

A Fire Upon the Deep

A Fire Upon the Deep is a 1992 science fiction novel by American writer Vernor Vinge. It is a space opera involving superhuman intelligences, aliens, variable physics, space battles, love, betrayal, genocide, and a communication medium resembling Usenet. A Fire Upon the Deep won the Hugo Award in 1993, sharing it with Doomsday Book by Connie Willis. Besides the normal print book editions, the novel was also included on a CD-ROM sold by ClariNet Communications along with the other nominees for the 1993 Hugo awards. The CD-ROM edition included numerous annotations by Vinge on his thoughts and intentions about different parts of the book, and was later released as a standalone e-book. Setting The novel is set in various locations in the Milky Way. The galaxy is divided into four concentric volumes called the "Zones of Thought"; it is not clear to the novel's characters whether this is a natural phenomenon or an artificially produced one, but it seems to roughly correspond with galactic-scale stellar density and a Beyond region is mentioned in the Sculptor Galaxy as well. The Zones reflect fundamental differences in basic physical laws, and one of the main consequences is their effect on intelligence, both biological and artificial. Artificial intelligence and automation is most directly affected, in that advanced hardware and software from the Beyond or the Transcend will work less and less well as a ship "descends" towards the Unthinking Depths. But even biological intelligence is affected to a lesser degree. The four zones are spoken of in terms of "low" to "high" as follows: The Unthinking Depths are the innermost zone, surrounding the Galactic Center. In it, only minimal forms of intelligence, biological or otherwise, are possible. This means that any ship straying into the Depths will be stranded, effectively permanently. Even if the crew did not die immediately—and some forms of life native to "higher" Zones would likely do so—they would be rendered incapable of even human intelligence, leaving them unable to operate their ship in any meaningful way. Surrounding the Depths is the Slow Zone. The Earth (called "Old Earth") is located in this Zone, and humanity is said to have originated there, although Earth plays no significant role in the story. Biological intelligence is possible in "the Slowness", but not true, sentient, artificial intelligence. Automation is not intelligent enough to calculate the jumps required for faster than light travel in the Slow Zone, but they may escape by performing an immediate reverse jump to where they arrived from if the Slowness is detected, and navigation systems watch for this and store the information required for a return to the start point during each jump. All ships which find themselves in the Slow Zone are restricted to sub-light speeds if an immediate reverse jump back out is impossible. Faster-than-light communication is impossible into or out of the Slow Zone. As the boundaries of the Zones are unknown and subject to change, accidental entry to the Slow Zone is a major interstellar navigational hazard at the "Bottom" of the Beyond. Starships which operate near the Beyond/Slow Zone border often have an auxiliary Bussard ramjet drive, so that, if they accidentally stray into the Slow Zone (thus disabling any FTL drive), they will at least have a backup (sub-light) drive to push them back "up" to the Beyond. Such ships also tend to include "coldsleep" equipment, as it is likely that any such return will still take many subjective lifetimes for most species. The next outermost layer is the Beyond, within which artificial intelligence, faster-than-light travel, and faster-than-light communication are possible. A few human civilizations exist in the Beyond, all descended from a single ethnic Norwegian group which managed to travel from the Slow Zone to the Beyond (presumably at sub-light speeds) and thence spread using FTL travel. The original settlement of this group is known as Nyjora; other human settlements in the Beyond include Straumli Realm and Sjandra Kei. In the Beyond, FTL travel is accomplished by making many small "jumps" across intervening space, and the efficiency of the drive increases the farther a ship travels from the galactic core. This reflects increases in both drive efficiency and the ship's automation's increased capacity as one moves outward, enabling the computation of longer and longer jumps. The Beyond is not a homogeneous zone—many references are made to, e.g., the "High Beyond" or the "Bottom of the Beyond", depending on distance to the galactic core. These terms seem to refer to differences in the Zone itself, not just relative distance from the Core, but there are no obvious Zone boundaries within the Beyond the way there are between the Slow Zone and the Beyond, or between the Beyond and the Transcend. Whereas a ship that crosses from the Beyond to the Slow Zone or vice versa will experience a dramatic change in its capabilities, a ship in the Beyond which moves farther from the Core will experience a gradual increase in efficiency (assuming it has the technology to make use of it) until another major shift at the boundary to the Transcend. The Beyond is populated by a very large number of interstellar and intergalactic civilizations which are linked by a faster-than-light communication network, "the Net", sometimes cynically called the "Net of a Million Lies". The Net does connect with the Transcend, on the off-chance that one of the "Powers" that live there deigns to communicate, but has no connections with the Slow Zone, as FTL communication is impossible into or out of that Zone. In the novel, the Net is depicted as working much like the Usenet network in the early 1990s, with transcripts of messages containing header and footer information as one would find in such forums. The outermost layer, containing the galactic halo, is the Transcend, within which incomprehensible, superintelligent beings dwell. When a "Beyonder" civilization reaches the point of technological singularity, it is said to "Transcend", becoming a "Power". Such Powers always seem to relocate to the Transcend, seemingly necessarily, where they become engaged in affairs which remain entirely mysterious to those that remain in the Beyond. Ravna uses this analogy to explain the relation between the zones: Plot An expedition from Straumli Realm, an ambitious young human civilization in the high Beyond, investigates a five-billion-year-old data archive in the low Transcend that offers the possibility of unimaginable riches. The expedition's facility, High Lab, is gradually compromised by a dormant superintelligence within the archive later known as the Blight. However, shortly before the Blight's final "flowering", two self-aware entities created similarly to the Blight plot to aid the humans before the Blight can escape. Recognizing the danger of what they have awakened, the researchers at High Lab attempt to flee in two ships, one carrying all the adults and the second carrying all the children in "coldsleep boxes". Suspicious, the Blight discovers that the first ship contains a data storage device in its cargo manifest; assuming it contains information that could harm it, the Blight destroys the ship. The second ship escapes. The Blight assumes that it is no threat, but later realizes that it is actually carrying away a "countermeasure" against it. The ship lands on a distant planet with a medieval-level civilization of dog-like creatures, dubbed "Tines", who live in packs as group minds. Upon landing, however, the two surviving adults are ambushed and killed by Tine fanatics known as Flenserists, in whose realm they have landed. The Flenserists capture a young boy named Jefri Olsndot and his wounded sister, Johanna. While Jefri is taken deeper into Flenserist territory, Johanna is rescued by a Tine pilgrim who witnessed the ambush and delivers her to a neighboring kingdom ruled by a Tine named Woodcarver. The Flenserists tell Jefri that Johanna has been killed by Woodcarver and exploit him in order to develop advanced technology (such as cannon and radio communication), while Johanna and the knowledge stored in her "dataset" device help Woodcarver rapidly develop in turn. A distress signal from the sleeper ship eventually reaches "Relay", a major node in the galactic communications network. A benign transcendent entity named "the Old One" contacts Relay, seeking information about the Blight and the humans who released it, and reconstitutes a human man named Pham Nuwen from an old wreck to act as its agent, using his doubt of his own memory's veracity to bend him to the Old One's will. Ravna Bergsndot, the only human Relay employee, traces the sleeper ship's signal to the Tines' world and persuades her employer to investigate what the human ship took from High Lab, contracting the merchant vessel Out of Band II, owned by two sentient plant "Skroderiders", Blueshell and Greenstalk, to transport them. Before the mission is launched, the Blight attacks Relay and concurrently kills Old One. As Old One dies, it downloads what information it can into Pham to defeat the Blight, and Pham, Ravna and the Skroderiders barely escape Relay's destruction in the Out of Band II. The Blight expands, taking over races and "rewriting" their people to become its agents, murdering several other Powers, and seizing other archives in the Beyond, looking for what was taken. It finally realizes where the danger truly lies and sends a hastily assembled fleet in pursuit of the Out of Band II. The humans arrive at the Tines' homeworld and ally with Woodcarver to defeat the Flenserists. Pham initiates Countermeasure, which extends the Slow Zone by thousands of light years, enveloping the Blight at the cost of wrecking thousands of uninvolved civilizations and causing trillions of deaths. The humans are stranded on the Tines world, now in the depths of the "Slow Zone". Activating the countermeasure costs Pham his life, but just before Pham dies, he realizes that, although his body is a reconstruction, his memories are real. Vinge expands on Pham's background story in A Deepness in the Sky. Intelligent species Aprahanti A race of humanoids with colorful butterfly-like wings who attempt to use the chaos wrought by the Blight to reestablish their waning hegemony. Despite their attractive, delicate appearance, the Aprahanti are an extremely fearsome and vicious species. Blight An ancient, malevolent super-intelligent entity which strives to constantly expand and can easily manipulate electronics and even organic beings. Dirokimes An older race which originally inhabited Sjandra Kei before the arrival of humanity. Humans All humans in the novel (except Pham) are descended from Nyjoran stock. Their ancestors were "Tuvo-Norsk" asteroid miners from Old Earth's solar system, which is noted as being on the other side of the galaxy in the Slow Zone. (Nyjora sounds similar to New Norwegian "New Earth".) One of the major human habitations is Sjandra Kei, three systems comprising roughly 28 billion individuals. Their main language is Samnorsk, the Norwegian term for a hypothetical unification of the Bokmål and Nynorsk forms of the language. (Vinge indicates in the book's dedication that several key ideas in it came to him while at a conference in Tromsø, Norway.) Skroders/Riders/Skroderiders A race of plantlike beings with fronds that are used for expression. The riders have no native capacity for short-term memory. Five billion years ago, someone gave the species wheeled mechanical constructs ("skrodes") to move around and to provide short-term memory. It is later revealed that their "benefactor" was the Blight, and it is able to corrupt and remotely operate the Riders via their skrodes. Tines A race of group minds: each person is a "pack" of 4–8 doglike members, which communicate within the pack using very short-range ultrasonic waves from drumlike organs called "tympana". Each "soul" can survive and evolve by adding members to replace those who die, potentially for hundreds of years, as Woodcarver does. Kalir A race of grub-like insectoids, authoritarian and warlike, who constitute one of the "majority races" of the Vrinimi organization. Related works Vinge first used the concepts of "Zones of Thought" in a 1988 novella The Blabber, which occurs after Fire. Vinge's novel A Deepness in the Sky (1999) is a prequel to A Fire Upon the Deep set 20,000 years earlier and featuring Pham Nuwen. Vinge's The Children of the Sky, "a near-term sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep, set ten years later, was released in October 2011. Vinge's former wife, Joan D. Vinge, has also written stories in the Zones of Thought universe, based on his notes. These include "The Outcasts of Heaven Belt", "Legacy", and (as of 2008) a planned novel featuring Pham Nuwen. Title Vinge's original title for the novel was "Among the Tines"; its final title was suggested by his editors. Awards and nominations A Fire Upon the Deep shared the 1993 Hugo Award for Best Novel with Doomsday Book. The book was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel of 1992, the 1993 John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, and the 1993 Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. Critical reactions Jo Walton wrote: "Any one of the ideas in A Fire Upon the Deep would have kept an ordinary writer going for years. For me it's the book that does everything right, the example of what science fiction does when it works. ... A Fire Upon the Deep remains a favourite and a delight to re-read, absorbing even when I know exactly what's coming." References External links A Fire Upon the Deep at Worlds Without End The book with Vinge's commentaries 1992 American novels Hugo Award for Best Novel-winning works Transhumanist books Usenet Novels by Vernor Vinge 1992 science fiction novels Tor Books books Fiction about artificial intelligence Fiction about malware Fiction about nanotechnology Fiction about consciousness transfer Apocalyptic fiction

2082

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeronautics

Aeronautics

Aeronautics is the science or art involved with the study, design, and manufacturing of air flight-capable machines, and the techniques of operating aircraft and rockets within the atmosphere. The British Royal Aeronautical Society identifies the aspects of "aeronautical Art, Science and Engineering" and "The profession of Aeronautics (which expression includes Astronautics)." While the term originally referred solely to operating the aircraft, it has since been expanded to include technology, business, and other aspects related to aircraft. The term "aviation" is sometimes used interchangeably with aeronautics, although "aeronautics" includes lighter-than-air craft such as airships, and includes ballistic vehicles while "aviation" technically does not. A significant part of aeronautical science is a branch of dynamics called aerodynamics, which deals with the motion of air and the way that it interacts with objects in motion, such as an aircraft. History Early ideas Attempts to fly without any real aeronautical understanding have been made from the earliest times, typically by constructing wings and jumping from a tower with crippling or lethal results. Wiser investigators sought to gain some rational understanding through the study of bird flight. Medieval Islamic Golden Age scientists such as Abbas ibn Firnas also made such studies. The founders of modern aeronautics, Leonardo da Vinci in the Renaissance and Cayley in 1799, both began their investigations with studies of bird flight. Man-carrying kites are believed to have been used extensively in ancient China. In 1282 the Italian explorer Marco Polo described the Chinese techniques then current. The Chinese also constructed small hot air balloons, or lanterns, and rotary-wing toys. An early European to provide any scientific discussion of flight was Roger Bacon, who described principles of operation for the lighter-than-air balloon and the flapping-wing ornithopter, which he envisaged would be constructed in the future. The lifting medium for his balloon would be an "aether" whose composition he did not know. In the late fifteenth century, Leonardo da Vinci followed up his study of birds with designs for some of the earliest flying machines, including the flapping-wing ornithopter and the rotating-wing helicopter. Although his designs were rational, they were not based on particularly good science. Many of his designs, such as a four-person screw-type helicopter, have severe flaws. He did at least understand that "An object offers as much resistance to the air as the air does to the object." (Newton would not publish the Third law of motion until 1687.) His analysis led to the realisation that manpower alone was not sufficient for sustained flight, and his later designs included a mechanical power source such as a spring. Da Vinci's work was lost after his death and did not reappear until it had been overtaken by the work of George Cayley. Balloon flight The modern era of lighter-than-air flight began early in the 17th century with Galileo's experiments in which he showed that air has weight. Around 1650 Cyrano de Bergerac wrote some fantasy novels in which he described the principle of ascent using a substance (dew) he supposed to be lighter than air, and descending by releasing a controlled amount of the substance. Francesco Lana de Terzi measured the pressure of air at sea level and in 1670 proposed the first scientifically credible lifting medium in the form of hollow metal spheres from which all the air had been pumped out. These would be lighter than the displaced air and able to lift an airship. His proposed methods of controlling height are still in use today; by carrying ballast which may be dropped overboard to gain height, and by venting the lifting containers to lose height. In practice de Terzi's spheres would have collapsed under air pressure, and further developments had to wait for more practicable lifting gases. From the mid-18th century the Montgolfier brothers in France began experimenting with balloons. Their balloons were made of paper, and early experiments using steam as the lifting gas were short-lived due to its effect on the paper as it condensed. Mistaking smoke for a kind of steam, they began filling their balloons with hot smoky air which they called "electric smoke" and, despite not fully understanding the principles at work, made some successful launches and in 1783 were invited to give a demonstration to the French Académie des Sciences. Meanwhile, the discovery of hydrogen led Joseph Black in to propose its use as a lifting gas, though practical demonstration awaited a gas-tight balloon material. On hearing of the Montgolfier Brothers' invitation, the French Academy member Jacques Charles offered a similar demonstration of a hydrogen balloon. Charles and two craftsmen, the Robert brothers, developed a gas-tight material of rubberised silk for the envelope. The hydrogen gas was to be generated by chemical reaction during the filling process. The Montgolfier designs had several shortcomings, not least the need for dry weather and a tendency for sparks from the fire to set light to the paper balloon. The manned design had a gallery around the base of the balloon rather than the hanging basket of the first, unmanned design, which brought the paper closer to the fire. On their free flight, De Rozier and d'Arlandes took buckets of water and sponges to douse these fires as they arose. On the other hand, the manned design of Charles was essentially modern. As a result of these exploits, the hot air balloon became known as the Montgolfière type and the gas balloon the Charlière. Charles and the Robert brothers' next balloon, La Caroline, was a Charlière that followed Jean Baptiste Meusnier's proposals for an elongated dirigible balloon, and was notable for having an outer envelope with the gas contained in a second, inner ballonet. On 19 September 1784, it completed the first flight of over 100 km, between Paris and Beuvry, despite the man-powered propulsive devices proving useless. In an attempt the next year to provide both endurance and controllability, de Rozier developed a balloon having both hot air and hydrogen gas bags, a design which was soon named after him as the Rozière. The principle was to use the hydrogen section for constant lift and to navigate vertically by heating and allowing to cool the hot air section, in order to catch the most favourable wind at whatever altitude it was blowing. The balloon envelope was made of goldbeater's skin. The first flight ended in disaster and the approach has seldom been used since. Cayley and the foundation of modern aeronautics Sir George Cayley (1773–1857) is widely acknowledged as the founder of modern aeronautics. He was first called the "father of the aeroplane" in 1846 and Henson called him the "father of aerial navigation." He was the first true scientific aerial investigator to publish his work, which included for the first time the underlying principles and forces of flight. In 1809 he began the publication of a landmark three-part treatise titled "On Aerial Navigation" (1809–1810). In it he wrote the first scientific statement of the problem, "The whole problem is confined within these limits, viz. to make a surface support a given weight by the application of power to the resistance of air." He identified the four vector forces that influence an aircraft: thrust, lift, drag and weight and distinguished stability and control in his designs. He developed the modern conventional form of the fixed-wing aeroplane having a stabilising tail with both horizontal and vertical surfaces, flying gliders both unmanned and manned. He introduced the use of the whirling arm test rig to investigate the aerodynamics of flight, using it to discover the benefits of the curved or cambered aerofoil over the flat wing he had used for his first glider. He also identified and described the importance of dihedral, diagonal bracing and drag reduction, and contributed to the understanding and design of ornithopters and parachutes. Another significant invention was the tension-spoked wheel, which he devised in order to create a light, strong wheel for aircraft undercarriage. The 19th century: Otto Lilienthal and the first human flights During the 19th century Cayley's ideas were refined, proved and expanded on, culminating in the works of Otto Lilienthal. Lilienthal was a German engineer and businessman who became known as the "flying man". He was the first person to make well-documented, repeated, successful flights with gliders, therefore making the idea of "heavier than air" a reality. Newspapers and magazines published photographs of Lilienthal gliding, favourably influencing public and scientific opinion about the possibility of flying machines becoming practical. His work lead to him developing the concept of the modern wing. His flight attempts in Berlin in the year 1891 are seen as the beginning of human flight and the "Lilienthal Normalsegelapparat" is considered to be the first air plane in series production, making the Maschinenfabrik Otto Lilienthal in Berlin the first air plane production company in the world. Otto Lilienthal is often referred to as either the "father of aviation" or "father of flight". Other important investigators included Horatio Phillips. Branches Aeronautics may be divided into three main branches, Aviation, Aeronautical science and Aeronautical engineering. Aviation Aviation is the art or practice of aeronautics. Historically aviation meant only heavier-than-air flight, but nowadays it includes flying in balloons and airships. Aeronautical engineering Aeronautical engineering covers the design and construction of aircraft, including how they are powered, how they are used and how they are controlled for safe operation. A major part of aeronautical engineering is aerodynamics, the science of passing through the air. With the increasing activity in space flight, nowadays aeronautics and astronautics are often combined as aerospace engineering. Aerodynamics The science of aerodynamics deals with the motion of air and the way that it interacts with objects in motion, such as an aircraft. The study of aerodynamics falls broadly into three areas: Incompressible flow occurs where the air simply moves to avoid objects, typically at subsonic speeds below that of sound (Mach 1). Compressible flow occurs where shock waves appear at points where the air becomes compressed, typically at speeds above Mach 1. Transonic flow occurs in the intermediate speed range around Mach 1, where the airflow over an object may be locally subsonic at one point and locally supersonic at another. Rocketry A rocket or rocket vehicle is a missile, spacecraft, aircraft or other vehicle which obtains thrust from a rocket engine. In all rockets, the exhaust is formed entirely from propellants carried within the rocket before use. Rocket engines work by action and reaction. Rocket engines push rockets forwards simply by throwing their exhaust backwards extremely fast. Rockets for military and recreational uses date back to at least 13th-century China. Significant scientific, interplanetary and industrial use did not occur until the 20th century, when rocketry was the enabling technology of the Space Age, including setting foot on the Moon. Rockets are used for fireworks, weaponry, ejection seats, launch vehicles for artificial satellites, human spaceflight and exploration of other planets. While comparatively inefficient for low speed use, they are very lightweight and powerful, capable of generating large accelerations and of attaining extremely high speeds with reasonable efficiency. Chemical rockets are the most common type of rocket and they typically create their exhaust by the combustion of rocket propellant. Chemical rockets store a large amount of energy in an easily released form, and can be very dangerous. However, careful design, testing, construction and use minimizes risks. See also References Citations Sources Wilson, E. B. (1920) Aeronautics: A Class Text, via Internet Archive External links Aeronautics Aviation Terminology Jeppesen The AVIATION DICTIONARY for pilots and aviation technicians DTIC ADA032206: Chinese-English Aviation and Space Dictionary Courses Research + Vehicle operation Articles containing video clips

2083

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auguste%20and%20Louis%20Lumi%C3%A8re

Auguste and Louis Lumière

The Lumière brothers (, ; ), Auguste Marie Louis Nicolas Lumière (19 October 1862 – 10 April 1954) and Louis Jean Lumière (5 October 1864 – 6 June 1948), were French manufacturers of photography equipment, best known for their motion picture system and the short films they produced between 1895 and 1905, which places them among the earliest filmmakers. Their screening of a single film on 22 March 1895 for around 200 members of the Société d'encouragement pour l'industrie nationale (Society for the Development of the National Industry) in Paris was probably the first presentation of projected film. Their first commercial public screening on 28 December 1895 for around 40 paying visitors and invited relations has traditionally been regarded as the birth of cinema. Either the techniques or the business models of earlier filmmakers proved to be less viable than the breakthrough presentations of the Lumières. History The Lumière brothers were born in Besançon, France, to Charles-Antoine Lumière (1840–1911) and Jeanne Joséphine Costille Lumière, who were married in 1861 and moved to Besançon, setting up a small photographic portrait studio. Here were born Auguste, Louis and their daughter Jeanne. They moved to Lyon in 1870, where their two other daughters were born: Mélina and Francine. Auguste and Louis both attended La Martiniere, the largest technical school in Lyon. They patented several significant processes leading up to their film camera, most notably film perforations (originally implemented by Émile Reynaud) as a means of advancing the film through the camera and projector. The original had been patented by Léon Guillaume Bouly on 12 February 1892. The — a three-in-one device that could record, develop, and project motion pictures — was further developed by the Lumières. The brothers patented their own version on 13 February 1895. The date of the recording of their first film is in dispute. In an interview with Georges Sadoul given in 1948, Louis claimed that he shot the film in August 1894 – before the arrival of the kinetoscope in France. This is questioned by historians, who consider that a functional Lumière camera did not exist before the beginning of 1895. The Lumière brothers saw film as a novelty and had withdrawn from the film business by 1905. They went on to develop the first practical photographic colour process, the Lumière Autochrome. Louis died on 6 June 1948 and Auguste on 10 April 1954. They are buried in a family tomb in the New Guillotière Cemetery in Lyon. First film screenings On 22 March 1895 in Paris, at the Society for the Development of the National Industry, in front of a small audience, one of whom was said to be Léon Gaumont, then director of the company , the Lumières privately screened a single film, Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory. The main focus of the conference by Louis concerned the recent developments in the photographic industry, mainly the research on polychromy (colour photography). It was much to Lumière's surprise that the moving black-and-white images retained more attention than the coloured stills. The Lumières gave their first paid public screening on 28 December 1895, at Salon Indien du Grand Café in Paris. This presentation consisted of the following 10 short films: (literally, "the exit from the Lumière factory in Lyon", or, under its more common English title, Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory), 46 seconds () (The Gardener, or The Sprinkler Sprinkled), 49 seconds (The Photographical Congress Arrives in Lyon), 48 seconds (Horse Trick Riders), 46 seconds ("fishing for goldfish"), 42 seconds (The Blacksmiths), 49 seconds (Baby's Breakfast (lit. "baby's meal")), 41 seconds ("Jumping Onto the Blanket"), 41 seconds (Cordeliers' Square in Lyon), 44 seconds (The Sea), 38 seconds Each film was up to long, which, when hand cranked through a projector, runs approximately 50 seconds. The Lumières went on tour with the in 1896, visiting places like Brussels, Bombay, London, Montreal, New York City, Palestine, and Buenos Aires. In 1896, only a few months after the initial screenings in Europe, films by the Lumiere Brothers were shown in Egypt, first in the Tousson stock exchange in Alexandria on 5 November 1896 and then in the Hamam Schneider (Schneider Bath) in Cairo. Early colour photography The brothers stated that "the cinema is an invention without any future" and declined to sell their camera to other filmmakers such as Georges Méliès. This made many film makers upset. Consequently, their role in the history of film was exceedingly brief. In parallel with their cinema work they experimented with colour photography. They worked on colour photographic processes in the 1890s including the Lippmann process (interference heliochromy) and their own 'bichromated glue' process, a subtractive colour process, examples of which were exhibited at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900. This last process was commercialised by the Lumieres but commercial success had to wait for their next colour process. In 1903 they patented a colour photographic process, the Autochrome Lumière, which was launched on the market in 1907. Throughout much of the 20th century, the Lumière company was a major producer of photographic products in Europe, but the brand name, Lumière, disappeared from the marketplace following merger with Ilford. Film systems that preceded the Cinématographe Lumière Earlier moving images, for instance those of the phantasmagoria shows, the phénakisticope, the zoetrope and Émile Reynaud's Théâtre Optique consisted of hand-drawn images. A system that could record photographic reality in motion, in a fashion much like it is seen by the eyes, had a greater impact on people. Eadweard Muybridge's Zoopraxiscope projected moving painted silhouettes based on his chronophotographic work. The only Zoopraxiscope disc with actual photographs was made as an early form of stop motion. Less-known predecessors, such as Jules Duboscq's Bioscope (patented in 1852) were not developed to project the moving images. A Polish inventor Kazimierz Prószyński built his camera and projecting device, called Pleograph, in 1894, before those made by the Lumière brothers. Le Prince went missing in 1890, before he got around to give public demonstrations of the patented cameras and projectors he had been developing during the previous years. His short film known as Roundhay Garden Scene (1888) has later come to be regarded as the oldest film. William Friese-Greene patented a "machine camera" in 1889, which embodied many aspects of later film cameras. He displayed the results at photographic societies in 1890 and developed further cameras but did not publicly project the results. Ottomar Anschütz's Electrotachyscope projected very short loops of high photographic quality. Thomas Edison believed projection of films wasn't as viable a business model as offering the films in the "peepshow" kinetoscope device. Watching the images on the screen turned out to be much preferred by audiences. Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope (developed by William Kennedy Dickson), premiered publicly in 1894. Lauste and Latham's Eidoloscope was demonstrated for members of the press on 21 April 1895, and opened to the paying public on Broadway on 20 May. They shot films up to twenty minutes long at speeds over thirty frames per second and showed them in many US cities. The Eidoloscope Company was dissolved in 1896 after various internal disputes. Max and Emil Skladanowsky, inventors of the Bioscop, had offered projected moving images to a paying public in Berlin from 1 November 1895 until the end of the month. Their machinery was relatively cumbersome and their films much shorter than those of the Lumière brothers. The Skladnowskys' booked screenings in Paris were cancelled after the news of the Lumière show. Nonetheless, they toured their films to other countries. See also Auguste Lumière Louis Lumière Institut Lumière 1895 in film 1896 in film 19th century in film History of film L'Idéal Cinéma Jacques Tati in Aniche the oldest still-active cinéma in the world, though not continuously, since 23 November 1905. List of works by Louis Botinelly Place Ambroise-Courtois References Notes Works cited Further reading Chardère, B. Les images des Lumière (in French). Paris: Gallimard, 1995. . Cook, David. A History of Narrative Film (4th ed.). New York: W. W. Norton, 2004. . Mast, Gerald and Bruce F. Kawin. A Short History of the Movies (9th ed.). New York: Pearson Longman, 2006. . Rittaud-Hutinet, Jacques. Le cinéma des origines (in French). Seyssel, France: Champ Vallon, 1985. . External links Le musée Lumière – Lumière Museum Businesspeople from Lyon Color scientists Sibling filmmakers Brother duos Filmmaking duos French film directors Silent film directors Pioneers of photography History of film Defunct film and television production companies La Martinière Lyon alumni Members of the French Academy of Sciences Order of the Francisque recipients Recipients of the Order of St. Sava French cinema pioneers Articles containing video clips

2085

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assyria

Assyria

Assyria (Neo-Assyrian cuneiform: , māt Aššur) was a major ancient Mesopotamian civilization which existed as a city-state from the 21st century BC to the 14th century BC, then to a territorial state, and eventually an empire from the 14th century BC to the 7th century BC. Spanning from the early Bronze Age to the late Iron Age, modern historians typically divide ancient Assyrian history into the Early Assyrian ( 2600–2025 BC), Old Assyrian ( 2025–1364 BC), Middle Assyrian ( 1363–912 BC), Neo-Assyrian (911–609 BC) and post-imperial (609 BC– AD 240) periods, based on political events and gradual changes in language. Assur, the first Assyrian capital, was founded 2600 BC but there is no evidence that the city was independent until the collapse of the Third Dynasty of Ur in the 21st century BC, when a line of independent kings beginning with Puzur-Ashur I began ruling the city. Centered in the Assyrian heartland in northern Mesopotamia, Assyrian power fluctuated over time. The city underwent several periods of foreign rule or domination before Assyria rose under Ashur-uballit I in the early 14th century BC as the Middle Assyrian Empire. In the Middle and Neo-Assyrian periods Assyria was one of the two major Mesopotamian kingdoms, alongside Babylonia in the south, and at times became the dominant power in the ancient Near East. Assyria was at its strongest in the Neo-Assyrian period, when the Assyrian army was the strongest military power in the world and the Assyrians ruled the largest empire then yet assembled in world history, spanning from parts of modern-day Iran in the east to Egypt in the west. The Neo-Assyrian Empire fell in the late 7th century BC, conquered by a coalition of the Babylonians, who had lived under Assyrian rule for about a century, and the Medes. Though the core urban territory of Assyria was extensively devastated in the Medo-Babylonian conquest of the Assyrian Empire and the succeeding Neo-Babylonian Empire invested few resources in rebuilding it, ancient Assyrian culture and traditions continued to survive for centuries throughout the post-imperial period. Assyria experienced a recovery under the Seleucid and Parthian empires, though declined again under the Sasanian Empire, which sacked numerous cities and semi independent Assyrian territories in the region, including Assur itself. The remaining Assyrian people, who have survived in northern Mesopotamia to modern times, were gradually Christianized from the 1st century AD onward. Ancient Mesopotamian religion persisted at Assur until its final sack in the 3rd century AD, and at certain other holdouts for centuries thereafter. The triumph of ancient Assyria can be attributed not only to its vigorous warrior-monarchs but also to its adeptness in efficiently assimilating and governing conquered territories using inventive and advanced administrative mechanisms. The developments in warfare and governance introduced by ancient Assyria continued to be employed by subsequent empires and states for centuries. Ancient Assyria also left a legacy of great cultural significance, particularly through the Neo-Assyrian Empire making a prominent impression in later Assyrian, Greco-Roman and Hebrew literary and religious tradition. Nomenclature In the Old Assyrian period, when Assyria was merely a city-state centered on the city of Assur, the state was typically referred to as ālu Aššur ("city of Ashur"). From the time of its rise as a territorial state in the 14th century BC and onward, Assyria was referred to in official documents as māt Aššur ("land of Ashur"), marking its shift to being a regional polity. The first attested use of the term māt Aššur is during the reign of Ashur-uballit I ( 1363–1328 BC), who was the first king of the Middle Assyrian Empire. Both ālu Aššur and māt Aššur derive from the name of the Assyrian national deity Ashur. Ashur probably originated in the Early Assyrian period as a deified personification of Assur itself. In the Old Assyrian period the deity was considered the formal king of Assur; the actual rulers only used the style Išši'ak ("governor"). From the time of Assyria's rise as a territorial state, Ashur began to be regarded as an embodiment of the entire land ruled by the Assyrian kings. The modern name "Assyria" is of Greek origin, derived from Ασσυρία (Assuría). The term's first attested use is during the time of the ancient Greek historian Herodotus (5th century BC). The Greeks called the Levant "Syria" and Mesopotamia "Assyria", even though the local population, both at that time and well into the later Christian period, used both terms interchangeably to refer to the entire region. It is not known whether the Greeks began referring to Mesopotamia as "Assyria" because they equated the region with the Assyrian Empire, long fallen by the time the term is first attested, or because they named the region after the people who lived there, the Assyrians. Because the term is so "similar to Syria", scholars have been examining since the 17th century whether the two terms are connected. And because, in sources predating the Greek ones, the shortened form "Syria" is attested as a synonym for Assyria, notably in Luwian and Aramaic texts from the time of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, modern scholars overwhelmingly support the conclusion that the names are connected. Both "Assyria" and the contraction, "Syria," are ultimately derived from the Akkadian Aššur. Following the decline of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, the subsequent empires that held dominion over the Assyrian lands adopted distinct appellations for the region, with a significant portion of these names also being rooted in Aššur. The Achaemenid Empire referred to Assyria as Aθūrā ("Athura"). The Sasanian Empire inexplicably referred to Lower Mesopotamia as Asoristan ("land of the Assyrians"), though the northern province of Nōdšīragān, which included much of the old Assyrian heartland, was also sometimes called Atūria or Āthōr. In Syriac, Assyria was and is referred to as ʾĀthor. History Early history Agricultural villages in the region that would later become Assyria are known to have existed by the time of the Hassuna culture, 6300–5800 BC. Though the sites of some nearby cities that would later be incorporated into the Assyrian heartland, such as Nineveh, are known to have been inhabited since the Neolithic, the earliest archaeological evidence from Assur dates to the Early Dynastic Period, 2600 BC. During this time, the surrounding region was already relatively urbanized. There is no evidence that early Assur was an independent settlement, and it might not have been called Assur at all initially, but rather Baltil or Baltila, used in later times to refer to the city's oldest portion. The name "Assur" is first attested for the site in documents of the Akkadian period in the 24th century BC. Through most of the Early Assyrian period ( 2600–2025 BC), Assur was dominated by states and polities from southern Mesopotamia. Early on, Assur for a time fell under the loose hegemony of the Sumerian city of Kish and it was later occupied by both the Akkadian Empire and then the Third Dynasty of Ur. In 2025 BC, due to the collapse of the Third Dynasty of Ur, Assur became an independent city-state under Puzur-Ashur I. Assur was under the Puzur-Ashur dynasty home to less than 10,000 people and likely held very limited military power; no military institutions at all are known from this time and no political influence was exerted on neighboring cities. The city was still influential in other ways; under Erishum I ( 1974–1934 BC), Assur experimented with free trade, the earliest known such experiment in world history, which left the initiative for trade and large-scale foreign transactions entirely to the populace rather than the state. Royal encouragement of trade led to Assur quickly establishing itself as a prominent trading city in northern Mesopotamia and soon thereafter establishing an extensive long-distance trade network, the first notable impression Assyria left in the historical record. Among the evidence left from this trade network are large collections of Old Assyrian cuneiform tablets from Assyrian trade colonies, the most notable of which is a set of 22,000 clay tablets found at Kültepe, near the modern city of Kayseri in Turkey. As trade declined, perhaps due to increased warfare and conflict between the growing states of the Near East, Assur was frequently threatened by larger foreign states and kingdoms. The original Assur city-state, and the Puzur-Ashur dynasty, came to an end 1808 BC when the city was conquered by the Amorite ruler of Ekallatum, Shamshi-Adad I. Shamshi-Adad's extensive conquests in northern Mesopotamia eventually made him the ruler of the entire region, founding what some scholars have termed the "Kingdom of Upper Mesopotamia". The survival of this realm relied chiefly on Shamshi-Adad's own strength and charisma and it thus collapsed shortly after his death 1776 BC. After Shamshi-Adad's death, the political situation in northern Mesopotamia was highly volatile, with Assur at times coming under the brief control of Eshnunna, Elam and the Old Babylonian Empire. At some point, the city returned to being an independent city-state, though the politics of Assur itself were volatile as well, with fighting between members of Shamshi-Adad's dynasty, native Assyrians and Hurrians for control. The infighting came to an end after the rise of Bel-bani as king 1700 BC. Bel-bani founded the Adaside dynasty, which after his reign ruled Assyria for about a thousand years. Assyria's rise as a territorial state in later times was in large part facilitated by two separate invasions of Mesopotamia by the Hittites. An invasion by the Hittite king Mursili I in 1595 BC destroyed the dominant Old Babylonian Empire, allowing the smaller kingdoms of Mitanni and Kassite Babylonia to rise in the north and south, respectively. Around 1430 BC, Assur was subjugated by Mitanni, an arrangement that lasted for about 70 years, until 1360 BC. Another Hittite invasion by Šuppiluliuma I in the 14th century BC effectively crippled the Mitanni kingdom. After his invasion, Assyria succeeded in freeing itself from its suzerain, achieving independence once more under Ashur-uballit I ( 1363–1328 BC) whose rise to power, independence, and conquests of neighboring territory traditionally marks the rise of the Middle Assyrian Empire ( 1363–912 BC). Assyrian Empire Ashur-uballit I was the first native Assyrian ruler to claim the royal title šar ("king"). Shortly after achieving independence, he further claimed the dignity of a great king on the level of the Egyptian pharaohs and the Hittite kings. Assyria's rise was intertwined with the decline and fall of the Mitanni kingdom, its former suzerain, which allowed the early Middle Assyrian kings to expand and consolidate territories in northern Mesopotamia. Under the warrior-kings Adad-nirari I ( 1305–1274 BC), Shalmaneser I ( 1273–1244 BC) and Tukulti-Ninurta I ( 1243–1207 BC), Assyria began to realize its aspirations of becoming a significant regional power. These kings campaigned in all directions and incorporated a significant amount of territory into the growing Assyrian Empire. Under Shalmaneser I, the last remnants of the Mitanni kingdom were formally annexed into Assyria. The most successful of the Middle Assyrian kings was Tukulti-Ninurta I, who brought the Middle Assyrian Empire to its greatest extent. His most notable military achievements were his victory at the Battle of Nihriya 1237 BC, which marked the beginning of the end of Hittite influence in northern Mesopotamia, and his temporary conquest of Babylonia, which became an Assyrian vassal 1225–1216 BC. Tukulti-Ninurta was also the first Assyrian king to try to move the capital away from Assur, inaugurating the new city Kar-Tukulti-Ninurta as capital 1233 BC. The capital was returned to Assur after his death. Tukulti-Ninurta I's assassination 1207 BC was followed by inter-dynastic conflict and a significant drop in Assyrian power. Tukulti-Ninurta I's successors were unable to maintain Assyrian power and Assyria became increasingly restricted to just the Assyrian heartland, a period of decline broadly coinciding with the Late Bronze Age collapse. Though some kings in this period of decline, such as Ashur-dan I ( 1178–1133 BC), Ashur-resh-ishi I (1132–1115 BC) and Tiglath-Pileser I (1114–1076 BC) worked to reverse the decline and made significant conquests, their conquests were ephemeral and shaky, quickly lost again. From the time of Eriba-Adad II (1056–1054 BC) onward, Assyrian decline intensified. The Assyrian heartland remained safe since it was protected by its geographical remoteness. Since Assyria was not the only state to undergo decline during these centuries, and the lands surrounding the Assyrian heartland were also significantly fragmented, it would ultimately be relatively easy for the reinvigorated Assyrian army to reconquer large parts of the empire. Under Ashur-dan II (934–912 BC), who campaigned in the northeast and northwest, Assyrian decline was at last reversed, paving the way for grander efforts under his successors. The end of his reign conventionally marks the beginning of the Neo-Assyrian Empire (911–609 BC). Through decades of conquests, the early Neo-Assyrian kings worked to retake the lands of the Middle Assyrian Empire. Since this reconquista had to begin nearly from scratch, its eventual success was an extraordinary achievement. Under Ashurnasirpal II (883–859 BC), the Neo-Assyrian Empire became the dominant political power in the Near East. In his ninth campaign, Ashurnasirpal II marched to the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, collecting tribute from various kingdoms on the way. A significant development during Ashurnasirpal II's reign was the second attempt to transfer the Assyrian capital away from Assur. Ashurnasirpal restored the ancient and ruined town of Nimrud, also located in the Assyrian heartland, and in 879 BC designated that city as the new capital of the empire Though no longer the political capital, Assur remained the ceremonial and religious center of Assyria. Ashurnasirpal II's son Shalmaneser III (859–824 BC) also went on wide-ranging wars of conquest, expanding the empire in all directions. After Shalmaneser III's death, the Neo-Assyrian Empire entered into a period of stagnation dubbed the "age of the magnates", when powerful officials and generals were the principal wielders of political power rather than the king. This time of stagnation came to an end with the rise of Tiglath-Pileser III (745–727 BC), who reduced the power of the magnates, consolidated and centralized the holdings of the empire, and through his military campaigns and conquests more than doubled the extent of Assyrian territory. The most significant conquests were the vassalization of the Levant all the way to the Egyptian border and the 729 BC conquest of Babylonia. The Neo-Assyrian Empire reached the height of its extent and power under the Sargonid dynasty, founded by Sargon II (722–705 BC). Under Sargon II and his son Sennacherib (705–681 BC), the empire was further expanded and the gains were consolidated. Both kings founded new capitals. Sargon II moved the capital to the new city of Dur-Sharrukin in 706 BC and the year after, Sennacherib transferred the capital to Nineveh, which he ambitiously expanded and renovated, and might even have built the hanging gardens there, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. The 671 BC conquest of Egypt under Esarhaddon (681–669 BC) brought Assyria to its greatest ever extent. After the death of Ashurbanipal (669–631 BC), the Neo-Assyrian Empire swiftly collapsed. One of the primary reasons was the inability of the Neo-Assyrian kings to resolve the "Babylonian problem"; despite many attempts to appease Babylonia in the south, revolts were frequent all throughout the Sargonid period. The revolt of Babylon under Nabopolassar in 626 BC, in combination with an invasion by the Medes under Cyaxares in 615/614 BC, led to the Medo-Babylonian conquest of the Assyrian Empire. Assur was sacked in 614 BC and Nineveh fell in 612 BC. The last Assyrian ruler, Ashur-uballit II, tried to rally the Assyrian army at Harran in the west but he was defeated in 609 BC, marking the end of the ancient line of Assyrian kings and of Assyria as a state. Later history Despite the violent downfall of the Assyrian Empire, Assyrian culture continued to survive through the subsequent post-imperial period (609 BC – AD 240) and beyond. The Assyrian heartland experienced a dramatic decrease in the size and number of inhabited settlements during the rule of the Neo-Babylonian Empire founded by Nabopolassar; the former Assyrian capital cities Assur, Nimrud and Nineveh were nearly completely abandoned. Throughout the time of the Neo-Babylonian and later Achaemenid Empire, Assyria remained a marginal and sparsely populated region. Toward the end of the 6th century BC, the Assyrian dialect of the Akkadian language went extinct, having toward the end of the Neo-Assyrian Empire already largely been replaced by Aramaic as a vernacular language. Under the empires succeeding the Neo-Babylonians, from the late 6th century BC onward, Assyria began to experience a recovery. Under the Achaemenids, most of the territory was organized into the province Athura (Aθūrā). The organization into a single large province, the lack of interference of the Achaemenid rulers in local affairs, and the return of the cult statue of Ashur to Assur soon after the Achaemenids conquered Babylon facilitated the survival of Assyrian culture. Under the Seleucid Empire, which controlled Mesopotamia from the late 4th to mid-2nd century BC, Assyrian sites such as Assur, Nimrud and Nineveh were resettled and a large number of villages were rebuilt and expanded. After the Parthian Empire conquered the region in the 2nd century BC, the recovery of Assyria continued, culminating in an unprecedented return to prosperity and revival in the 1st to 3rd centuries AD. The region was resettled and restored so intensely that the population and settlement density reached heights not seen since the Neo-Assyrian Empire. The region was under the Parthians primarily ruled by a group of vassal kingdoms, including Osroene, Adiabene and Hatra. Though in some aspects influenced by Assyrian culture, these states were for the most part not ruled by Assyrian rulers. Assur itself flourished under Parthian rule. From around or shortly after the end of the 2nd century BC, the city may have become the capital of its own small semi-autonomous Assyrian realm, either under the suzerainty of Hatra, or under direct Parthian suzerainty. On account of the resemblance between the stelae by the local rulers and those of the ancient Assyrian kings, they may have seen themselves as the restorers and continuators of the old royal line. The ancient Ashur temple was restored in the 2nd century AD. This last cultural golden age came to an end with the sack of Assur by the Sasanian Empire 240. During the sack, the Ashur temple was destroyed again and the city's population was dispersed. Starting from the 1st century AD onward, many of the Assyrians became Christianized, though holdouts of the old ancient Mesopotamian religion continued to survive for centuries. Despite the loss of political power, the Assyrians continued to constitute a significant portion of the population in northern Mesopotamia until religiously motivated suppression and massacres under the Ilkhanate and the Timurid Empire in the 14th century, which relegated them to a local ethnic and religious minority. The Assyrians lived largely in peace under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, which gained control of Assyria in 16th century. In the late 19th and early 20th century, when the Ottomans grew increasingly nationalistic, further persecutions and massacres were enacted against the Assyrians, most notably the Sayfo (Assyrian genocide), which resulted in the deaths of as many as 250,000 Assyrians. Throughout the 20th century, many unsuccessful proposals have been made by the Assyrians for autonomy or independence. Further massacres and persecutions, enacted both by governments and by terrorist groups such as the Islamic State, have resulted in most of the Assyrian people living in diaspora. Government and military Kingship In the Assur city-state of the Old Assyrian period, the government was in many respects an oligarchy, where the king was a permanent, albeit not the only prominent, actor. The Old Assyrian kings were not autocrats, with sole power, but rather acted as stewards on behalf of the god Ashur and presided over the meetings of the city assembly, the main Assyrian administrative body during this time. The composition of the city assembly is not known, but it is generally believed to have been made up of members of the most powerful families of the city, many of whom were merchants. The king acted as the main executive officer and chairman of this group of influential individuals and also contributed with legal knowledge and expertise. The Old Assyrian kings were styled as iššiak Aššur ("governor [on behalf] of Ashur"), with Ashur being considered the city's formal king. That the populace of Assur in the Old Assyrian period often referred to the king as rubā’um ("great one") clearly indicates that the kings, despite their limited executive power, were seen as royal figures and as being primus inter pares (first among equals) among the powerful individuals of the city. Assur first experienced a more autocratic form of kingship under the Amorite conqueror Shamshi-Adad I, the earliest ruler of Assur to use the style šarrum (king) and the title 'king of the Universe'. Shamshi-Adad I appears to have based his more absolute form of kingship on the rulers of the Old Babylonian Empire. Under Shamshi-Adad I, Assyrians also swore their oaths by the king, not just by the god. This practice did not survive beyond his death. The influence of the city assembly had disappeared by the beginning of the Middle Assyrian period. Though the traditional iššiak Aššur continued to be used at times, the Middle Assyrian kings were autocrats, in terms of power having little in common with the rulers of the Old Assyrian period. As the Assyrian Empire grew, the kings began to employ an increasingly sophisticated array of royal titles. Ashur-uballit I was the first to assume the style šar māt Aššur ("king of the land of Ashur") and his grandson Arik-den-ili ( 1317–1306 BC) introduced the style šarru dannu ("strong king"). Adad-nirari I's inscriptions required 32 lines to be devoted just to his titles. This development peaked under Tukulti-Ninurta I, who assumed, among other titles, the styles "king of Assyria and Karduniash", "king of Sumer and Akkad", "king of the Upper and the Lower Seas" and "king of all peoples". Royal titles and epithets were often highly reflective of current political developments and the achievements of individual kings; during periods of decline, the royal titles used typically grew more simple again, only to grow grander once more as Assyrian power experienced resurgences. The kings of the Middle and Neo-Assyrian periods continued to present themselves, and be viewed by their subjects, as the intermediaries between Ashur and mankind. This position and role was used to justify imperial expansion: the Assyrians saw their empire as being the part of the world overseen and administered by Ashur through his human agents. In their ideology, the outer realm outside of Assyria was characterized by chaos and the people there were uncivilized, with unfamiliar cultural practices and strange languages. The mere existence of the "outer realm" was regarded as a threat to the cosmic order within Assyria and as such, it was the king's duty to expand the realm of Ashur and incorporate these strange lands, converting chaos to civilization. Texts describing the coronation of Middle and Neo-Assyrian kings at times include Ashur commanding the king to "broaden the land of Ashur" or "extend the land at his feet". As such, expansion was cast as a moral and necessary duty. Because the rule and actions of the Assyrian king were seen as divinely sanctioned, resistance to Assyrian sovereignty in times of war was regarded to be resistance against divine will, which deserved punishment. Peoples and polities who revolted against Assyria were seen as criminals against the divine world order. Since Ashur was the king of the gods, all other gods were subjected to him and thus the people who followed those gods should be subjected to the representative of Ashur, the Assyrian king. The kings also had religious and judicial duties. Kings were responsible for performing various rituals in support of the cult of Ashur and the Assyrian priesthood. They were expected, together with the Assyrian people, to provide offerings to not only Ashur but also all the other gods. From the time of Ashur-resh-ishi I onward, the religious and cultic duties of the king were pushed somewhat into the background, though they were still prominently mentioned in accounts of building and restoring temples. Assyrian titles and epithets in inscriptions from then on generally emphasized the kings as powerful warriors. Developing from their role in the Old Assyrian period, the Middle and Neo-Assyrian kings were the supreme judicial authority in the empire, though they generally appear to have been less concerned with their role as judges than their predecessors in the Old Assyrian period were. The kings were expected to ensure the welfare and prosperity of the Assyria and its people, indicated by multiple inscriptions referring to the kings as "shepherds" (re’û). Capital cities No word for the idea of a capital city existed in Akkadian, the nearest being the idea of a "city of kingship", i.e. an administrative center used by the king, but there are several examples of kingdoms having multiple "cities of kingship". Due to Assyria growing out of the Assur city-state of the Old Assyrian period, and due to the city's religious importance, Assur was the administrative center of Assyria through most of its history. Though the royal administration at times moved elsewhere, the ideological status of Assur was never fully superseded and it remained a ceremonial center in the empire even when it was governed from elsewhere. The transfer of the royal seat of power to other cities was ideologically possible since the king was Ashur's representative on Earth. The king, like the deity embodied Assyria itself, and so the capital of Assyria was in a sense wherever the king happened to have his residence. The first transfer of administrative power away from Assur occurred under Tukulti-Ninurta I, who 1233 BC inaugurated Kar-Tukulti-Ninurta as capital. Tukulti-Ninurta I's foundation of a new capital was perhaps inspired by developments in Babylonia in the south, where the Kassite dynasty had transferred the administration from the long-established city of Babylon to the newly constructed city of Dur-Kurigalzu, also named after a king. It seems that Tukulti-Ninurta I intended to go further than the Kassites and also establish Kar-Tukulti-Ninurta as the new Assyrian cult center. The city was however not maintained as capital after Tukulti-Ninurta I's death, with subsequent kings once more ruling from Assur. The Neo-Assyrian Empire underwent several different capitals. There is some evidence that Tukulti-Ninurta II (890–884 BC), perhaps inspired by his predecessor of the same name, made unfulfilled plans to transfer the capital to a city called Nemid Tukulti-Ninurta, either a completely new city or a new name applied to Nineveh, which by this point already rivalled Assur in scale and political importance. The capital was transferred under Tukulti-Ninurta II's son Ashurnasirpal II to Nimrud in 879 BC. An architectural detail separating Nimrud and the other Neo-Assyrian capitals from Assur is that they were designed in a way that emphasized royal power: the royal palaces in Assur were smaller than the temples but the situation was reversed in the new capitals. Sargon II transferred the capital in 706 BC to the city Dur-Sharrukin, which he built himself. Since the location of Dur-Sharrukin had no obvious practical or political merit, this move was probably an ideological statement. Immediately after Sargon II's death in 705 BC, his son Sennacherib transferred the capital to Nineveh, a far more natural seat of power. Though it was not meant as a permanent royal residence, Ashur-uballit II chose Harran as his seat of power after the fall of Nineveh in 612 BC. Harran is typically seen as the short-lived final Assyrian capital. No building projects were conducted during this time, but Harran had been long-established as a major religious center, dedicated to the god Sîn. Aristocracy and elite Because of the nature of source preservation, more information about the upper classes of ancient Assyria survives than for the lower ones. At the top of Middle and Neo-Assyrian society were members of long-established and large families called "houses". Members of this aristocracy tended to occupy the most important offices within the government and they were likely descendants of the most prominent families of the Old Assyrian period. One of the most influential offices in the Assyrian administration was the position of vizier (sukkallu). From at least the time of Shalmaneser I onward, there were grand viziers (sukkallu rabi’u), superior to the ordinary viziers, who at times governed their own lands as appointees of the kings. At least in the Middle Assyrian period, the grand viziers were typically members of the royal family and the position was at this time, as were many other offices, hereditary. The elite of the Neo-Assyrian Empire was expanded and included several different offices. The Neo-Assyrian inner elite is typically divided by modern scholars into the "magnates", a set of high-ranking offices, and the "scholars" (ummânī), tasked with advising and guiding the kings through interpreting omens. The magnates included the offices masennu (treasurer), nāgir ekalli (palace herald), rab šāqê (chief cupbearer), rab ša-rēši (chief officer/eunuch), sartinnu (chief judge), sukkallu (grand vizier) and turtanu (commander-in-chief), which at times continued to be occupied by royal family members. Some of the magnates also acted as governors of important provinces and all of them were deeply involved with the Assyrian military, controlling significant forces. They also owned large tax-free estates, scattered throughout the empire. In the late Neo-Assyrian Empire, there was a growing disconnect between the traditional Assyrian elite and the kings due to eunuchs growing unprecedently powerful. The highest offices both in the civil administration and the army began to be occupied by eunuchs with deliberately obscure and lowly origins since this ensured that they would be loyal to the king. Eunuchs were trusted since they were believed to not be able to have any dynastic aspirations of their own. From the time of Erishum I in the early Old Assyrian period onward, a yearly office-holder, a limmu official, was elected from the influential men of Assyria. The limmu official gave their name to the year, meaning that their name appeared in all administrative documents signed that year. Kings were typically the limmu officials in their first regnal years. In the Old Assyrian period, the limmu officials also held substantial executive power, though this aspect of the office had disappeared by the time of the rise of the Middle Assyrian Empire. Administration The success of Assyria was not only due to energetic kings who expanded its borders but more importantly due to its ability to efficiently incorporate and govern conquered lands. From the rise of Assyria as a territorial state at the beginning of the Middle Assyrian period onward, Assyrian territory was divided into a set of provinces or districts (pāḫutu). The total number and size of these provinces varied and changed as Assyria expanded and contracted. Every province was headed by a provincial governor (bel pāḫete, bēl pīhāti or šaknu) who was responsible for handling local order, public safety and economy. Governors also stored and distributed the goods produced in their province, which were inspected and collected by royal representatives once a year. Through these inspections, the central government could keep track of current stocks and production throughout the country. Governors had to pay both taxes and offer gifts to the god Ashur, though such gifts were usually small and mainly symbolic. The channeling of taxes and gifts were not only a method of collecting profit but also served to connect the elite of the entire empire to the Assyrian heartland. In the Neo-Assyrian period, an extensive hierarchy within the provincial administration is attested. At the bottom of this hierarchy were lower officials, such as village managers (rab ālāni) who oversaw one or more villages, collecting taxes in the form of labor and goods and keeping the administration informed of the conditions of their settlements, and corvée officers (ša bēt-kūdini) who kept tallies on the labor performed by forced laborers and the remaining time owed. Individual cities had their own administrations, headed by mayors (ḫazi’ānu), responsible for the local economy and production. Some regions of the Assyrian Empire were not incorporated into the provincial system but were still subjected to the rule of the Assyrian kings. Such vassal states could be ruled indirectly through allowing established local lines of kings to continue ruling in exchange for tribute or through the Assyrian kings appointing their own vassal rulers. Through the ilku system, the Assyrian kings could also grant arable lands to individuals in exchange for goods and military service. To overcome the challenges of governing a large empire, the Neo-Assyrian Empire developed a sophisticated state communication system, which included various innovative techniques and relay stations. Per estimates by Karen Radner, an official message sent in the Neo-Assyrian period from the western border province Quwê to the Assyrian heartland, a distance of 700 kilometers (430 miles) over a stretch of lands featuring many rivers without any bridges, could take less than five days to arrive. Such communication speed was unprecedented before the rise of the Neo-Assyrian Empire and was not surpassed in the Middle East until the telegraph was introduced by the Ottoman Empire in 1865, nearly two and a half thousand years after the Neo-Assyrian Empire's fall. Military The Assyrian army was throughout its history mostly composed of levies, mobilized only when they were needed (such as in the time of campaigns). Through regulations, obligations and sophisticated government systems, large amounts of soldiers could be recruited and mobilized already in the early Middle Assyrian period. A small central standing army unit was established in the Neo-Assyrian Empire, dubbed the kiṣir šarri ("king's unit"). Some professional (though not standing) troops are also attested in the Middle Assyrian period, dubbed ḫurādu or ṣābū ḫurādātu, though what their role was is not clear due to the scarcity of sources. Perhaps this category included archers and charioteers, who needed more extensive training than normal foot soldiers. The Assyrian army developed and evolved over time. In the Middle Assyrian period, foot soldiers were divided into the sạ bū ša kakkē ("weapon troops") and the sạ bū ša arâtē ("shield-bearing troops") but surviving records are not detailed enough to determine what the differences were. It is possible that the sạ bū ša kakkē included ranged troops, such as slingers (ṣābū ša ušpe) and archers (ṣābū ša qalte). The chariots in the army composed a unit of their own. Based on surviving depictions, chariots were crewed by two soldiers: an archer who commanded the chariot (māru damqu) and a driver (ša mugerre). Chariots first entered extensive military use under Tiglath-Pileser I in the 12th–11th centuries BC and were in the later Neo-Assyrian period gradually phased out in favor of cavalry (ša petḫalle). In the Middle Assyrian period, cavalry was mainly used for escorting or message deliveries. Under the Neo-Assyrian Empire, important new developments in the military were the large-scale introduction of cavalry, the adoption of iron for armor and weapons, and the development of new and innovative siege warfare techniques. At the height of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, the Assyrian army was the strongest army yet assembled in world history. The number of soldiers in the Neo-Assyrian army was likely several hundred thousand. The Neo-Assyrian army was subdivided into kiṣru, composed of perhaps 1,000 soldiers, most of whom would have been infantry soldiers (zūk, zukkû or raksūte). The infantry was divided into three types: light, medium and heavy, with varying weapons, level of armor and responsibilities. While on campaign, the Assyrian army made heavy use of both interpreters/translators (targumannu) and guides (rādi kibsi), both probably being drawn from foreigners resettled in Assyra. Population and society Population and social standing Populace The majority of the population of ancient Assyria were farmers who worked land owned by their families. Old Assyrian society was divided into two main groups: slaves (subrum) and free citizens, referred to as awīlum ("men") or DUMU Aššur ("sons of Ashur"). Among the free citizens there was also a division into rabi ("big") and ṣaher ("small") members of the city assembly. Assyrian society grew more complex and hierarchical over time. In the Middle Assyrian Empire, there were several groups among the lower classes, the highest of which were the free men (a’ılū), who like the upper classes could receive land in exchange for performing duties for the government, but who could not live on these lands since they were comparably small. Below the free men were the unfree men (šiluhlu̮). The unfree men had given up their freedom and entered the services of others on their own accord, and were in turn provided with clothes and rations. Many of them probably originated as foreigners. Though similar to slavery, it was possible for an unfree person to regain their freedom by providing a replacement and they were during their service considered the property of the government rather than their employers. Other lower classes of the Middle Assyrian period included the ālāyû ("village residents"), ālik ilke (people recruited through the ilku system) and the hupšu, though what these designations meant in terms of social standing and living standards is not known. The Middle Assyrian structure of society by and large endured through the subsequent Neo-Assyrian period. Below the higher classes of Neo-Assyrian society were free citizens, semi-free laborers and slaves. It was possible through steady service to the Assyrian state bureaucracy for a family to move up the social ladder; in some cases stellar work conducted by a single individual enhanced the status of their family for generations to come. In many cases, Assyrian family groups, or "clans", formed large population groups within the empire referred to as tribes. Such tribes lived together in villages and other settlements near or adjacent to their agricultural lands. Slavery was an intrinsic part of nearly every society in the ancient Near East. There were two main types of slaves in ancient Assyria: chattel slaves, primarily foreigners who were kidnapped or who were spoils of war, and debt slaves, formerly free men and women who had been unable to pay off their debts. In some cases, Assyrian children were seized by authorities due to the debts of their parents and sold off into slavery when their parents were unable to pay. Children born to slave women automatically became slaves themselves, unless some other arrangement had been agreed to. Though Old Babylonian texts frequently mention the geographical and ethnic origin of slaves, there is only a single known such reference in Old Assyrian texts (whereas there are many describing slaves in a general sense), a slave girl explicitly being referred to as Subaraean, indicating that ethnicity was not seen as very important in terms of slavery. The surviving evidence suggests that the number of slaves in Assyria never reached a large share of the population. In the Akkadian language, several terms were used for slaves, commonly wardum, though this term could confusingly also be used for (free) official servants, retainers and followers, soldiers and subjects of the king. Because many individuals designated as wardum in Assyrian texts are described as handling property and carrying out administrative tasks on behalf of their masters, many may have in actuality been free servants and not slaves in the common meaning of the term. A number of wardum are however also recorded as being bought and sold. Status of women The main evidence concerning the lives of ordinary women in ancient Assyria is in administrative documents and law codes. There was no legal distinction between men and women in the Old Assyrian period and they had more or less the same rights in society. Since several letters written by women are known from the Old Assyrian period, it is evident that women were free to learn how to read and write. Both men and women paid the same fines, could inherit property, participated in trade, bought, owned, and sold houses and slaves, made their own last wills, and were allowed to divorce their partners. Records of Old Assyrian marriages confirm that the dowry to the bride belonged to her, not the husband, and it was inherited by her children after her death. Although they were equal legally, men and women in the Old Assyrian period were raised and socialized differently and had different social expectations and obligations. Typically, girls were raised by their mothers, taught to spin, weave, and help with daily tasks and boys were taught trades by masters, later often following their fathers on trade expeditions. Sometimes the eldest daughter of a family was consecrated as a priestess. She was not allowed to marry and became economically independent. Wives were expected to provide their husbands with garments and food. Although marriages were typically monogamous, husbands were allowed to buy a female slave in order to produce an heir if his wife was infertile. The wife was allowed to choose that slave and the slave never gained the status of a second wife. Husbands who were away on long trading journeys were allowed to take a second wife in one of the trading colonies, although with strict rules that must be followed: the second wife was not allowed to accompany him back to Assur and both wives had to be provided with a home to live in, food, and wood. The status of women decreased in the Middle Assyrian period, as can be gathered from laws concerning them among the Middle Assyrian Laws. Among these laws were punishments for various crimes, often sexual or marital ones. Although they did not deprive women of all their rights and they were not significantly different from other ancient Near Eastern laws of their time, the Middle Assyrian Laws effectively made women second-class citizens. However, it is not clear how strongly these laws were enforced. These laws gave men the right to punish their wives as they wished. Among the harshest punishments written into these laws, for a crime not even committed by the woman, was that a raped woman would be forcibly married to her rapist. These laws also specified that certain women were obliged to wear veils while out on the street, marital status being the determining factor. Some women, such as slave women and ḫarımtū women, were prohibited from wearing veils and others, such as certain priestesses, were only allowed to wear veils if they were married. Not all laws were suppressive against women; women whose husbands died or were taken prisoner in war, and who did not have any sons or relatives to support them, were guaranteed support from the government. The ḫarımtū women have historically been believed to have been prostitutes, but today, are interpreted as women with an independent social existence, i.e. not tied to a husband, father, or institution. Although most ḫarımtū appear to have been poor, there were noteworthy exceptions. The term appears with negative connotations in several texts. Their mere existence makes it clear that it was possible for women to live independent lives, despite their lesser social standing during that period. During the Neo-Assyrian period that followed, royal and upper-class women experienced increased influence. Women attached to the Neo-Assyrian royal court sent and received letters, were independently wealthy, and could buy and own lands of their own. The queens of the Neo-Assyrian Empire are better attested historically than queens of preceding periods of the culture. Under the Sargonid dynasty, they were granted their own military units, sometimes they are known to have partaken alongside other units in military campaigns. Among the most influential women of the Neo-Assyrian period were Shammuramat, queen of Shamshi-Adad V (824–811 BC), who in the reign of her son Adad-nirari III (811–783 BC) might have been regent and participated in military campaigns. Another is Naqi'a, who influenced politics in the reigns of Sennacherib, Esarhaddon, and Ashurbanipal. Economy In the Old Assyrian period, a major portion of Assur's population was involved in the city's international trade. As can be gathered from hiring contracts and other records, the trade involved people of many different occupations, including porters, guides, donkey drivers, agents, traders, bakers and bankers. Because of the extensive cuneiform records known from the period, details of the trade are relatively well-known. It has been estimated that just in the period 1950–1836 BC, twenty-five tons of Anatolian silver was transported to Assur, and that approximately one hundred tons of tin and 100,000 textiles were transported to Anatolia in return. The Assyrians also sold livestock, processed goods and reed products. In many cases, the materials sold by Assyrian colonists came from far-away places; the textiles sold by Assyrians in Anatolia were imported from southern Mesopotamia and the tin came from the east in the Zagros Mountains. After international trade declined in the 19th century BC, the Assyrian economy became increasingly oriented toward the state. In the Neo-Assyrian period, the wealth generated through private investments was dwarfed by the wealth of the state, which was by far the largest employer in the empire and had a monopoly on agriculture, manufacturing and exploitation of minerals. The imperial economy advantaged mainly the elite, since it was structured in a way that ensured that surplus wealth flowed to the government and was then used for the maintenance of the state throughout the empire. Though all means of production were owned by the state, there also continued to be a vibrant private economic sector within the empire, with property rights of individuals ensured by the government. Personal identity and continuity Ethnicity and culture are largely based in self-perception and self-designation. A distinct Assyrian identity seems to have formed already in the Old Assyrian period, when distinctly Assyrian burial practices, foods and dress codes are attested and Assyrian documents appear to consider the inhabitants of Assur to be a distinct cultural group. A wider Assyrian identity appears to have spread across northern Mesopotamia under the Middle Assyrian Empire, since later writings concerning the reconquests of the early Neo-Assyrian kings refer to some of their wars as liberating the Assyrian people of the cities they reconquered. Surviving evidence suggests that the ancient Assyrians had a relatively open definition of what it meant to be Assyrian. Modern ideas such as a person's ethnic background, or the Roman idea of legal citizenship, do not appear to have been reflected in ancient Assyria. Although Assyrian accounts and artwork of warfare frequently describe and depict foreign enemies, they are not depicted with different physical features, but rather with different clothing and equipment. Assyrian accounts describe enemies as barbaric only in terms of their behavior, as lacking correct religious practices, and as doing wrongdoings against Assyria. All things considered, there does not appear to have been any well-developed concepts of ethnicity or race in ancient Assyria. What mattered for a person to be seen by others as Assyrian was mainly fulfillment of obligations (such as military service), being affiliated with the Assyrian Empire politically and maintaining loyalty to the Assyrian king. One of the inscriptions that attest to this view, as well as royal Assyrian policies enacted to encourage assimilation and cultural mixture, is Sargon II's account of the construction of Dur-Sharrukin. One of the passages of the inscription reads: Although the text clearly differentiates the new settlers from those that had been "born Assyrians", the aim of Sargon's policy was also clearly to transform the new settlers into Assyrians through appointing supervisors and guides to teach them. Though the expansion of the Assyrian Empire, in combination with resettlements and deportations, changed the ethno-cultural make-up of the Assyrian heartland, there is no evidence to suggest that the more ancient Assyrian inhabitants of the land ever disappeared or became restricted to a small elite, nor that the ethnic and cultural identity of the new settlers was anything other than "Assyrian" after one or two generations. Although the use of the term "Assyrian" by the modern Assyrian people has historically been the target of misunderstanding and controversy, both politically and academically, Assyrian continuity is generally scholarly accepted based on both historical and genetic evidence in the sense that the modern Assyrians are regarded to be descendants of the population of the ancient Assyrian Empire. Though the ancient Akkadian language and cuneiform script did not survive for long in Assyria after the empire was destroyed in 609 BC, Assyrian culture clearly did; the old Assyrian religion continued to be practised at Assur until the 3rd century AD, and at other sites for centuries thereafter, gradually losing ground to Christianity. At Mardin, believers in the old religion are known from as late as the 18th century. Individuals with names harkening back to ancient Mesopotamia are also attested at Assur until it was sacked for the last time in AD 240 and at other sites as late as the 13th century. Though many foreign states ruled over Assyria in the millennia following the empire's fall, there is no evidence of any large scale influx of immigrants that replaced the original population, which instead continued to make up a significant portion of the region's people until the Mongol and Timurid massacres in the late 14th century. In pre-modern Syriac-language (the type of Aramaic used in Christian Mesopotamian writings) sources, the typical self-designations used are ʾārāmāyā ("Aramean") and suryāyā, with the term ʾāthorāyā ("Assyrian") rarely being used as a self-designation. The terms Assyria (ʾāthor) and Assyrian (ʾāthorāyā) were however used in several senses in pre-modern times; most notably being used for the ancient Assyrians and for the land surrounding Nineveh (and for the city of Mosul, built next to Nineveh's ruins). In Syriac translations of the Bible, the term ʾāthor is also used to refer to the ancient Assyrian Empire. In the sense of a citizen of Mosul, the designation ʾāthorāyā were used for some individuals in the pre-modern period. The reluctance of Christians to use ʾāthorāyā as a self-designation could perhaps be explained by the Assyrians described in the Bible being prominent enemies of Israel; the term ʾāthorāyā was sometimes employed in Syriac writings as a term for enemies of Christians. In this context, the term was sometimes applied to the Persians of the Sasanian Empire; the 4th-century Syriac writer Ephrem the Syrian for instance referred to the Sasanian Empire as "filthy ʾāthor, mother of corruption". In a similar fashion, the term was also sometimes applied to the later Muslim rulers. The self-designation suryāyā, suryāyē or sūrōyē, sometimes translated as "Syrian", is believed to be derived from the Akkadian term assūrāyu ("Assyrian"), which was sometimes even in ancient times rendered in the shorter form sūrāyu. Some medieval Syriac Christian documents used āsūrāyē and sūrāyē, rather than āthōrāyē, also for the ancient Assyrians. Medieval and modern Armenian sources also connected assūrāyu and suryāyā, consistently referring to the Aramaic-speaking Christians of Mesopotamia and Syria as Asori. Despite the complex issue of self-designations, pre-modern Syriac-language sources at times identified positively with the ancient Assyrians and drew connections between the ancient empire and themselves. Most prominently, ancient Assyrian kings and figures long appeared in local folklore and literary tradition and claims of descent from ancient Assyrian royalty were forwarded both for figures in folklore and by actual living high-ranking members of society in northern Mesopotamia. Visits by missionaries from various western churches to the Assyrian heartland in the 18th century likely contributed to the Assyrian people more strongly relating their self-designation and identity to ancient Assyria; in the context of interactions with westerners who connected them to the ancient Assyrians, and due to an increasing number of atrocities and massacres directed against them, the Assyrian people experienced a cultural "awakening" or "renaissance" toward the end of the 19th century, which led to the development of a national ideology more strongly rooted in their descent from ancient Assyria and a re-adoption of self-designations such as ʾāthorāyā and ʾāsurāyā. Today, sūryōyō or sūrāyā are the predominant self-designations used by Assyrians in their native language, though they are typically translated as "Assyrian" rather than "Syrian". Culture Languages Akkadian The ancient Assyrians primarily spoke and wrote the Assyrian language, a Semitic language (i.e. related to modern Hebrew and Arabic) closely related to Babylonian, spoken in southern Mesopotamia. Both Assyrian and Babylonian are generally regarded by modern scholars to be dialects of the Akkadian language. This is a modern convention since contemporary ancient authors considered Assyrian and Babylonian to be two separate languages. Only Babylonian was referred to as akkadûm, with Assyrian being referred to as aššurû or aššurāyu. Though both were written with cuneiform script, the signs look quite different and can be distinguished relatively easily. Given the vast timespan covered by ancient Assyria, the Assyrian language developed and evolved over time. Modern scholars broadly categorize it into three different periods, roughly (though far from precisely) corresponding to the periods used to divide Assyrian history: the Old Assyrian language (2000–1500 BC), Middle Assyrian language (1500–1000 BC) and Neo-Assyrian language (1000–500 BC). Because the record of Assyrian tablets and documents is still somewhat spotty, many of the stages of the language remain poorly known and documented. The signs used in Old Assyrian texts are for the most part less complex than those used during the succeeding Middle and Neo-Assyrian periods and they were fewer in number, amounting to no more than 150–200 unique signs, most of which were syllabic signs (representing syllables). Due to the limited number of signs used, Old Assyrian is relatively easier to decipher for modern researchers than later forms of the language, though the limited number of signs also means that there are in cases several possible alternative phonetic values and readings. This means that while it is easy to decipher the signs, many researchers remain uncomfortable with the language itself. Though it was a more archaic variant of the later Assyrian language, Old Assyrian also contains several words that are not attested in later periods, some being peculiar early forms of words and others being names for commercial terms or various textile and food products from Anatolia. In the Middle and Neo-Assyrian empires, the later versions of the Assyrian language were not the only versions of Akkadian used. Though Assyrian was typically used in letters, legal documents, administrative documents, and as a vernacular, Standard Babylonian was also used in an official capacity. Standard Babylonian was a highly codified version of ancient Babylonian, as used around 1500 BC, and was used as a language of high culture, for nearly all scholarly documents, literature, poetry and royal inscriptions. The culture of the Assyrian elite was strongly influenced by Babylonia in the south; in a vein similar to how Greek civilization was respected in, and influenced, ancient Rome, the Assyrians had much respect for Babylon and its ancient culture. Because of the multilingual nature of the vast empire, many loan words are attested as entering the Assyrian language during the Neo-Assyrian period. The number of surviving documents written in cuneiform grow considerably fewer in the late reign of Ashurbanipal, which suggests that the language was declining since it is probably attributable to an increased use of Aramaic, often written on perishable materials such as leather scrolls or papyrus. The ancient Assyrian language did not disappear completely until around the end of the 6th century BC, well into the subsequent post-imperial period. Aramaic and other languages Because the Assyrians never imposed their language on foreign peoples whose lands they conquered outside of the Assyrian heartland, there were no mechanisms in place to stop the spread of languages other than Akkadian. Beginning with the migrations of Arameans into Assyrian territory during the Middle Assyrian period, this lack of linguistic policies facilitated the spread of the Aramaic language. As the most widely spoken and mutually understandable of the Semitic languages (the language group containing many of the languages spoken through the empire), Aramaic grew in importance throughout the Neo-Assyrian period and increasingly replaced the Neo-Assyrian language even within the Assyrian heartland itself. From the 9th century BC onward, Aramaic became the de facto lingua franca of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, with Neo-Assyrian and other forms of Akkadian becoming relegated to a language of the political elite. From the time of Shalmaneser III, in the 9th century BC, Aramaic was used in state-related contexts alongside Akkadian and by the time of Tiglath-Pileser III, the kings employed both Akkadian and Aramaic-language royal scribes, confirming the rise of Aramaic to a position of an official language used by the imperial administration. During the time after the fall of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, the old Assyrian language was completely abandoned in Mesopotamia in favor of Aramaic. By 500 BC, Akkadian was probably no longer a spoken language. Modern Assyrian people refer to their language as "Assyrian" (Sūrayt or Sūreth). Though it has little in common with the Assyrian dialect of the Akkadian language, it is a modern version of the ancient Mesopotamian Aramaic. The language retains some influence of ancient Akkadian, particularly in the form of loanwords. Modern Assyrian varieties of Aramaic are often referred to by scholars as Neo-Aramaic or Neo-Syriac. As a liturgical language, many Assyrians also speak Syriac, a codified version of classical Aramaic as spoken at Edessa during the Christianization of Assyria. Another language sometimes used in ancient Assyria as a language of scholarship and culture, though only in written form, was the ancient Sumerian language. At the height of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, various other local languages were also spoken within the imperial borders, though none achieved the same level of official recognition as Aramaic. Architecture There are three surviving forms of primary evidence for the architecture of ancient Assyria. The most important form is the surviving buildings themselves, found through archaeological excavations, but important evidence can also be gathered from both contemporary documentation, such as letters and administrative documents that describe buildings that might not have been preserved, as well as documentation by later kings concerning the building works of previous kings. Assyrian buildings and construction works were almost always constructed out of mudbrick. Limestone was also used, though primarily only in works such as aqueducts and river walls, exposed to running water, and defensive fortifications. In order to support large buildings, they were often built on top of foundation platforms or on mud brick foundations. Floors were typically made of rammed earth, covered in important rooms with carpets or reed mats. Floors in locations that were exposed to the elements, such as outside on terraces or in courtyards, were paved with stone slabs or backed bricks. Roofs, particularly in larger rooms, were supported through the use of wooden beams. The ancient Assyrians accomplished several technologically complex construction projects, including constructions of whole new capital cities, which indicates sophisticated technical knowledge. Though in large part following previous Mesopotamian architecture, there are several characteristic features of ancient Assyrian architecture. Some examples of features of ancient Assyrian architecture include stepped merlons, vaulted roofs, and palaces to a large degree often being made up of sets of self-contained suites. Art A relatively large number of statues and figurines have been recovered from the ruins of temples in Assur dating to the Early Assyrian period. Most of the surviving artwork from this time was clearly influenced by the artwork of foreign powers. For instance, a set of 87 alabaster figures of male and female worshippers from Assur before the rise of the Akkadian Empire greatly resembles Early Dynastic Sumerian figures. Because of variation in artwork elsewhere, the artwork of early Assur was also highly variable depending on the time period, ranging from highly stylized to highly naturalistic. Among the most unique finds from the Early period is the head of a woman of which her eyes, eyebrows, and elaborate hair covering were originally inlaid. This head is typical of the art style of the Akkadian period, with an overall naturalistic style, smooth and soft curves and a full mouth. Another unique art piece from the early period is an ivory figurine of a nude woman, and fragments of at least five additional similar figurines. The ivory used might have come from Indian elephants, which would indicate trade between early Assur and the early tribes and states of Iran. Among other artwork known from the early period are a handful of large stone statues of rulers (governors and foreign kings), figures of animals, and stone statues of naked women. The artwork known from the Old Assyrian period, other than a few objects such as a partial stone statue perhaps depicting Erishum I, is largely limited to seals and impressions of seals on cuneiform documents. Royal seals from the Puzur-Ashur dynasty of kings, prior to the rise of Shamshi-Adad I, are very similar to the seals of the kings of the Third Dynasty of Ur. In the Middle Assyrian period, from Ashur-uballit I onward, seals looked quite different and appear to emphasize royal power, rather than the theological and cosmic sources of the king's right to rule. Among non-royal seals of the Middle Assyrian period a wide assortment of different motifs are known, including both religious scenes and peaceful scenes of animals and trees. From the time of Tukulti-Ninurta I onward, seals also sometimes featured contests and struggles between humans, various animals, and mythological creatures. Several other new artistic innovations were also made in the Middle Assyrian period. In the temple dedicated to Ishtar in Assur, four cult pedestals (or "altars") from the time of Tukulti-Ninurta I have been discovered. These altars were decorated with various motifs, common inclusions being the king (sometimes multiple times) and protective divine figures and standards. One of the pedestals preserves along the lower step of its base a relief image which is the earliest known narrative image in Assyrian art history. This relief, which is not very well-preserved, appears to depict rows of prisoners before the Assyrian king. The earliest known Assyrian wall paintings are also from the time of Tukulti-Ninurta I, from his palace in Kar-Tukulti-Ninurta. Motifs included plant-based patterns (rosettes and palmettes), trees and bird-headed genies. The colors used to paint the walls included black, red, blue, and white. An unusual limestone statue of a nude woman is known from Nineveh from the time of Ashur-bel-kala (1074–1056 BC). An entirely new type of monument introduced in the 11th century BC were obelisks; four-sided stone stelae decorated all around with both images and text. Obelisks saw continued use until at least the 9th century BC. Compared to other periods, a larger amount of artwork survives from the Neo-Assyrian period, particularly monumental art made under the patronage of the kings. The most well-known form of Neo-Assyrian monumental art are wall reliefs, carved stone artwork that lined the internal and external walls of temples and palaces. Another well-known form of Neo-Assyrian art are colossi, often human-headed lions or bulls (lamassu), that were placed at the gates of temples, palaces and cities. The earliest known examples of both wall reliefs and colossi are from the reign of Ashurnasirpal II, who might have been inspired by the Hittite monumental art that he saw on his campaigns to the Mediterranean. Wall paintings such as those made under Tukulti-Ninurta I in the Middle Assyrian period also continued to be used, sometimes to supplement wall reliefs and sometimes instead of them. Interior walls could be decorated by covering the mudbrick used in construction with painted mud plaster and exterior walls were at times decorated with glazed and painted tiles or bricks. The most extensive known surviving sets of wall reliefs are from the reign of Sennacherib. In terms of Neo-Assyrian artwork, modern scholars have paid particular attention to the reliefs produced under Ashurbanipal, which have been described as possessing a distinct "epic quality" unlike the art under his predecessors. Scholarship and literature Ancient Assyrian literature drew heavily on Babylonian literary traditions. Both the Old and Middle Assyrian periods are limited in terms of surviving literary texts. The most important surviving Old Assyrian literary work is Sargon, Lord of Lies, a text found in a well-preserved version on a cuneiform tablet from Kültepe. Once thought to have been a parody, the tale is a first-person narrative of the reign of Sargon of Akkad, the founder of the Akkadian Empire. The text follows Sargon as he gains strength from the god Adad, swears by Ishtar, the "lady of combat", and speaks with the gods. Surviving Middle Assyrian literature is only slightly more diverse. A distinct Assyrian scholarship tradition, though still drawing on Babylonian tradition, is conventionally placed as beginning around the time of the beginning of the Middle Assyrian period. The rising status of scholarship at this time might be connected to the kings beginning to regard amassing knowledge as a way to strengthen their power. Known Middle Assyrian works include the Tukulti-Ninurta Epic (a narrative of the reign of Tukulti-Ninurta I and his exploits), fragments of other royal epics, The Hunter (a short martial poem) and some royal hymns. The clear majority of surviving ancient Assyrian literature is from the Neo-Assyrian period. The kings of the Neo-Assyrian Empire began to see preserving knowledge as one of their responsibilities, and not, as previous kings had, a responsibility of private individuals and temples. This development might have originated with the kings no longer viewing the divination performed by their diviners as enough and wished to have access to the relevant texts themselves. The office of chief scholar is first attested in the reign of the Neo-Assyrian king Tukulti-Ninurta II. Most of the surviving ancient Assyrian literature comes from the Neo-Assyrian Library of Ashurbanipal, which included more than 30,000 documents. Libraries were built in the Neo-Assyrian period to preserve knowledge of the past and maintain scribal culture. Neo-Assyrian texts fall into a wide array of genres, including divinatory texts, divination reports, treatments for the sick (either medical or magical), ritual texts, incantations, prayers and hymns, school texts and literary texts. An innovation of the Neo-Assyrian period were the annals, a genre of texts recording the events of the reigns of a king, particularly military exploits. Annals were disseminated throughout the empire and probably served propagandistic purposes, supporting the legitimacy of the king's rule. Various purely literary works, previously aligned by scholars with propaganda, are known from the Neo-Assyrian period. Such works include, among others, the Underworld Vision of an Assyrian Crown Prince, the Sin of Sargon and the Marduk Ordeal. In addition to their own works, the Assyrians copied and preserved earlier Mesopotamian literature. The inclusion of texts such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Enûma Eliš (the Babylonian creation myth), Erra, the Myth of Etana and the Epic of Anzu in the Library of Ashurbanipal is the primary reason for how such texts have survived to the present day. Religion Ancient Assyrian religion Knowledge of the ancient polytheistic Assyrian religion, referred to as "Ashurism" by some modern Assyrians, is mostly limited to state cults given that little can be ascertained of the personal religious beliefs and practices of the common people of ancient Assyria. The Assyrians worshipped the same pantheon of gods as the Babylonians in southern Mesopotamia. The chief Assyrian deity was the national deity Ashur. Though the deity and the ancient capital city are commonly distinguished by modern historians through calling the god Ashur and the city Assur, both were inscribed in the exact same way in ancient times (Aššur). In documents from the preceding Old Assyrian period, the city and god are often not clearly differentiated, which suggests that Ashur originated sometime in the Early Assyrian period as a deified personification of the city itself. Below Ashur, the other Mesopotamian deities were organized in a hierarchy, with each having their own assigned roles (the sun-god Shamash was for instance regarded as a god of justice and Ishtar was seen as a goddess of love and war) and their own primary seats of worship (Ninurta was for instance primarily worshipped at Nimrud and Ishtar primarily at Arbela). Quintessentially Babylonian deities such as Enlil, Marduk, and Nabu were worshipped in Assyria just as much as in Babylonia, and several traditionally Babylonian rituals, such as the akitu festival, were borrowed in the north. Ashur's role as the chief deity was flexible and changed with the changing culture and politics of the Assyrians themselves. In the Old Assyrian period, Ashur was mainly regarded as a god of death and revival, related to agriculture. Under the Middle and Neo-Assyrian Empire, Ashur's role was expanded and thoroughly altered. Possibly originating as a reaction to the period of suzerainty under the Mittani kingdom, Middle Assyrian theology presented Ashur as a god of war, who bestowed the Assyrian kings not only with divine legitimacy, something retained from the Old Assyrian period, but also commanded the kings to enlarge Assyria ("the land of Ashur") with Ashur's "just scepter", i.e. expand the Assyrian Empire through military conquest. This militarization of Ashur might also have derived from the Amorite conqueror Shamshi-Adad I equating Ashur with the southern Enlil during his rule over northern Mesopotamia in the 18th and 17th centuries BC. In the Middle Assyrian period, Ashur is attested with the title "king of the gods", a role previous civilizations in both northern and southern Mesopotamia ascribed to Enlil. The development of equating Ashur with Enlil, or at least transferring Enlil's role to Ashur, was paralleled in Babylon, where the previously unimportant local god Marduk was elevated in the reign of Hammurabi (18th century BC) to the head of the pantheon, modelled after Enlil. Assyrian religion was centered in temples, monumental structures that included a central shrine which housed the cult statue of the temple's god, and several subordinate chapels with space for statues of other deities. Temples were typically self-contained communities; they had their own economic resources, chiefly in the form of land holdings, and their own hierarchically organized personnel. In later times, temples became increasingly dependent on royal benefits, in the shape of specific taxes, offerings and donations of booty and tribute. The head of a temple was titled as the "chief administrator" and was responsible to the Assyrian king since the king was regarded to be Ashur's representative in the mortal world. Records from temples showcase that divination in the form of astrology and extispicy (studying the entrails of dead animals) were important parts of the Assyrian religion since they were believed to be means through which deities communicated with the mortal world. Unlike many other ancient empires, the Neo-Assyrian Empire did at its height not impose its culture and religion on conquered regions; there were no significant temples built for Ashur outside of northern Mesopotamia. In the post-imperial period, after the fall of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, the Assyrians continued to venerate Ashur and the rest of the pantheon, though without the Assyrian state, religious beliefs in many parts of the Assyrian heartland diverged and developed in different directions. From the time of Seleucid rule over the region (4th to 2nd century BC) onward, there was a strong influence of the ancient Greek religion, with many Greek deities becoming syncretized with Mesopotamian deities. There was also some influence of Judaism, given that the kings of Adiabene, a vassal kingdom covering much of the old Assyrian heartland, converted to Judaism in the 1st century AD. In the 1st century BC onward, as a frontier region between the Roman and the Parthian empires, Assyria was likely highly religiously complex and diverse. Under Parthian rule, both old and new gods were worshipped at Assur. As late as the time of the city's second destruction in the 3rd century AD, the most important deity was still Ashur, known during this time as Assor or Asor. Worship of Ashur during this time was carried out in the same way as it had been in ancient times, per a cultic calendar effectively identical to that used under the Neo-Assyrian Empire 800 years prior. The ancient Mesopotamian religion persisted in some places for centuries after the end of the post-imperial period, such as at Harran until at least the 10th century (the "Sabians" of Harran) and at Mardin until as late as the 18th century (the Shamsīyah). Christianity The Church of the East developed early in Christian history. Though tradition holds that Christianity was first spread to Mesopotamia by Thomas the Apostle, the exact timespan when the Assyrians were first Christianized is unknown. The city of Arbela was an important early Christian center; according to the later Chronicle of Arbela, Arbela became the seat of a bishop already in AD 100, but the reliability of this document is questioned among scholars. It is however known that both Arbela and Kirkuk later served as important Christian centers in the Sasanian and later Islamic periods. According to some traditions, Christianity took hold in Assyria when Saint Thaddeus of Edessa converted King Abgar V of Osroene in the mid-1st century AD. From the 3rd century AD onward, it is clear that Christianity was becoming the major religion of the region, with Christ replacing the old Mesopotamian deities. Assyrians had by this time already intellectually contributed to Christian thought; in the 1st century AD, the Christian Assyrian writer Tatian composed the influential Diatessaron, a synoptic rendition of the gospels. Though Christianity is today an intrinsic part of Assyrian identity, Assyrian Christians have over the centuries splintered into a number of different Christian denominations. Though the prominent Assyrian Church of the East, the followers of which have often been termed "Nestorians", continues to exist, other prominent eastern churches include the Chaldean Catholic Church, which split off in the 16th century, the Syriac Orthodox Church, the Syriac Catholic Church, and the Ancient Church of the East, which branched off from the Assyrian Church of the East in 1968. Though these churches have been distinct for centuries, they still follow much of the same liturgical, spiritual and theological foundation. There are also Assyrian followers of various denominations of Protestantism, chiefly due to missions by American missionaries of the Presbyterian Church. Because the Assyrian Church of the East remains dismissed as "Nestorian" and heretical by many other branches of Christianity, it has not been admitted into the Middle East Council of Churches and it does not take part in the Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue Between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church. This does not mean that efforts to approach ecumenism have not been undertaken. In 1994, Pope John Paul II and Patriarch Dinkha IV signed the Common Christological Declaration Between the Catholic Church and the Assyrian Church of the East, with some further efforts also having been made in the years since. Historically, the main obstacle in the way of ecumenism has been the ancient text Liturgy of Addai and Mari, used in the Assyrian churches, wherein the anaphora does not contain the Words of Institution, seen as indispensable by the Catholic Church. This obstacle was removed in 2001, when the Catholic Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith determined that the text could be considered valid in Catholicism as well, despite the absence of the words. Some efforts have also been made to approach reunification of the Assyrian and Chaldean churches. In 1996, Dinkha IV and Patriarch Raphael I Bidawid of the Chaldean Church signed a list of common proposals to move toward unity, approved by synods of both churches in 1997. See also Ancient Near East Chronology of the ancient Near East History of Mesopotamia Geography of Mesopotamia Music of Mesopotamia List of Mesopotamian dynasties Beth Nahrain Beth Garmai History of the Middle East History of Iraq Assyrian nationalism List of Assyrian settlements List of Assyrian tribes Assyrian cuisine Notes References Bibliography Web sources External links Ancient Levant Ancient Mesopotamia Ancient Near East Bronze Age countries in Asia Iron Age countries in Asia 9th century BC 8th century BC 7th century BC States and territories established in the 3rd millennium BC States and territories disestablished in the 7th century BC 7th-century BC disestablishments Eastern Mediterranean Former empires

2086

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abijah

Abijah

Abijah ( ) is a Biblical Hebrew unisex name which means "my Father is Yah". The Hebrew form also occurs in the Bible. Old Testament characters Women Abijah, who married King Ahaz of Judah. She is also called Abi. Her father's name was Zechariah; she was the mother of King Hezekiah A wife of Hezron, one of the grandchildren of Judah Men Abijah of Judah, also known as Abijam (, , "My Father is Yam [Sea]"), who was son of Rehoboam and succeeded him on the throne of Judah A son of Becher, the son of Benjamin The second son of Samuel. His conduct, along with that of his brother, as a judge in Beersheba, to which office his father had appointed him, led to popular discontent, and ultimately provoked the people to demand a monarchy. A descendant of Eleazar, the son of Aaron, a chief of the eighth of the twenty-four orders into which the priesthood was divided by David and an ancestor of Zechariah, the priest who was the father of John the Baptist. The order of Abijah is listed with the priests and Levites who returned with Zerubbabel son of Shealtiel and with Joshua. A son of Jeroboam, the first king of Israel. On account of his severe illness when a youth, his father sent his wife to consult the prophet Ahijah regarding his recovery. The prophet, though blind with old age, knew the wife of Jeroboam as soon as she approached, and under a divine impulse he announced to her that inasmuch as in Abijah alone of all the house of Jeroboam there was found "some good thing toward the Lord", he only would come to his grave in peace. As his mother crossed the threshold of the door on her return, the youth died, and "all Israel mourned for him". According to The Jewish Encyclopedia, the good that he did "Rabbinical Literature:The passage, I Kings, xiv. 13, in which there is a reference to "some good thing [found in him] toward the Lord God of Israel," is interpreted as an allusion to Abijah's courageous and pious act in removing the sentinels placed by his father on the frontier between Israel and Judah to prevent pilgrimages to Jerusalem. Some assert that he himself undertook a pilgrimage." This name (possibly) appeared on the Gezer calendar, a Paleo-Hebrew inscription dating to the 9th or 10th century BC, making it one of the earliest if not the earliest Yahwistic theophoric names outside the Bible. Russian name The variant used in the Russian language is "" (), with "" or "" (), being older forms. Included into various, often handwritten, church calendars throughout the 17th–19th centuries, it was omitted from the official Synodal Menologium at the end of the 19th century. In 1924–1930, the name (as "", a form of "") was included into various Soviet calendars, which included the new and often artificially created names promoting the new Soviet realities and encouraging the break with the tradition of using the names in the Synodal Menologia. In Russian it is only used as a female name. Diminutives of this name include "" () and "" (). References Notes Sources Н. А. Петровский (N. A. Petrovsky). "Словарь русских личных имён" (Dictionary of Russian First Names). ООО Издательство "АСТ". Москва, 2005. А. В. Суперанская (A. V. Superanskaya). "Словарь русских имён" (Dictionary of Russian Names). Издательство Эксмо. Москва, 2005. Feminine given names Masculine given names 8th-century BC women Set index articles on Hebrew Bible people Women in the Hebrew Bible Samuel

2087

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ark

Ark

Ark or ARK may refer to: Biblical narratives and religion Hebrew word teva Noah's Ark, a massive vessel said to have been built to save the world's animals from a flood Ark of bulrushes, the boat of the infant Moses Hebrew aron Ark of the Covenant, chest for the tablets of the Ten Commandments Torah ark, a cabinet used to store a synagogue's Torah scrolls Businesses and organizations Ark (charity), UK Ark (toy company), a former company Ark Invest, American asset management firm ARK Music Factory, a record label, Los Angeles, California, US The Ark, a weekly newspaper in Tiburon, California ARK Theatre Company in Los Angeles, California, US Media, arts and entertainment Fiction Works of fiction The Ark (Doctor Who), a 1966 Doctor Who serial Ark, a 1970 apocalyptic short film directed by Rolf Forsberg Ark II, a 1976 children's science fiction television series ARK (1996), a book of poetry by Ronald Johnson Ark (film), a 2005 animated science fiction film directed by Subro Adonis "The Ark" (Stargate Atlantis), a 2007 episode of Stargate Atlantis Ark (novel), a 2009 novel by Stephen Baxter Ark (web series), a 2010 science fiction series by Trey Stokes The Ark (film), a 2015 BBC TV film Ark: Survival Evolved, a 2017 video game The Ark (TV series), a 2023 SyFy television series Ark: The Animated Series, a 2024 television series Fictional story elements Ark (Gravitation), character in Gravitation Ark (Noon Universe), a planet Ark (Transformers), a spacecraft The Ark (Halo), control station ARK, space colony in video games Sonic Adventure 2 and Shadow the Hedgehog Ark, character in video game Terranigma The Ark, space stations housing humanity in The 100 (TV series) The Ark, a floating city and the main setting of the game Brink The Ark, fictional English pop rock band from Alice Oseman's third novel I Was Born For This The Ark of Truth, an Alteran device in Stargate: The Ark of Truth Music Bands Ark (British band), a 1985 melodic rock band Ark (Bangladeshi band), a 1991 Bangladeshi rock band The Ark (Swedish band), a 1991 Swedish glam-rock band Ark (Norwegian band), a 1999 progressive metal band The Ark, a 2015 South Korean girl group with members including Euna Kim and Lee Su-ji Albums Ark (The Animals album), 1983, by The Original Animals The Ark (album), 1991 album by Frank Zappa The Ark (EP), 1996, by Swedish band The Ark Ark (L'Arc-en-Ciel album), 1999, by Japanese rock band L'Arc-en-Ciel Here Comes the Indian, 2003 album by Animal Collective, reissued in 2020 as Ark Ark (Brendan Perry album), 2010, by Brendan Perry Ark (We Are the Ocean album), 2015, by We Are the Ocean Ark (In Hearts Wake album), 2017, by In Hearts Wake Songs "The Ark", 2008, by Dr. Dog from Fate Poetry "Ark", 2019 poem by Simon Armitage to commemorate launch of RRS Sir David Attenborough Video games Ark: Survival Evolved, a 2017 action adventure survival video game Places Buildings The Ark (fortress), 5th century AD, Bukhara, Uzbekistan The Ark (Duke University), an 1898 dance studio The Ark (folk venue), since 1965, Ann Arbor, Michigan, US The Ark (Prince Edward Island), a 1975 bioshelter in Canada The Ark (Tadcaster), historic building in England The Ark, London, a 1989 office block in Hammersmith, London, UK Ark Encounter, a 2016 creationist theme park, Kentucky, US Inhabited places Ark., an alternative abbreviation for Arkansas, United States Ark, Iran (disambiguation) Ark, Missouri, a ghost town in the United States Ark, Virginia, in Gloucester County, Virginia, United States Autonomous Region of Krajina, in Bosnia and Herzegovina Other places The Ark (Antarctica), a rock summit in Antarctica Transportation Ark (river boat), a temporary boat used in river transport in eastern North America , a prestigious ship name in the British Royal Navy, often the name of the Fleet Flagship, has been given to five ships The Ark (ship), a ship used in founding the Province of Maryland The Ark, a ship used as a Scottish Marine Station, now the basis of the University Marine Biological Station Millport The Ark, an unfinished sculpture in the form of a functional ship created by artist Kea Tawana between 1982 and 1988 in Newark, New Jersey Interstellar ark, a conceptual multi-lifetime space vehicle Ararat International Airlines, by ICAO airline designator Arusha Airport, by IATA airport code Arkadelphia (Amtrak station), by Amtrak station code Armoured Ramp Carrier, a specialist armoured vehicle Technology ARK (Archival Resource Key), a type of URL that serves as a persistent identifier for scientific and cultural objects Ark Linux, a software distribution founded by Bernhard Rosenkränzer Ark (search engine), a people search engine Ark (software), an archiving tool Hongmeng OS, an Android-compatible mobile operating system by Huawei Archaeological Recording Kit, a database and GIS web-based recording system for archaeology Other uses Ark Prize of the Free Word, a literary prize ARK (Atomska Ratna Komanda), a nuclear command bunker near Konjic, Bosnia and Herzegovina Netherlands Court of Audit (Algemene Rekenkamer) ARK (Access Research Knowledge), Northern Ireland Social and Political Archive See also Chicken ark, a mobile shelter for domestic chickens Knowledge ark, a collection of knowledge preserved in such a way that future generations would have access to said knowledge if current means of access were lost Arc (disambiguation) ARC (disambiguation) Arch (disambiguation) Arkana (disambiguation) ARQ (disambiguation) ARRC (disambiguation)

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphasia

Aphasia

In aphasia (sometimes called dysphasia), a person may be unable to comprehend or unable to formulate language because of damage to specific brain regions. The major causes are stroke and head trauma; prevalence is hard to determine but aphasia due to stroke is estimated to be 0.1–0.4% in the Global North. Aphasia can also be the result of brain tumors, epilepsy, autoimmune neurological diseases, brain infections, or neurodegenerative diseases (such as dementias). To be diagnosed with aphasia, a person's language must be significantly impaired in one (or more) of the four aspects of communication. Alternatively, in the case of progressive aphasia, it must have significantly declined over a short period of time. The four aspects of communication are spoken language production and comprehension and written language production and comprehension; impairments in any of these aspects can impact on functional communication. The difficulties of people with aphasia can range from occasional trouble finding words, to losing the ability to speak, read, or write; intelligence, however, is unaffected. Expressive language and receptive language can both be affected as well. Aphasia also affects visual language such as sign language. In contrast, the use of formulaic expressions in everyday communication is often preserved. For example, while a person with aphasia, particularly expressive aphasia (Broca's aphasia), may not be able to ask a loved one when their birthday is, they may still be able to sing "Happy Birthday". One prevalent deficit in all aphasias is anomia, which is a difficulty in finding the correct word. With aphasia, one or more modes of communication in the brain have been damaged and are therefore functioning incorrectly. Aphasia is not caused by damage to the brain resulting in motor or sensory deficits, thus producing abnormal speech – that is, aphasia is not related to the mechanics of speech, but rather the individual's language cognition. However, it is possible for a person can have both problems, e.g. in the case of a hemorrhage damaging a large area of the brain. An individual's language abilities incorporate the socially shared set of rules, as well as the thought processes that go behind communication (as it affects both verbal and nonverbal language). Aphasia is not a result of other peripheral motor or sensory difficulty, such as paralysis affecting the speech muscles, or a general hearing impairment. Neurodevelopmental forms of auditory processing disorder are differentiable from aphasia in that aphasia is by definition caused by acquired brain injury, but acquired epileptic aphasia has been viewed as a form of APD. Signs and symptoms People with aphasia may experience any of the following behaviors due to an acquired brain injury, although some of these symptoms may be due to related or concomitant problems, such as dysarthria or apraxia, and not primarily due to aphasia. Aphasia symptoms can vary based on the location of damage in the brain. Signs and symptoms may or may not be present in individuals with aphasia and may vary in severity and level of disruption to communication. Often those with aphasia may have a difficulty with naming objects, so they might use words such as thing or point at the objects. When asked to name a pencil they may say it is a "thing used to write". Inability to comprehend language Inability to pronounce, not due to muscle paralysis or weakness Inability to form words Inability to recall words (anomia) Poor enunciation Excessive creation and use of personal neologisms Inability to repeat a phrase Persistent repetition of one syllable, word, or phrase (stereotypies, recurrent/recurring utterances/speech automatism) also known as perseveration. Paraphasia (substituting letters, syllables or words) Agrammatism (inability to speak in a grammatically correct fashion) speaking in incomplete sentences Inability to read Inability to write Limited verbal output Difficulty in naming Speech disorder Speaking gibberish Inability to follow or understand simple requests Related behaviors Given the previously stated signs and symptoms, the following behaviors are often seen in people with aphasia as a result of attempted compensation for incurred speech and language deficits: Self-repairs: Further disruptions in fluent speech as a result of mis-attempts to repair erred speech production. Struggle in non-fluent aphasias: A severe increase in expelled effort to speak after a life where talking and communicating was an ability that came so easily can cause visible frustration. Preserved and automatic language: A behavior in which some language or language sequences that were used so frequently prior to onset are still produced with more ease than other language post onset. Subcortical Subcortical aphasias characteristics and symptoms depend upon the site and size of subcortical lesion. Possible sites of lesions include the thalamus, internal capsule, and basal ganglia. Cognitive deficits While aphasia has traditionally been described in terms of language deficits, there is increasing evidence that many people with aphasia commonly experience co-occurring non-linguistic cognitive deficits in areas such as attention, memory, executive functions and learning. By some accounts, cognitive deficits, such as attention and working memory constitute the underlying cause of language impairment in people with aphasia. Others suggest that cognitive deficits often co-occur but are comparable to cognitive deficits in stroke patients without aphasia and reflect general brain dysfunction following injury. Whilst it has been shown that cognitive neural networks support language reorganisation after stroke, The degree to which deficits in attention and other cognitive domains underlie language deficits in aphasia is still unclear. In particular, people with aphasia often demonstrate short-term and working memory deficits. These deficits can occur in both the verbal domain as well as the visuospatial domain. Furthermore, these deficits are often associated with performance on language specific tasks such as naming, lexical processing, and sentence comprehension, and discourse production. Other studies have found that most, but not all people with aphasia demonstrate performance deficits on tasks of attention, and their performance on these tasks correlate with language performance and cognitive ability in other domains. Even patients with mild aphasia, who score near the ceiling on tests of language often demonstrate slower response times and interference effects in non-verbal attention abilities. In addition to deficits in short-term memory, working memory, and attention, people with aphasia can also demonstrate deficits in executive function. For instance, people with aphasia may demonstrate deficits in initiation, planning, self-monitoring, and cognitive flexibility. Other studies have found that people with aphasia demonstrate reduced speed and efficiency during completion executive function assessments. Regardless of their role in the underlying nature of aphasia, cognitive deficits have a clear role in the study and rehabilitation of aphasia. For instance, the severity of cognitive deficits in people with aphasia has been associated with lower quality of life, even more so than the severity of language deficits. Furthermore, cognitive deficits may influence the learning process of rehabilitation and language treatment outcomes in aphasia. Non-linguistic cognitive deficits have also been the target of interventions directed at improving language ability, though outcomes are not definitive. While some studies have demonstrated language improvement secondary to cognitively-focused treatment, others have found little evidence that the treatment of cognitive deficits in people with aphasia has an influence on language outcomes. One important caveat in the measurement and treatment of cognitive deficits in people with aphasia is the degree to which assessments of cognition rely on language abilities for successful performance. Most studies have attempted to circumvent this challenge by utilizing non-verbal cognitive assessments to evaluate cognitive ability in people with aphasia. However, the degree to which these tasks are truly "non-verbal" and not mediated by language is unclear. For instance, Wall et al. found that language and non-linguistic performance was related, except when non-linguistic performance was measured by "real life" cognitive tasks. Causes Aphasia is most often caused by stroke, where about a quarter of patients who experience an acute stroke develop aphasia. However, any disease or damage to the parts of the brain that control language can cause aphasia. Some of these can include brain tumors, traumatic brain injury, epilepsy and progressive neurological disorders. In rare cases, aphasia may also result from herpesviral encephalitis. The herpes simplex virus affects the frontal and temporal lobes, subcortical structures, and the hippocampal tissue, which can trigger aphasia. In acute disorders, such as head injury or stroke, aphasia usually develops quickly. When caused by brain tumor, infection, or dementia, it develops more slowly. Substantial damage to tissue anywhere within the region shown in blue (on the figure in the infobox above) can potentially result in aphasia. Aphasia can also sometimes be caused by damage to subcortical structures deep within the left hemisphere, including the thalamus, the internal and external capsules, and the caudate nucleus of the basal ganglia. The area and extent of brain damage or atrophy will determine the type of aphasia and its symptoms. A very small number of people can experience aphasia after damage to the right hemisphere only. It has been suggested that these individuals may have had an unusual brain organization prior to their illness or injury, with perhaps greater overall reliance on the right hemisphere for language skills than in the general population. Primary progressive aphasia (PPA), while its name can be misleading, is actually a form of dementia that has some symptoms closely related to several forms of aphasia. It is characterized by a gradual loss in language functioning while other cognitive domains are mostly preserved, such as memory and personality. PPA usually initiates with sudden word-finding difficulties in an individual and progresses to a reduced ability to formulate grammatically correct sentences (syntax) and impaired comprehension. The etiology of PPA is not due to a stroke, traumatic brain injury (TBI), or infectious disease; it is still uncertain what initiates the onset of PPA in those affected by it. Epilepsy can also include transient aphasia as a prodromal or episodic symptom. However, the repeated seizure activity within language regions may also lead to chronic, and progressive aphasia. Aphasia is also listed as a rare side-effect of the fentanyl patch, an opioid used to control chronic pain. Diagnosis Neuroimaging methods Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) are the most common neuroimaging tools used in identifying aphasia and studying the extent of damage in the loss of language abilities. This is done by doing MRI scans and locating the extent of lesions or damage within brain tissue, particularly within areas of the left frontal and temporal regions- where a lot of language related areas lie. In fMRI studies a language related task is often completed and then the BOLD image is analyzed. If there are lower than normal BOLD responses that indicate a lessening of blood flow to the affected area and can show quantitatively that the cognitive task is not being completed. There are limitations to the use of fMRI in aphasic patients particularly. Because a high percentage of aphasic patients develop it because of stroke there can be infarct present which is the total loss of blood flow. This can be due to the thinning of blood vessels or the complete blockage of it. This is important in fMRI as it relies on the BOLD response (the oxygen levels of the blood vessels), and this can create a false hyporesponse upon fMRI study. Due to the limitations of fMRI such as a lower spatial resolution, it can show that some areas of the brain are not active during a task when they in reality are. Additionally, with stroke being the cause of many cases of aphasia the extent of damage to brain tissue can be difficult to quantify therefore the effects of stroke brain damage on the functionality of the patient can vary. Neural substrates of aphasia subtypes MRI is often used to predict or confirm the subtype of aphasia present. Researchers compared 3 subtypes of aphasia- nonfluent-variant primary progressive aphasia (nfPPA), logopenic-variant primary progressive aphasia (lvPPA), and semantic-variant primary progressive aphasia (svPPA), with primary progressive aphasia (PPA) and Alzheimer's disease. This was done by analyzing the MRIs of patients with each of the subsets of PPA. Images which compare subtypes of aphasia as well as for finding the extent of lesions are generated by overlapping images of different participant's brains (if applicable) and isolating areas of lesions or damage using third-party software such as MRIcron. MRI has also been used to study the relationship between the type of aphasia developed and the age of the person with aphasia. It was found that patients with fluent aphasia are on average older than people with non-fluent aphasia. It was also found that among patients with lesions confined to the anterior portion of the brain an unexpected portion of them presented with fluent aphasia and were remarkably older than those with non-fluent aphasia. This effect was not found when the posterior portion of the brain was studied. Associated conditions In a study on the features associated with different disease trajectories in Alzheimer's disease (AD)-related primary progressive aphasia (PPA), it was found that metabolic patterns via PET SPM analysis can help predict progression of total loss of speech and functional autonomy in AD and PPA patients. This was done by comparing an MRI or CT image of the brain and presence of a radioactive biomarker with normal levels in patients without Alzheimer's Disease. Apraxia is another disorder often correlated with aphasia. This is due to a subset of apraxia which affects speech. Specifically, this subset affects the movement of muscles associated with speech production, apraxia and aphasia are often correlated due to the proximity of neural substrates associated with each of the disorders. Researchers concluded that there were 2 areas of lesion overlap between patients with apraxia and aphasia, the anterior temporal lobe and the left inferior parietal lobe. Treatment and neuroimaging Evidence for positive treatment outcomes can also be quantified using neuroimaging tools. The use of fMRI and an automatic classifier can help predict language recovery outcomes in stroke patients with 86% accuracy when coupled with age and language test scores. The stimuli tested were sentences both correct and incorrect and the subject had to press a button whenever the sentence was incorrect. The fMRI data collected focused on responses in regions of interest identified by healthy subjects.  Recovery from aphasia can also be quantified using diffusion tensor imaging. The accurate fasciculus (AF) connects the right and left superior temporal lobe, premotor regions/posterior inferior frontal gyrus. and the primary motor cortex. In a study which enrolled patients in a speech therapy program, an increase in AF fibers and volume was found in patients after 6-weeks in the program which correlated with long-term improvement in those patients. The results of the experiment are pictured in Figure 2. This implies that DTI can be used to quantify the improvement in patients after speech and language treatment programs are applied. Classification Aphasia is best thought of as a collection of different disorders, rather than a single problem. Each individual with aphasia will present with their own particular combination of language strengths and weaknesses. Consequently, it is a major challenge just to document the various difficulties that can occur in different people, let alone decide how they might best be treated. Most classifications of the aphasias tend to divide the various symptoms into broad classes. A common approach is to distinguish between the fluent aphasias (where speech remains fluent, but content may be lacking, and the person may have difficulties understanding others), and the nonfluent aphasias (where speech is very halting and effortful, and may consist of just one or two words at a time). However, no such broad-based grouping has proven fully adequate, or reliable. There is wide variation among people even within the same broad grouping, and aphasias can be highly selective. For instance, people with naming deficits (anomic aphasia) might show an inability only for naming buildings, or people, or colors. Unfortunately, assessments that characterize aphasia in these groupings have persisted. This is not helpful to people living with aphasia, and provides inaccurate descriptions of an individual pattern of difficulties. It is important to note that there are typical difficulties with speech and language that come with normal aging as well. As we age, language can become more difficult to process resulting in a slowing of verbal comprehension, reading abilities and more likely word finding difficulties. With each of these, though, unlike some aphasias, functionality within daily life remains intact. Boston classification Individuals with receptive aphasia (Wernicke's aphasia), also referred to as fluent aphasia, may speak in long sentences that have no meaning, add unnecessary words, and even create new "words" (neologisms). For example, someone with receptive aphasia may say, "delicious taco", meaning "The dog needs to go out so I will take him for a walk". They have poor auditory and reading comprehension, and fluent, but nonsensical, oral and written expression. Individuals with receptive aphasia usually have great difficulty understanding the speech of both themselves and others and are, therefore, often unaware of their mistakes. Receptive language deficits usually arise from lesions in the posterior portion of the left hemisphere at or near Wernicke's area. It is often the result of trauma to the temporal region of the brain, specifically damage to Wernicke's area. Trauma can be the result from an array of problems, however it is most commonly seen as a result of stroke Individuals with expressive aphasia (Broca's aphasia) frequently speak short, meaningful phrases that are produced with great effort. It is thus characterized as a nonfluent aphasia. Affected people often omit small words such as "is", "and", and "the". For example, a person with expressive aphasia may say, "walk dog", which could mean "I will take the dog for a walk", "you take the dog for a walk" or even "the dog walked out of the yard." Individuals with expressive aphasia are able to understand the speech of others to varying degrees. Because of this, they are often aware of their difficulties and can become easily frustrated by their speaking problems. While Broca's aphasia may appear to be solely an issue with language production, evidence suggests that it may be rooted in an inability to process syntactical information. Individuals with expressive aphasia may have a speech automatism (also called recurring or recurrent utterance). These speech automatisms can be repeated lexical speech automatisms; e.g., modalisations ('I can't..., I can't...'), expletives/swearwords, numbers ('one two, one two') or non-lexical utterances made up of repeated, legal but meaningless, consonant-vowel syllables (e.g.., /tan tan/, /bi bi/). In severe cases, the individual may be able to utter only the same speech automatism each time they attempt speech. Individuals with anomic aphasia have difficulty with naming. People with this aphasia may have difficulties naming certain words, linked by their grammatical type (e.g., difficulty naming verbs and not nouns) or by their semantic category (e.g., difficulty naming words relating to photography but nothing else) or a more general naming difficulty. People tend to produce grammatic, yet empty, speech. Auditory comprehension tends to be preserved. Anomic aphasia is the aphasial presentation of tumors in the language zone; it is the aphasial presentation of Alzheimer's disease. Anomic aphasia is the mildest form of aphasia, indicating a likely possibility for better recovery. Individuals with transcortical sensory aphasia, in principle the most general and potentially among the most complex forms of aphasia, may have similar deficits as in receptive aphasia, but their repetition ability may remain intact. Global aphasia is considered a severe impairment in many language aspects since it impacts expressive and receptive language, reading, and writing. Despite these many deficits, there is evidence that has shown individuals benefited from speech language therapy. Even though individuals with global aphasia will not become competent speakers, listeners, writers, or readers, goals can be created to improve the individual's quality of life. Individuals with global aphasia usually respond well to treatment that includes personally relevant information, which is also important to consider for therapy. Individuals with conduction aphasia have deficits in the connections between the speech-comprehension and speech-production areas. This might be caused by damage to the arcuate fasciculus, the structure that transmits information between Wernicke's area and Broca's area. Similar symptoms, however, can be present after damage to the insula or to the auditory cortex. Auditory comprehension is near normal, and oral expression is fluent with occasional paraphasic errors. Paraphasic errors include phonemic/literal or semantic/verbal. Repetition ability is poor. Conduction and transcortical aphasias are caused by damage to the white matter tracts. These aphasias spare the cortex of the language centers but instead create a disconnection between them. Conduction aphasia is caused by damage to the arcuate fasciculus. The arcuate fasciculus is a white matter tract that connects Broca's and Wernicke's areas. People with conduction aphasia typically have good language comprehension, but poor speech repetition and mild difficulty with word retrieval and speech production. People with conduction aphasia are typically aware of their errors. Two forms of conduction aphasia have been described: reproduction conduction aphasia (repetition of a single relatively unfamiliar multisyllabic word) and repetition conduction aphasia (repetition of unconnected short familiar words. Transcortical aphasias include transcortical motor aphasia, transcortical sensory aphasia, and mixed transcortical aphasia. People with transcortical motor aphasia typically have intact comprehension and awareness of their errors, but poor word finding and speech production. People with transcortical sensory and mixed transcortical aphasia have poor comprehension and unawareness of their errors. Despite poor comprehension and more severe deficits in some transcortical aphasias, small studies have indicated that full recovery is possible for all types of transcortical aphasia. Classical-localizationist approaches Localizationist approaches aim to classify the aphasias according to their major presenting characteristics and the regions of the brain that most probably gave rise to them. Inspired by the early work of nineteenth-century neurologists Paul Broca and Carl Wernicke, these approaches identify two major subtypes of aphasia and several more minor subtypes: Expressive aphasia (also known as "motor aphasia" or "Broca's aphasia"), which is characterized by halted, fragmented, effortful speech, but well-preserved comprehension relative to expression. Damage is typically in the anterior portion of the left hemisphere, most notably Broca's area. Individuals with Broca's aphasia often have right-sided weakness or paralysis of the arm and leg, because the left frontal lobe is also important for body movement, particularly on the right side. Receptive aphasia (also known as "sensory aphasia" or "Wernicke's aphasia"), which is characterized by fluent speech, but marked difficulties understanding words and sentences. Although fluent, the speech may lack in key substantive words (nouns, verbs, adjectives), and may contain incorrect words or even nonsense words. This subtype has been associated with damage to the posterior left temporal cortex, most notably Wernicke's area. These individuals usually have no body weakness, because their brain injury is not near the parts of the brain that control movement. Conduction aphasia, where speech remains fluent, and comprehension is preserved, but the person may have disproportionate difficulty repeating words or sentences. Damage typically involves the arcuate fasciculus and the left parietal region. Transcortical motor aphasia and transcortical sensory aphasia, which are similar to Broca's and Wernicke's aphasia respectively, but the ability to repeat words and sentences is disproportionately preserved. Recent classification schemes adopting this approach, such as the Boston-Neoclassical Model, also group these classical aphasia subtypes into two larger classes: the nonfluent aphasias (which encompasses Broca's aphasia and transcortical motor aphasia) and the fluent aphasias (which encompasses Wernicke's aphasia, conduction aphasia and transcortical sensory aphasia). These schemes also identify several further aphasia subtypes, including: anomic aphasia, which is characterized by a selective difficulty finding the names for things; and global aphasia, where both expression and comprehension of speech are severely compromised. Many localizationist approaches also recognize the existence of additional, more "pure" forms of language disorder that may affect only a single language skill. For example, in pure alexia, a person may be able to write but not read, and in pure word deafness, they may be able to produce speech and to read, but not understand speech when it is spoken to them. Cognitive neuropsychological approaches Although localizationist approaches provide a useful way of classifying the different patterns of language difficulty into broad groups, one problem is that most individuals do not fit neatly into one category or another. Another problem is that the categories, particularly the major ones such as Broca's and Wernicke's aphasia, still remain quite broad and do not meaningfully reflect a person's difficulties. Consequently, even amongst those who meet the criteria for classification into a subtype, there can be enormous variability in the types of difficulties they experience. Instead of categorizing every individual into a specific subtype, cognitive neuropsychological approaches aim to identify the key language skills or "modules" that are not functioning properly in each individual. A person could potentially have difficulty with just one module, or with a number of modules. This type of approach requires a framework or theory as to what skills/modules are needed to perform different kinds of language tasks. For example, the model of Max Coltheart identifies a module that recognizes phonemes as they are spoken, which is essential for any task involving recognition of words. Similarly, there is a module that stores phonemes that the person is planning to produce in speech, and this module is critical for any task involving the production of long words or long strings of speech. Once a theoretical framework has been established, the functioning of each module can then be assessed using a specific test or set of tests. In the clinical setting, use of this model usually involves conducting a battery of assessments, each of which tests one or a number of these modules. Once a diagnosis is reached as to the skills/modules where the most significant impairment lies, therapy can proceed to treat these skills. Progressive aphasias Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is a neurodegenerative focal dementia that can be associated with progressive illnesses or dementia, such as frontotemporal dementia / Pick Complex Motor neuron disease, Progressive supranuclear palsy, and Alzheimer's disease, which is the gradual process of progressively losing the ability to think. Gradual loss of language function occurs in the context of relatively well-preserved memory, visual processing, and personality until the advanced stages. Symptoms usually begin with word-finding problems (naming) and progress to impaired grammar (syntax) and comprehension (sentence processing and semantics). The loss of language before the loss of memory differentiates PPA from typical dementias. People with PPA may have difficulties comprehending what others are saying. They can also have difficulty trying to find the right words to make a sentence. There are three classifications of Primary Progressive Aphasia : Progressive nonfluent aphasia (PNFA), Semantic Dementia (SD), and Logopenic progressive aphasia (LPA). Progressive Jargon Aphasia is a fluent or receptive aphasia in which the person's speech is incomprehensible, but appears to make sense to them. Speech is fluent and effortless with intact syntax and grammar, but the person has problems with the selection of nouns. Either they will replace the desired word with another that sounds or looks like the original one or has some other connection or they will replace it with sounds. As such, people with jargon aphasia often use neologisms, and may perseverate if they try to replace the words they cannot find with sounds. Substitutions commonly involve picking another (actual) word starting with the same sound (e.g., clocktower – colander), picking another semantically related to the first (e.g., letter – scroll), or picking one phonetically similar to the intended one (e.g., lane – late). Deaf aphasia There have been many instances showing that there is a form of aphasia among deaf individuals. Sign languages are, after all, forms of language that have been shown to use the same areas of the brain as verbal forms of language. Mirror neurons become activated when an animal is acting in a particular way or watching another individual act in the same manner. These mirror neurons are important in giving an individual the ability to mimic movements of hands. Broca's area of speech production has been shown to contain several of these mirror neurons resulting in significant similarities of brain activity between sign language and vocal speech communication. People use facial movements to create, what other people perceive, to be faces of emotions. While combining these facial movements with speech, a more full form of language is created which enables the species to interact with a much more complex and detailed form of communication. Sign language also uses these facial movements and emotions along with the primary hand movement way of communicating. These facial movement forms of communication come from the same areas of the brain. When dealing with damages to certain areas of the brain, vocal forms of communication are in jeopardy of severe forms of aphasia. Since these same areas of the brain are being used for sign language, these same, at least very similar, forms of aphasia can show in the Deaf community. Individuals can show a form of Wernicke's aphasia with sign language and they show deficits in their abilities in being able to produce any form of expressions. Broca's aphasia shows up in some people, as well. These individuals find tremendous difficulty in being able to actually sign the linguistic concepts they are trying to express. Severity The severity of the type of aphasia varies depending on the size of the stroke. However, there is much variance between how often one type of severity occurs in certain types of aphasia. For instance, any type of aphasia can range from mild to profound. Regardless of the severity of aphasia, people can make improvements due to spontaneous recovery and treatment in the acute stages of recovery. Additionally, while most studies propose that the greatest outcomes occur in people with severe aphasia when treatment is provided in the acute stages of recovery, Robey (1998) also found that those with severe aphasia are capable of making strong language gains in the chronic stage of recovery as well. This finding implies that persons with aphasia have the potential to have functional outcomes regardless of how severe their aphasia may be. While there is no distinct pattern of the outcomes of aphasia based on severity alone, global aphasia typically makes functional language gains, but may be gradual since global aphasia affects many language areas. Prevention Aphasia is largely caused by unavoidable instances. However, some precautions can be taken to decrease risk for experiencing one of the two major causes of aphasia: stroke and traumatic brain injury (TBI). To decrease the probability of having an ischemic or hemorrhagic stroke, one should take the following precautions: Exercising regularly Eating a healthy diet, avoiding cholesterol in particular Keeping alcohol consumption low and avoiding tobacco use Controlling blood pressure Going to the emergency room immediately if you begin to experience unilateral extremity (especially leg) swelling, warmth, redness, and/or tenderness as these are symptoms of a deep vein thrombosis which can lead to a stroke To prevent aphasia due to traumatic injury, one should take precautionary measures when engaging in dangerous activities such as: Wearing a helmet when operating a bicycle, motor cycle, ATV, or any other moving vehicle that could potentially be involved in an accident Wearing a seatbelt when driving or riding in a car Wearing proper protective gear when playing contact sports, especially American football, rugby, and hockey, or refraining from such activities Minimizing anticoagulant use (including aspirin) if at all possible as they increase the risk of hemorrhage after a head injury Additionally, one should always seek medical attention after sustaining head trauma due to a fall or accident. The sooner that one receives medical attention for a traumatic brain injury, the less likely one is to experience long-term or severe effects. Management Most acute cases of aphasia recover some or most skills by participating in speech and language therapy. Recovery and improvement can continue for years after the stroke. After the onset of aphasia, there is approximately a six-month period of spontaneous recovery; during this time, the brain is attempting to recover and repair the damaged neurons. Improvement varies widely, depending on the aphasia's cause, type, and severity. Recovery also depends on the person's age, health, motivation, handedness, and educational level. Speech and language therapy that is higher intensity, higher dose or provided over a long duration of time leads to significantly better functional communication but people might be more likely to drop out of high intensity treatment (up to 15 hours per week). A total of 20–50 hours of speech and language therapy is necessary for the best recovery. The most improvement happens when 2–5 hours of therapy is provided each week over 4–5 days. Recovery is further improved when besides the therapy people practice tasks at home. Speech and language therapy is also effective if it is delivered online through video or by a family member who has been trained by a professional therapist. Recovery with therapy is also dependent on the recency of stroke and the age of the person. Receiving therapy within a month after the stroke leads to the greatest improvements. 3 or 6 months after the stroke more therapy will be needed but symptoms can still be improved. People with aphasia who are younger than 55 years are the most likely to improve but people older than 75 years can still get better with therapy. There is no one treatment proven to be effective for all types of aphasias. The reason that there is no universal treatment for aphasia is because of the nature of the disorder and the various ways it is presented. Aphasia is rarely exhibited identically, implying that treatment needs to be catered specifically to the individual. Studies have shown that, although there is no consistency on treatment methodology in literature, there is a strong indication that treatment, in general, has positive outcomes. Therapy for aphasia ranges from increasing functional communication to improving speech accuracy, depending on the person's severity, needs and support of family and friends. Group therapy allows individuals to work on their pragmatic and communication skills with other individuals with aphasia, which are skills that may not often be addressed in individual one-on-one therapy sessions. It can also help increase confidence and social skills in a comfortable setting. Evidence does not support the use of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) for improving aphasia after stroke. Moderate quality evidence does indicate naming performance improvements for nouns but not verbs using tDCS Specific treatment techniques include the following: Copy and recall therapy (CART) – repetition and recall of targeted words within therapy may strengthen orthographic representations and improve single word reading, writing, and naming Visual communication therapy (VIC) – the use of index cards with symbols to represent various components of speech Visual action therapy (VAT) – typically treats individuals with global aphasia to train the use of hand gestures for specific items Functional communication treatment (FCT) – focuses on improving activities specific to functional tasks, social interaction, and self-expression Promoting aphasic's communicative effectiveness (PACE) – a means of encouraging normal interaction between people with aphasia and clinicians. In this kind of therapy, the focus is on pragmatic communication rather than treatment itself. People are asked to communicate a given message to their therapists by means of drawing, making hand gestures or even pointing to an object Melodic intonation therapy (MIT) – aims to use the intact melodic/prosodic processing skills of the right hemisphere to help cue retrieval of words and expressive language Centeredness Theory Interview (CTI) - Uses client centered goal formation into the nature of current patient interactions as well as future / desired interactions to improve subjective well-being, cognition and communication. Other – i.e. drawing as a way of communicating, trained conversation partners Semantic feature analysis (SFA) – a type of aphasia treatment that targets word-finding deficits. It is based on the theory that neural connections can be strengthened by using related words and phrases that are similar to the target word, to eventually activate the target word in the brain. SFA can be implemented in multiple forms such as verbally, written, using picture cards, etc. The SLP provides prompting questions to the individual with aphasia in order for the person to name the picture provided. Studies show that SFA is an effective intervention for improving confrontational naming. Melodic intonation therapy is used to treat non-fluent aphasia and has proved to be effective in some cases. However, there is still no evidence from randomized controlled trials confirming the efficacy of MIT in chronic aphasia. MIT is used to help people with aphasia vocalize themselves through speech song, which is then transferred as a spoken word. Good candidates for this therapy include people who have had left hemisphere strokes, non-fluent aphasias such as Broca's, good auditory comprehension, poor repetition and articulation, and good emotional stability and memory. An alternative explanation is that the efficacy of MIT depends on neural circuits involved in the processing of rhythmicity and formulaic expressions (examples taken from the MIT manual: "I am fine," "how are you?" or "thank you"); while rhythmic features associated with melodic intonation may engage primarily left-hemisphere subcortical areas of the brain, the use of formulaic expressions is known to be supported by right-hemisphere cortical and bilateral subcortical neural networks. Systematic reviews support the effectiveness and importance of partner training. According to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), involving family with the treatment of an aphasic loved one is ideal for all involved, because while it will no doubt assist in their recovery, it will also make it easier for members of the family to learn how best to communicate with them. When a person's speech is insufficient, different kinds of augmentative and alternative communication could be considered such as alphabet boards, pictorial communication books, specialized software for computers or apps for tablets or smartphones. When addressing Wernicke's aphasia, according to Bakheit et al. (2007), the lack of awareness of the language impairments, a common characteristic of Wernicke's aphasia, may affect the rate and extent of therapy outcomes. Robey (1998) determined that at least 2 hours of treatment per week is recommended for making significant language gains. Spontaneous recovery may cause some language gains, but without speech-language therapy, the outcomes can be half as strong as those with therapy. When addressing Broca's aphasia, better outcomes occur when the person participates in therapy, and treatment is more effective than no treatment for people in the acute period. Two or more hours of therapy per week in acute and post-acute stages produced the greatest results. High-intensity therapy was most effective, and low-intensity therapy was almost equivalent to no therapy. People with global aphasia are sometimes referred to as having irreversible aphasic syndrome, often making limited gains in auditory comprehension, and recovering no functional language modality with therapy. With this said, people with global aphasia may retain gestural communication skills that may enable success when communicating with conversational partners within familiar conditions. Process-oriented treatment options are limited, and people may not become competent language users as readers, listeners, writers, or speakers no matter how extensive therapy is. However, people's daily routines and quality of life can be enhanced with reasonable and modest goals. After the first month, there is limited to no healing to language abilities of most people. There is a grim prognosis leaving 83% who were globally aphasic after the first month they will remain globally aphasic at the first year. Some people are so severely impaired that their existing process-oriented treatment approaches offer no signs of progress, and therefore cannot justify the cost of therapy. Perhaps due to the relative rareness of conduction aphasia, few studies have specifically studied the effectiveness of therapy for people with this type of aphasia. From the studies performed, results showed that therapy can help to improve specific language outcomes. One intervention that has had positive results is auditory repetition training. Kohn et al. (1990) reported that drilled auditory repetition training related to improvements in spontaneous speech, Francis et al. (2003) reported improvements in sentence comprehension, and Kalinyak-Fliszar et al. (2011) reported improvements in auditory-visual short-term memory. Individualized service delivery Intensity of treatment should be individualized based on the recency of stroke, therapy goals, and other specific characteristics such as age, size of lesion, overall health status, and motivation. Each individual reacts differently to treatment intensity and is able to tolerate treatment at different times post-stroke. Intensity of treatment after a stroke should be dependent on the person's motivation, stamina, and tolerance for therapy. Outcomes If the symptoms of aphasia last longer than two or three months after a stroke, a complete recovery is unlikely. However, it is important to note that some people continue to improve over a period of years and even decades. Improvement is a slow process that usually involves both helping the individual and family understand the nature of aphasia and learning compensatory strategies for communicating. After a traumatic brain injury (TBI) or cerebrovascular accident (CVA), the brain undergoes several healing and re-organization processes, which may result in improved language function. This is referred to as spontaneous recovery. Spontaneous recovery is the natural recovery the brain makes without treatment, and the brain begins to reorganize and change in order to recover. There are several factors that contribute to a person's chance of recovery caused by stroke, including stroke size and location. Age, sex, and education have not been found to be very predictive. There is also research pointing to damage in the left hemisphere healing more effectively than the right. Specific to aphasia, spontaneous recovery varies among affected people and may not look the same in everyone, making it difficult to predict recovery. Though some cases of Wernicke's aphasia have shown greater improvements than more mild forms of aphasia, people with Wernicke's aphasia may not reach as high a level of speech abilities as those with mild forms of aphasia. Prevalence Aphasia affects about two million people in the U.S. and 250,000 people in Great Britain. Nearly 180,000 people acquire the disorder every year in the U.S., 170,000 due to stroke. Any person of any age can develop aphasia, given that it is often caused by a traumatic injury. However, people who are middle aged and older are the most likely to acquire aphasia, as the other etiologies are more likely at older ages. For example, approximately 75% of all strokes occur in individuals over the age of 65. Strokes account for most documented cases of aphasia: 25% to 40% of people who survive a stroke develop aphasia as a result of damage to the language-processing regions of the brain. History The first recorded case of aphasia is from an Egyptian papyrus, the Edwin Smith Papyrus, which details speech problems in a person with a traumatic brain injury to the temporal lobe. During the second half of the 19th century, aphasia was a major focus for scientists and philosophers who were working in the beginning stages of the field of psychology. In medical research, speechlessness was described as an incorrect prognosis, and there was no assumption that underlying language complications existed. Broca and his colleagues were some of the first to write about aphasia, but Wernicke was the first credited to have written extensively about aphasia being a disorder that contained comprehension difficulties. Despite claims of who reported on aphasia first, it was F.J. Gall that gave the first full description of aphasia after studying wounds to the brain, as well as his observation of speech difficulties resulting from vascular lesions. A recent book on the entire history of aphasia is available (Reference: Tesak, J. & Code, C. (2008) Milestones in the History of Aphasia: Theories and Protagonists. Hove, East Sussex: Psychology Press). Etymology Aphasia is from Greek a- ("without", negative prefix) + phásis (φάσις, "speech"). The word aphasia comes from the word ἀφασία aphasia, in Ancient Greek, which means "speechlessness", derived from ἄφατος aphatos, "speechless" from ἀ- a-, "not, un" and φημί phemi, "I speak". Further research Research is currently being done using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to witness the difference in how language is processed in normal brains vs aphasic brains. This will help researchers to understand exactly what the brain must go through in order to recover from Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) and how different areas of the brain respond after such an injury. Another intriguing approach being tested is that of drug therapy. Research is in progress that will hopefully uncover whether or not certain drugs might be used in addition to speech-language therapy in order to facilitate recovery of proper language function. It's possible that the best treatment for Aphasia might involve combining drug treatment with therapy, instead of relying on one over the other. One other method being researched as a potential therapeutic combination with speech-language therapy is brain stimulation. One particular method, Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), alters brain activity in whatever area it happens to stimulate, which has recently led scientists to wonder if this shift in brain function caused by TMS might help people re-learn language. Another type of external brain stimulation is transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS), but existing research has not shown it to be useful for improving aphasia after a stroke. See also Agnosia, inability to process sensory information (e.g. inability to recognize objects) Aphasiology, study of language impairment (usually from brain damage) Apraxia of speech, difficulty connecting speech messages from the brain to the mouth Aprosodia Auditory processing disorder Lethologica Lists of language disorders My Beautiful Broken Brain, a 2014 documentary Origin of speech Notes References External links National Aphasia Association Alexia (condition) Communication disorders Language disorders Symptoms and signs: Speech and voice

2089

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aorta

Aorta

The aorta ( ; : aortas or aortae) is the main and largest artery in the human body, originating from the left ventricle of the heart, branching upwards immediately after, and extending down to the abdomen, where it splits at the aortic bifurcation into two smaller arteries (the common iliac arteries). The aorta distributes oxygenated blood to all parts of the body through the systemic circulation. Structure Sections In anatomical sources, the aorta is usually divided into sections. One way of classifying a part of the aorta is by anatomical compartment, where the thoracic aorta (or thoracic portion of the aorta) runs from the heart to the diaphragm. The aorta then continues downward as the abdominal aorta (or abdominal portion of the aorta) from the diaphragm to the aortic bifurcation. Another system divides the aorta with respect to its course and the direction of blood flow. In this system, the aorta starts as the ascending aorta, travels superiorly from the heart, and then makes a hairpin turn known as the aortic arch. Following the aortic arch, the aorta then travels inferiorly as the descending aorta. The descending aorta has two parts. The aorta begins to descend in the thoracic cavity and is consequently known as the thoracic aorta. After the aorta passes through the diaphragm, it is known as the abdominal aorta. The aorta ends by dividing into two major blood vessels, the common iliac arteries and a smaller midline vessel, the median sacral artery. Ascending aorta The ascending aorta begins at the opening of the aortic valve in the left ventricle of the heart. It runs through a common pericardial sheath with the pulmonary trunk. These two blood vessels twist around each other, causing the aorta to start out posterior to the pulmonary trunk, but end by twisting to its right and anterior side. The transition from ascending aorta to aortic arch is at the pericardial reflection on the aorta. At the root of the ascending aorta, the lumen has small pockets between the cusps of the aortic valve and the wall of the aorta, which are called the aortic sinuses or the sinuses of Valsalva. The left aortic sinus contains the origin of the left coronary artery and the right aortic sinus likewise gives rise to the right coronary artery. Together, these two arteries supply the heart. The posterior aortic sinus does not give rise to a coronary artery. For this reason the left, right and posterior aortic sinuses are also called left-coronary, right-coronary and non-coronary sinuses. Aortic arch The aortic arch loops over the left pulmonary artery and the bifurcation of the pulmonary trunk, to which it remains connected by the ligamentum arteriosum, a remnant of the fetal circulation that is obliterated a few days after birth. In addition to these blood vessels, the aortic arch crosses the left main bronchus. Between the aortic arch and the pulmonary trunk is a network of autonomic nerve fibers, the cardiac plexus or aortic plexus. The left vagus nerve, which passes anterior to the aortic arch, gives off a major branch, the recurrent laryngeal nerve, which loops under the aortic arch just lateral to the ligamentum arteriosum. It then runs back to the neck. The aortic arch has three major branches: from proximal to distal, they are the brachiocephalic trunk, the left common carotid artery, and the left subclavian artery. The brachiocephalic trunk supplies the right side of the head and neck as well as the right arm and chest wall, while the latter two together supply the left side of the same regions. The aortic arch ends, and the descending aorta begins at the level of the intervertebral disc between the fourth and fifth thoracic vertebrae. Thoracic aorta The thoracic aorta gives rise to the intercostal and subcostal arteries, as well as to the superior and inferior left bronchial arteries and variable branches to the esophagus, mediastinum, and pericardium. Its lowest pair of branches are the superior phrenic arteries, which supply the diaphragm, and the subcostal arteries for the twelfth rib. Abdominal aorta The abdominal aorta begins at the aortic hiatus of the diaphragm at the level of the twelfth thoracic vertebra. It gives rise to lumbar and musculophrenic arteries, renal and middle suprarenal arteries, and visceral arteries (the celiac trunk, the superior mesenteric artery and the inferior mesenteric artery). It ends in a bifurcation into the left and right common iliac arteries. At the point of the bifurcation, there also springs a smaller branch, the median sacral artery. Development The ascending aorta develops from the outflow tract, which initially starts as a single tube connecting the heart with the aortic arches (which will form the great arteries) in early development but is then separated into the aorta and the pulmonary trunk. The aortic arches start as five pairs of symmetrical arteries connecting the heart with the dorsal aorta, and then undergo a significant remodelling to form the final asymmetrical structure of the great arteries, with the 3rd pair of arteries contributing to the common carotids, the right 4th forming the base and middle part of the right subclavian artery and the left 4th being the central part of the aortic arch. The smooth muscle of the great arteries and the population of cells that form the aorticopulmonary septum that separates the aorta and pulmonary artery is derived from cardiac neural crest. This contribution of the neural crest to the great artery smooth muscle is unusual as most smooth muscle is derived from mesoderm. In fact the smooth muscle within the abdominal aorta is derived from mesoderm, and the coronary arteries, which arise just above the semilunar valves, possess smooth muscle of mesodermal origin. A failure of the aorticopulmonary septum to divide the great vessels results in persistent truncus arteriosus. Microanatomy The aorta is an elastic artery, and as such is quite distensible. The aorta consists of a heterogeneous mixture of smooth muscle, nerves, intimal cells, endothelial cells, fibroblast-like cells, and a complex extracellular matrix. The vascular wall is subdivided into three layers known as the tunica externa, tunica media, and tunica intima. The aorta is covered by an extensive network of tiny blood vessels called vasa vasorum, which feed the tunica externa and tunica media, the outer layers of the aorta. The aortic arch contains baroreceptors and chemoreceptors that relay information concerning blood pressure and blood pH and carbon dioxide levels to the medulla oblongata of the brain. This information along with information from baroreceptors and chemoreceptors located elsewhere is processed by the brain and the autonomic nervous system mediates appropriate homeostatic responses. Within the tunica media, smooth muscle and the extracellular matrix are quantitatively the largest components, these are arranged concentrically as musculoelastic layers (the elastic lamella) in mammals. The elastic lamella, which comprise smooth muscle and elastic matrix, can be considered as the fundamental structural unit of the aorta and consist of elastic fibers, collagens (predominately type III), proteoglycans, and glycoaminoglycans. The elastic matrix dominates the biomechanical properties of the aorta. The smooth muscle component, while contractile, does not substantially alter the diameter of the aorta, but rather serves to increase the stiffness and viscoelasticity of the aortic wall when activated. Variation Variations may occur in the location of the aorta, and the way in which arteries branch off the aorta. The aorta, normally on the left side of the body, may be found on the right in dextrocardia, in which the heart is found on the right, or situs inversus, in which the location of all organs are flipped. Variations in the branching of individual arteries may also occur. For example, the left vertebral artery may arise from the aorta, instead of the left common carotid artery. In patent ductus arteriosus, a congenital disorder, the fetal ductus arteriosus fails to close, leaving an open vessel connecting the pulmonary artery to the proximal descending aorta. Function The aorta supplies all of the systemic circulation, which means that the entire body, except for the respiratory zone of the lung, receives its blood from the aorta. Broadly speaking, branches from the ascending aorta supply the heart; branches from the aortic arch supply the head, neck, and arms; branches from the thoracic descending aorta supply the chest (excluding the heart and the respiratory zone of the lung); and branches from the abdominal aorta supply the abdomen. The pelvis and legs get their blood from the common iliac arteries. Blood flow and velocity The contraction of the heart during systole is responsible for ejection and creates a (pulse) wave that is propagated down the aorta, into the arterial tree. The wave is reflected at sites of impedance mismatching, such as bifurcations, where reflected waves rebound to return to semilunar valves and the origin of the aorta. These return waves create the dicrotic notch displayed in the aortic pressure curve during the cardiac cycle as these reflected waves push on the aortic semilunar valve. With age, the aorta stiffens such that the pulse wave is propagated faster and reflected waves return to the heart faster before the semilunar valve closes, which raises the blood pressure. The stiffness of the aorta is associated with a number of diseases and pathologies, and noninvasive measures of the pulse wave velocity are an independent indicator of hypertension. Measuring the pulse wave velocity (invasively and non-invasively) is a means of determining arterial stiffness. Maximum aortic velocity may be noted as Vmax or less commonly as AoVmax. Mean arterial pressure (MAP) is highest in the aorta, and the MAP decreases across the circulation from aorta to arteries to arterioles to capillaries to veins back to atrium. The difference between aortic and right atrial pressure accounts for blood flow in the circulation. When the left ventricle contracts to force blood into the aorta, the aorta expands. This stretching gives the potential energy that will help maintain blood pressure during diastole, as during this time the aorta contracts passively. This Windkessel effect of the great elastic arteries has important biomechanical implications. The elastic recoil helps conserve the energy from the pumping heart and smooth out the pulsatile nature created by the heart. Aortic pressure is highest at the aorta and becomes less pulsatile and lower pressure as blood vessels divide into arteries, arterioles, and capillaries such that flow is slow and smooth for gases and nutrient exchange. Clinical significance Central aortic blood pressure has frequently been shown to have greater prognostic value and to show a more accurate response to antihypertensive drugs than has peripheral blood pressure. Aortic aneurysm – mycotic, bacterial (e.g. syphilis), senile, genetic, associated with valvular heart disease Aortic coarctation – pre-ductal, post-ductal Aortic dissection Aortic stenosis Abdominal aortic aneurysm Aortitis, inflammation of the aorta that can be seen in trauma, infections, and autoimmune disease Atherosclerosis Ehlers–Danlos syndrome Marfan syndrome Trauma, such as traumatic aortic rupture, most often thoracic and distal to the left subclavian artery and often quickly fatal Transposition of the great vessels, see also dextro-Transposition of the great arteries and levo-Transposition of the great arteries Other animals All amniotes have a broadly similar arrangement to that of humans, albeit with a number of individual variations. In fish, however, there are two separate vessels referred to as aortas. The ventral aorta carries de-oxygenated blood from the heart to the gills; part of this vessel forms the ascending aorta in tetrapods (the remainder forms the pulmonary artery). A second, dorsal aorta carries oxygenated blood from the gills to the rest of the body and is homologous with the descending aorta of tetrapods. The two aortas are connected by a number of vessels, one passing through each of the gills. Amphibians also retain the fifth connecting vessel, so that the aorta has two parallel arches. History The word aorta stems from the Late Latin from Classical Greek aortē (), from aeirō, "I lift, raise" () This term was first applied by Aristotle when describing the aorta and describes accurately how it seems to be "suspended" above the heart. The function of the aorta is documented in the Talmud, where it is noted as one of three major vessels entering or leaving the heart, and where perforation is linked to death. References External links Arteries of the thorax Arteries of the abdomen Cardiac anatomy

2099

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew%20Tridgell

Andrew Tridgell

Andrew "Tridge" Tridgell (born 28 February 1967) is an Australian computer programmer. He is the author of and a contributor to the Samba file server, and co-inventor of the rsync algorithm. He has analysed complex proprietary protocols and algorithms, to allow compatible free and open source software implementations. Projects Tridgell was a major developer of the Samba software, analyzing the Server Message Block protocol used for workgroup and network file sharing by Microsoft Windows products. He developed the hierarchical memory allocator, originally as part of Samba. For his PhD dissertation, he co-developed rsync, including the rsync algorithm, a highly efficient file transfer and synchronisation tool. He was also the original author of rzip, which uses a similar algorithm to rsync. He developed spamsum, based on locality-sensitive hashing algorithms. He is the author of KnightCap, a reinforcement-learning based chess engine. Tridgell was also a leader in hacking the TiVo to make it work in Australia, which uses the PAL video format. In April 2005, Tridgell tried to produce free software (now known as SourcePuller) that interoperated with the BitKeeper source code repository. This was cited as the reason that BitMover revoked a license allowing Linux developers free use of their BitKeeper product. Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel, and Tridgell were thus involved in a public debate about the events, in which Tridgell stated that, not having bought or owned BitKeeper – and thus having never agreed to its license – he could not violate it, and was analyzing the protocol ethically, as he had done with Samba. Tridgell's involvement in the project resulted in Torvalds accusing him of playing dirty tricks with BitKeeper. Tridgell claimed his analysis started with simply telneting to a BitKeeper server and typing help. In 2011 Tridgell became involved with the software development of ArduPilot Mega, an open source Arduino-based UAV controller board, working on an entry with CanberraUAV for the UAV Challenge Outback Rescue. Academic achievements Tridgell completed a PhD at the Computer Sciences Laboratory of the Australian National University. His original doctorate work was in the area of speech recognition but was never completed. His submitted dissertation 'Efficient Algorithms for Sorting and Synchronization' was based on his work on the rsync algorithm. Awards and honours In October 2003, The Bulletin magazine judged Tridgell to be Australia's smartest Information and Communications Technology person. In July 2008, Tridgell was named "Best Interoperator" at the Google–O'Reilly Open Source Awards, for his work on Samba and rsync. Tridgell (along with Jeremy Allison and Volker Lendecke) has been called a "guru in its traditional Indian meaning" by IT writer, Sam Varghese. On 11 December 2018, Tridgell was awarded the degree of Doctor of Science (Honoris Causa) by the Australian National University, for authoring Samba, co-inventing rsync; and contributions to free and open source software. On 26 January 2020, Tridgell was awarded the Medal (OAM) of the Order of Australia in the General Division for service to Information Technology. The biographical notes for the award noted his contributions to software development and education including his work on rsync, Samba, ArduPilot, MAVProxy as well as teaching at the Australian National University. References External links Andrew Tridgell's website, Newer Personal Website Andrew Tridgell's "Junk Code" collection Efficient Algorithms for Sorting and Synchronization (PhD thesis) – (406kB PDF) Active Directory in Samba 4 'an old story' FOSS folk who make us proud Patent Defence for Free Software, January 2010 presentation transcript Australian computer programmers Free software programmers IBM employees 1967 births Living people People from the Australian Capital Territory University of Sydney alumni Australian National University alumni Geeknet People educated at Barker College Recipients of the Medal of the Order of Australia

2104

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heathenry%20in%20the%20United%20States

Heathenry in the United States

Heathenry is a modern Pagan new religious movement that has been active in the United States since at least the early 1970s. Although the term "Heathenry" is often employed to cover the entire religious movement, different Heathen groups within the United States often prefer the term "Ásatrú" or "Odinism" as self-designations. Heathenry appeared in the United States during the 1960s, at the same time as the wider emergence of modern Paganism in the United States. Among the earliest American group was the Odinist Fellowship, founded by Danish migrant Else Christensen in 1969. History Ásatrú grew steadily in the United States during the 1960s. In 1969, the Danish Odinist Else Christensen established the Odinist Fellowship from her home in Florida. Heavily influenced by Alexander Rud Mills' writings, she began publication of a magazine, The Odinist, although this focused to a greater extent on right-wing and racialist ideas than theological ones. Stephen McNallen first founded the Viking Brotherhood in the early 1970s, before creating the Ásatrú Free Assembly (AFA) in 1976, which broke up in 1986 amid widespread political disagreements after McNallen's repudiation of neo-Nazis within the group. In the 1990s, McNallen founded the Ásatrú Folk Assembly (AFA), an ethnically oriented Heathen group headquartered in California. Meanwhile, Valgard Murray and his kindred in Arizona founded the Ásatrú Alliance (AA) in the late 1980s, which shared the AFA's perspectives on race and which published the Vor Tru newsletter. In 1987, Edred Thorsson and James Chisholm founded The Troth, which was incorporated in Texas. Taking an inclusive, non-racialist view, it soon grew into an international organisation. Terminology In English usage, the genitive "of Æsir faith" is often used on its own to denote adherents (both singular and plural). This term is favored by practitioners who focus on the deities of Scandinavia, although it is problematic as many Asatruar worship deities and entities other than the Æsir, such as the Vanir, Valkyries, Elves, and Dwarves. Other practitioners term their religion Vanatrú, meaning "those who honour the Vanir" or Dísitrú, meaning "those who honour the Goddesses", depending on their particular theological emphasis. Within the community it is sometimes stated that the term Ásatrú pertains to groups which are not racially focused, while Odinism is the term preferred by racially oriented groups. However, in practice, there is no such neat division in terminology. There are notable differences of emphasis between Ásatrú as practiced in the US and in Scandinavia. According to , American Asatruar tend to prefer a more devotional form of worship and a more emotional conception of the Nordic gods than Scandinavian practitioners, reflecting the parallel tendency of highly emotional forms of Christianity prevalent in the United States. Demographics Although deeming it impossible to calculate the exact size of the Heathen community in the US, sociologist Jeffrey Kaplan estimated that, in the mid-1990s, there were around 500 active practitioners in the country, with a further thousand individuals on the periphery of the movement. He noted that the overwhelming majority of individuals in the movement were white, male, and young. Most had at least an undergraduate degree, and worked in a mix of white collar and blue collar jobs. From her experience within the community, Snook concurred that the majority of American Heathens were male, adding also that most were also white and middle-aged, but believed that there had been a growth in the proportion of Heathen women in the US since the mid-1990s. In 2003, the Pagan Census Project led by Helen A. Berger, Evan A. Leach, and Leigh S. Shaffer gained 60 responses from Heathens in the US, noting that 65% were male and 35% female, which they saw as the "opposite" of the rest of the country's Pagan community. The majority had a college education, but were generally less well educated than the wider Pagan community, with a lower median income than the wider Pagan community too. Politics and controversies Ásatrú organizations have memberships which span the entire political and spiritual spectrum. There is a history of political controversy within organized US Ásatrú, mostly surrounding the question of how to deal with such adherents as place themselves in a context of the far right and white supremacy, notably resulting in the fragmentation of the Asatru Free Assembly in 1986. Externally, political activity on the part of Ásatrú organizations has surrounded campaigns against alleged religious discrimination, such as the call for the introduction of an Ásatrú "emblem of belief" by the United States Department of Veterans Affairs to parallel the Wiccan pentacle granted to the widow of Patrick Stewart in 2006. In May 2013, the "Hammer of Thor" was added to the list of United States Department of Veterans Affairs emblems for headstones and markers. It was reported in early 2019 that a Heathenry service was held on the U.S. Navy's USS John C. Stennis Folkish Ásatrú, Universalism and racialism Historically, the main dispute between the national organizations has generally centered on the interpretation of "Nordic heritage" as either something cultural, or as something genetic or racial. In the internal discourse within American Ásatrú, this cultural/racial divide has long been known as "universalist" vs. "folkish" Ásatrú. The Troth takes the "universalist" position, claiming Ásatrú as a synonym for "Northern European Heathenry" taken to comprise "many variations, names, and practices, including Theodism, Irminism, Odinism, and Anglo-Saxon Heathenry". The Asatru Folk Assembly takes the folkish position, claiming that Ásatrú and the Germanic beliefs are ancestral in nature, and as an indigenous religion of the European Folk should only be accessed by the descendants of Europe. In the UK, Germanic Neopaganism is more commonly known as Odinism or as Heathenry. This is mostly a matter of terminology, and US Ásatrú may be equated with UK Odinism for practical purposes, as is evident in the short-lived International Asatru-Odinic Alliance of folkish Ásatrú/Odinist groups. Some groups identifying as Ásatrú have been associated with national socialist and white nationalist movements. Wotansvolk, for example, is an explicitly racial form. More recently, however, many Ásatrú groups have been taking a harder stance against these elements of their community. Declaration 127, so named for the corresponding stanza of the Hávamál: "When you see misdeeds, speak out against them, and give your enemies no frið” is a collective statement denouncing and testifying disassociation with the Asatru Folk Assembly for alleged racial and sexually-discriminatory practices and beliefs signed by over 150 Ásatrú religious organizations from over 15 different nations mainly represented on Facebook. Discrimination charges Inmates of the "Intensive Management Unit" at Washington State Penitentiary who are adherents of Ásatrú in 2001 were deprived of their Thor's Hammer medallions. In 2007, a federal judge confirmed that Ásatrú adherents in US prisons have the right to possess a Thor's Hammer pendant. An inmate sued the Virginia Department of Corrections after he was denied it while members of other religions were allowed their medallions. In the Georgacarakos v. Watts case Peter N. Georgacarakos filed a pro se civil-rights complaint in the United States District Court for the District of Colorado against 19 prison officials for "interference with the free exercise of his Ásatrú religion" and "discrimination on the basis of his being Ásatrú". See also Germanic Neopaganism Heathen holidays Neopaganism in German-speaking Europe Ásatrúarfélagið Neopaganism in the United Kingdom Heathenry in Canada Norse mythology Polytheistic reconstructionism Odinism References Footnotes Sources External links Paulas, Rick; How a Thor-Worshipping Religion Turned Racist, Vice Magazine, May 1, 2015 Ásatrú (Germanic Paganism) – ReligionFacts Asatru (Norse Heathenism) – AltReligion Ásatrú (Norse Heathenism) – Religioustolerance Jotun's Bane Kindred Ravencast – The Only Asatru Podcast – Interviews and 101 Information Theodish Belief – General information about Theodism On the development of Ásatrú in Australia see:

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansible

Ansible

An ansible is a category of fictional devices or technology capable of near-instantaneous or faster-than-light communication. It can send and receive messages to and from a corresponding device over any distance or obstacle whatsoever with no delay, even between star systems. As a name for such a device, the word "ansible" first appeared in a 1966 novel by Ursula K. Le Guin. Since that time, the term has been broadly used in the works of numerous science fiction authors, across a variety of settings and continuities. A related term is ultrawave. Coinage by Ursula Le Guin Ursula K. Le Guin coined the word "ansible" in her 1966 novel Rocannon's World. The word was a contraction of "answerable", as the device would allow its users to receive answers to their messages in a reasonable amount of time, even over interstellar distances. The ansible was the basis for creating a specific kind of interstellar civilizationone where communications between far-flung stars are instantaneous, but humans can only travel at relativistic speeds. Under these conditions, a full-fledged galactic empire is not possible, but there is a looser interstellar organization, in which several of Le Guin's protagonists are involved. Although Le Guin invented the name "ansible" for this type of device (fleshed out with specific details in her fictional works), the broader concept of instantaneous or faster-than-light communication had previously existed in science fiction. Similar communication functions were included in a device called an interocitor in the 1952 novel This Island Earth by Raymond F. Jones, and the 1955 film based on that novel. Also in the "Dirac Communicator" which first appeared in James Blish's short story "Beep" (1954) and was later expanded into the novel The Quincunx of Time (1973). Robert A. Heinlein in Time for the Stars (1958) employed instantaneous telepathic communication between identical twin pairs over interstellar distances, and like Le Guin, provided a technical explanation based on a non-Einsteinian principle of simultaneity. In Le Guin's works In her subsequent works, Le Guin continued to develop the concept of the ansible: In The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Le Guin writes that the ansible "doesn't involve radio waves, or any form of energy. The principle it works on, the constant of simultaneity, is analogous in some ways to gravity ... One point has to be fixed, on a planet of certain mass, but the other end is portable." In The Word for World Is Forest (1972), Le Guin explains that in order for communication to work with any pair of ansibles, at least one "must be on a large-mass body, the other can be anywhere in the cosmos". In The Dispossessed (1974), Le Guin tells of the development of the theory leading up to the ansible. Any ansible may be used to communicate through any other, by setting its coordinates to those of the receiving ansible. They have a limited bandwidth, which only allows for at most a few hundred characters of text to be communicated in any transaction of a dialog session, and are attached to a keyboard and small display to perform text messaging. Use by later authors Since Le Guin's conception of the ansible, the name of the device has been borrowed by numerous authors. While Le Guin's ansible was said to communicate "instantaneously", the name has also been adopted for devices capable of communication at finite speeds that are faster than light. David Langford publishes the science fiction fanzine and newsletter Ansible (magazine) Orson Scott Card's works Orson Scott Card, in his 1977 novelette and 1985 novel Ender's Game and its sequels, used the term "ansible" as an unofficial name for the Philotic Parallax Instantaneous Communicator, a machine capable of communicating across infinite distances with no time delay. In Ender's Game, Colonel Graff states that "somebody dredged the name ansible out of an old book somewhere". In an answer on the question-and-answer website Quora, Card explained why he chose to reuse the word "ansible" for an FTL communication device instead of developing a new in-universe name for one: "In an ftl universe, you have several levels. I've you can travel hyperfast, but no radio signal can outstrip your ship. Therefore you have to carry the mail with you. It's like the way things were between Europe and America before the laying of the successful transatlantic cable. But once it was laid, messages could be sent long before a ship could make the passage. That is like the ansible universe in which Ursula K. LeGuin‘s early Hainish novels. Since I needed to use exactly that rule set, why not use the word — an excellent word — which I apply in the same way we all say “robot,” an invented word that has entered the language. Thus I paid tribute to the writer from whose works I learned the word." In the universe of the Ender's Game series, the ansible's functions involved a fictional subatomic particle, the philote. The two quarks inside a pi meson can be separated by an arbitrary distance, while remaining connected by "philotic rays". This concept is similar to quantum teleportation due to entanglement; however, in reality, quark confinement prevents quarks from being separated by any observable distance. Card's version of the ansible was also featured in the video game Advent Rising, for which Card helped write the story, and in the movie Ender's Game, which was based on the book. Other writers Numerous other writers have included faster-than-light communication devices in their fictional works. Notable examples include: Christopher Rowley, in his 1986 novel Starhammer, describes the Deep Link, an instantaneous interstellar communicator. Most commonly used for messaging, it is capable of voice and video conversations as well, although the latter only at great expense. Vernor Vinge, in the 1988 short story "The Blabber" Elizabeth Moon, in the 1995 novel Winning Colors Jason Jones, in the 1995 computer game Marathon 2: Durandal L.A. Graf, in the 1996 Star Trek: Deep Space Nine novel Time's Enemy The New Jedi Order, 1999, featured enemies, the Yuuzhan Vong, use organic communication devices known as villips, which can transmit over infinite distances thanks to telepathic connections formed while being harvested in groups Philip Pullman, in the 2000 novel The Amber Spyglass, part of the His Dark Materials trilogy Neal Asher, in his Polity series of novels including Gridlinked (2001), in which the runcible, named in homage to the ansible, is an interstellar wormhole generator/teleporter Dan Simmons, in the 2003 novel Ilium Liu Cixin, in the 2008 trilogy Remembrance of Earth's Past Kim Stanley Robinson, in the 2012 novel 2312 Becky Chambers, in her Wayfarer novels, including the 2014 novel The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, and 2016 novel A Closed and Common Orbit L.J Cohen in the 2014 novel Derelict Neon Yang, in the 2017 novella Waiting on a Bright Moon Joe M. McDermott, in the 2017 novel The Fortress at the End of Time Thomas Happ, in the 2021 console and PC video game Axiom Verge 2. Oliver Helm in the 2023 novel Swimming with Dolphins See also Interstellar communication No-cloning theorem Quantum entanglement Superluminal communication Tachyon Tachyonic antitelephone References Further reading Faster-than-light communication Fictional technology

2110

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%86lfheah%20of%20Canterbury

Ælfheah of Canterbury

Ælfheah ( – 19 April 1012), more commonly known today as Alphege, was an Anglo-Saxon Bishop of Winchester, later Archbishop of Canterbury. He became an anchorite before being elected abbot of Bath Abbey. His reputation for piety and sanctity led to his promotion to the episcopate and, eventually, to his becoming archbishop. Ælfheah furthered the cult of Dunstan and also encouraged learning. He was captured by Viking raiders in 1011 during the siege of Canterbury and killed by them the following year after refusing to allow himself to be ransomed. Ælfheah was canonised as a saint in 1078. Thomas Becket, a later Archbishop of Canterbury, prayed to Ælfheah just before his murder in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170. Life Ælfheah was born around 953, supposedly in Weston on the outskirts of Bath, and became a monk early in life. He first entered the monastery of Deerhurst, but then moved to Bath, where he became an anchorite. He was noted for his piety and austerity and rose to become abbot of Bath Abbey. The 12th-century chronicler, William of Malmesbury recorded that Ælfheah was a monk and prior at Glastonbury Abbey, but this is not accepted by all historians. Indications are that Ælfheah became abbot at Bath by 982, perhaps as early as around 977. He perhaps shared authority with his predecessor Æscwig after 968. Probably due to the influence of Dunstan, the Archbishop of Canterbury (959–988), Ælfheah was elected Bishop of Winchester in 984, and was consecrated on 19 October that year. While bishop he was largely responsible for the construction of a large organ in the cathedral, audible from over a mile (1600 m) away and said to require more than 24 men to operate. He also built and enlarged the city's churches, and promoted the cult of Swithun and his predecessor, Æthelwold of Winchester. One act promoting Æthelwold's cult was the translation of Æthelwold's body to a new tomb in the cathedral at Winchester, which Ælfheah presided over on 10 September 996. Following a Viking raid in 994, a peace treaty was agreed with one of the raiders, Olaf Tryggvason. Besides receiving danegeld, Olaf converted to Christianity and undertook never to raid or fight the English again. Ælfheah may have played a part in the treaty negotiations, and it is certain that he confirmed Olaf in his new faith. In 1006, Ælfheah succeeded Ælfric as Archbishop of Canterbury, taking Swithun's head with him as a relic for the new location. He went to Rome in 1007 to receive his pallium—symbol of his status as an archbishop—from Pope John XVIII, but was robbed during his journey. While at Canterbury, he promoted the cult of Dunstan, ordering the writing of the second Life of Dunstan, which Adelard of Ghent composed between 1006 and 1011. He also introduced new practices into the liturgy, and was instrumental in the Witenagemot's recognition of Wulfsige of Sherborne as a saint in about 1012. Ælfheah sent Ælfric of Eynsham to Cerne Abbey to take charge of its monastic school. He was present at the council of May 1008 at which Wulfstan II, Archbishop of York, preached his Sermo Lupi ad Anglos (The Sermon of the Wolf to the English), castigating the English for their moral failings and blaming the latter for the tribulations afflicting the country. In 1011, the Danes again raided England, and from 8–29 September they laid siege to Canterbury. Aided by the treachery of Ælfmaer, whose life Ælfheah had once saved, the raiders succeeded in sacking the city. Ælfheah was taken prisoner and held captive for seven months. Godwine (Bishop of Rochester), Leofrun (abbess of St Mildrith's), and the king's reeve, Ælfweard were captured also, but the abbot of St Augustine's Abbey, Ælfmær, managed to escape. Canterbury Cathedral was plundered and burned by the Danes following Ælfheah's capture. Death Ælfheah refused to allow a ransom to be paid for his freedom, and as a result was killed on 19 April 1012 at Greenwich, reputedly on the site of St Alfege's Church. The account of Ælfheah's death appears in the E version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: Ælfheah was the first Archbishop of Canterbury to die a violent death. A contemporary report tells that Thorkell the Tall attempted to save Ælfheah from the mob about to kill him by offering everything he owned except for his ship, in exchange for Ælfheah's life; Thorkell's presence is not mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, however. Some sources record that the final blow, with the back of an axe, was delivered as an act of kindness by a Christian convert known as "Thrum". Ælfheah was buried in Old St Paul's Cathedral. In 1023, his body was moved by King Cnut to Canterbury, with great ceremony. Thorkell the Tall was appalled at the brutality of his fellow raiders, and switched sides to the English king Æthelred the Unready following Ælfheah's death. Veneration Pope Gregory VII canonised Ælfheah in 1078, with a feast day of 19 April. Lanfranc, the first post-Conquest archbishop, was dubious about some of the saints venerated at Canterbury. He was persuaded of Ælfheah's sanctity, but Ælfheah and Augustine of Canterbury were the only pre-conquest Anglo-Saxon archbishops kept on Canterbury's calendar of saints. Ælfheah's shrine, which had become neglected, was rebuilt and expanded in the early 12th century under Anselm of Canterbury, who was instrumental in retaining Ælfheah's name in the church calendar. After the 1174 fire in Canterbury Cathedral, Ælfheah's remains together with those of Dunstan were placed around the high altar, at which Thomas Becket is said to have commended his life into Ælfheah's care shortly before his martyrdom during the Becket controversy. The new shrine was sealed in lead, and was north of the high altar, sharing the honour with Dunstan's shrine, which was located south of the high altar. A Life of Saint Ælfheah in prose and verse was written by a Canterbury monk named Osbern, at Lanfranc's request. The prose version has survived, but the Life is very much a hagiography; many of the stories it contains have obvious Biblical parallels, making them suspect as a historical record. In the late medieval period, Ælfheah's feast day was celebrated in Scandinavia, perhaps because of the saint's connection with Cnut. Few church dedications to him are known, with most of them occurring in Kent and one each in London and Winchester; as well as St Alfege's Church in Greenwich, a nearby hospital (1931–1968) was named after him. In Kent, there are two 12th-century parish churches dedicated to St Alphege at Seasalter and Canterbury. Reputedly his body lay in these churches overnight on his way back to Canterbury Cathedral for burial. In the town of Solihull in the West Midlands, St Alphege Church is dedicated to Ælfheah dating back to approximately 1277. In 1929, a new Roman Catholic church in Bath, the Church of Our Lady & St Alphege, was designed by Giles Gilbert Scott in homage to the ancient Roman church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin, and dedicated to Ælfheah under the name of Alphege. St George the Martyr with St Alphege & St Jude stands in Borough in London. Artistic representations of Ælfheah often depict him holding a pile of stones in his chasuble, a reference to his martyrdom. Notes Citations References Further reading External links 950s births 1012 deaths Clergy from Bath, Somerset Anglo-Saxon saints Archbishops of Canterbury Bishops of Winchester Martyred Roman Catholic priests 11th-century Christian saints 11th-century Christian martyrs Incorrupt saints Year of birth uncertain 11th-century English Roman Catholic archbishops Anglican saints Canonizations by Pope Gregory VII

2113

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom%20of%20regularity

Axiom of regularity

In mathematics, the axiom of regularity (also known as the axiom of foundation) is an axiom of Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory that states that every non-empty set A contains an element that is disjoint from A. In first-order logic, the axiom reads: The axiom of regularity together with the axiom of pairing implies that no set is an element of itself, and that there is no infinite sequence (an) such that ai+1 is an element of ai for all i. With the axiom of dependent choice (which is a weakened form of the axiom of choice), this result can be reversed: if there are no such infinite sequences, then the axiom of regularity is true. Hence, in this context the axiom of regularity is equivalent to the sentence that there are no downward infinite membership chains. The axiom is the contribution of ; it was adopted in a formulation closer to the one found in contemporary textbooks by . Virtually all results in the branches of mathematics based on set theory hold even in the absence of regularity; see chapter 3 of . However, regularity makes some properties of ordinals easier to prove; and it not only allows induction to be done on well-ordered sets but also on proper classes that are well-founded relational structures such as the lexicographical ordering on Given the other axioms of Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory, the axiom of regularity is equivalent to the axiom of induction. The axiom of induction tends to be used in place of the axiom of regularity in intuitionistic theories (ones that do not accept the law of the excluded middle), where the two axioms are not equivalent. In addition to omitting the axiom of regularity, non-standard set theories have indeed postulated the existence of sets that are elements of themselves. Elementary implications of regularity No set is an element of itself Let A be a set, and apply the axiom of regularity to {A}, which is a set by the axiom of pairing. We see that there must be an element of {A} which is disjoint from {A}. Since the only element of {A} is A, it must be that A is disjoint from {A}. So, since , we cannot have A ∈ A (by the definition of disjoint). No infinite descending sequence of sets exists Suppose, to the contrary, that there is a function, f, on the natural numbers with f(n+1) an element of f(n) for each n. Define S = {f(n): n a natural number}, the range of f, which can be seen to be a set from the axiom schema of replacement. Applying the axiom of regularity to S, let B be an element of S which is disjoint from S. By the definition of S, B must be f(k) for some natural number k. However, we are given that f(k) contains f(k+1) which is also an element of S. So f(k+1) is in the intersection of f(k) and S. This contradicts the fact that they are disjoint sets. Since our supposition led to a contradiction, there must not be any such function, f. The nonexistence of a set containing itself can be seen as a special case where the sequence is infinite and constant. Notice that this argument only applies to functions f that can be represented as sets as opposed to undefinable classes. The hereditarily finite sets, Vω, satisfy the axiom of regularity (and all other axioms of ZFC except the axiom of infinity). So if one forms a non-trivial ultrapower of Vω, then it will also satisfy the axiom of regularity. The resulting model will contain elements, called non-standard natural numbers, that satisfy the definition of natural numbers in that model but are not really natural numbers. They are "fake" natural numbers which are "larger" than any actual natural number. This model will contain infinite descending sequences of elements. For example, suppose n is a non-standard natural number, then and , and so on. For any actual natural number k, . This is an unending descending sequence of elements. But this sequence is not definable in the model and thus not a set. So no contradiction to regularity can be proved. Simpler set-theoretic definition of the ordered pair The axiom of regularity enables defining the ordered pair (a,b) as {a,{a,b}}; see ordered pair for specifics. This definition eliminates one pair of braces from the canonical Kuratowski definition (a,b) = {{a},{a,b}}. Every set has an ordinal rank This was actually the original form of the axiom in von Neumann's axiomatization. Suppose x is any set. Let t be the transitive closure of {x}. Let u be the subset of t consisting of unranked sets. If u is empty, then x is ranked and we are done. Otherwise, apply the axiom of regularity to u to get an element w of u which is disjoint from u. Since w is in u, w is unranked. w is a subset of t by the definition of transitive closure. Since w is disjoint from u, every element of w is ranked. Applying the axioms of replacement and union to combine the ranks of the elements of w, we get an ordinal rank for w, to wit . This contradicts the conclusion that w is unranked. So the assumption that u was non-empty must be false and x must have rank. For every two sets, only one can be an element of the other Let X and Y be sets. Then apply the axiom of regularity to the set {X,Y} (which exists by the axiom of pairing). We see there must be an element of {X,Y} which is also disjoint from it. It must be either X or Y. By the definition of disjoint then, we must have either Y is not an element of X or vice versa. The axiom of dependent choice and no infinite descending sequence of sets implies regularity Let the non-empty set S be a counter-example to the axiom of regularity; that is, every element of S has a non-empty intersection with S. We define a binary relation R on S by , which is entire by assumption. Thus, by the axiom of dependent choice, there is some sequence (an) in S satisfying anRan+1 for all n in N. As this is an infinite descending chain, we arrive at a contradiction and so, no such S exists. Regularity and the rest of ZF(C) axioms Regularity was shown to be relatively consistent with the rest of ZF by and , meaning that if ZF without regularity is consistent, then ZF (with regularity) is also consistent. For his proof in modern notation see for instance. The axiom of regularity was also shown to be independent from the other axioms of ZF(C), assuming they are consistent. The result was announced by Paul Bernays in 1941, although he did not publish a proof until 1954. The proof involves (and led to the study of) Rieger-Bernays permutation models (or method), which were used for other proofs of independence for non-well-founded systems ( and ). Regularity and Russell's paradox Naive set theory (the axiom schema of unrestricted comprehension and the axiom of extensionality) is inconsistent due to Russell's paradox. In early formalizations of sets, mathematicians and logicians have avoided that contradiction by replacing the axiom schema of comprehension with the much weaker axiom schema of separation. However, this step alone takes one to theories of sets which are considered too weak. So some of the power of comprehension was added back via the other existence axioms of ZF set theory (pairing, union, powerset, replacement, and infinity) which may be regarded as special cases of comprehension. So far, these axioms do not seem to lead to any contradiction. Subsequently, the axiom of choice and the axiom of regularity were added to exclude models with some undesirable properties. These two axioms are known to be relatively consistent. In the presence of the axiom schema of separation, Russell's paradox becomes a proof that there is no set of all sets. The axiom of regularity together with the axiom of pairing also prohibit such a universal set. However, Russell's paradox yields a proof that there is no "set of all sets" using the axiom schema of separation alone, without any additional axioms. In particular, ZF without the axiom of regularity already prohibits such a universal set. If a theory is extended by adding an axiom or axioms, then any (possibly undesirable) consequences of the original theory remain consequences of the extended theory. In particular, if ZF without regularity is extended by adding regularity to get ZF, then any contradiction (such as Russell's paradox) which followed from the original theory would still follow in the extended theory. The existence of Quine atoms (sets that satisfy the formula equation x = {x}, i.e. have themselves as their only elements) is consistent with the theory obtained by removing the axiom of regularity from ZFC. Various non-wellfounded set theories allow "safe" circular sets, such as Quine atoms, without becoming inconsistent by means of Russell's paradox. Regularity, the cumulative hierarchy, and types In ZF it can be proven that the class , called the von Neumann universe, is equal to the class of all sets. This statement is even equivalent to the axiom of regularity (if we work in ZF with this axiom omitted). From any model which does not satisfy axiom of regularity, a model which satisfies it can be constructed by taking only sets in . wrote that "The idea of rank is a descendant of Russell's concept of type". Comparing ZF with type theory, Alasdair Urquhart wrote that "Zermelo's system has the notational advantage of not containing any explicitly typed variables, although in fact it can be seen as having an implicit type structure built into it, at least if the axiom of regularity is included. The details of this implicit typing are spelled out in [Zermelo 1930], and again in a well-known article of George Boolos [Boolos 1971]." went further and claimed that: In the same paper, Scott shows that an axiomatic system based on the inherent properties of the cumulative hierarchy turns out to be equivalent to ZF, including regularity. History The concept of well-foundedness and rank of a set were both introduced by Dmitry Mirimanoff (1917) cf. and . Mirimanoff called a set x "regular" (French: "ordinaire") if every descending chain x ∋ x1 ∋ x2 ∋ ... is finite. Mirimanoff however did not consider his notion of regularity (and well-foundedness) as an axiom to be observed by all sets; in later papers Mirimanoff also explored what are now called non-well-founded sets ("extraordinaire" in Mirimanoff's terminology). and pointed out that non-well-founded sets are superfluous (on p. 404 in van Heijenoort's translation) and in the same publication von Neumann gives an axiom (p. 412 in translation) which excludes some, but not all, non-well-founded sets. In a subsequent publication, gave an equivalent but more complex version of the Axiom of Class Foundation, cf. and : . The contemporary and final form of the axiom is due to . Regularity in the presence of urelements Urelements are objects that are not sets, but which can be elements of sets. In ZF set theory, there are no urelements, but in some other set theories such as ZFA, there are. In these theories, the axiom of regularity must be modified. The statement "" needs to be replaced with a statement that is not empty and is not an urelement. One suitable replacement is , which states that x is inhabited. See also Non-well-founded set theory Scott's trick Epsilon-induction References Sources reprinted in Reprinted in From Frege to Gödel, van Heijenoort, 1967, in English translation by Stefan Bauer-Mengelberg, pp. 291–301. ; translation in ; translation in External links Inhabited set and the axiom of foundation on nLab Axioms of set theory Wellfoundedness

2114

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM%20AIX

IBM AIX

AIX (Advanced Interactive eXecutive, pronounced ) is a series of proprietary Unix operating systems developed and sold by IBM for several of its computer platforms. Background Originally released for the IBM RT PC RISC workstation in 1986, AIX has supported a wide variety of hardware platforms, including the IBM RS/6000 series and later Power and PowerPC-based systems, IBM System i, System/370 mainframes, PS/2 personal computers, and the Apple Network Server. It is currently supported on IBM Power Systems alongside IBM i and Linux. AIX is based on UNIX System V with 4.3BSD-compatible extensions. It is certified to the UNIX 03 and UNIX V7 marks of the Single UNIX Specification, beginning with AIX versions 5.3 and 7.2 TL5 respectively. Older versions were previously certified to the UNIX 95 and UNIX 98 marks. AIX was the first operating system to have a journaling file system, and IBM has continuously enhanced the software with features such as processor, disk and network virtualization, dynamic hardware resource allocation (including fractional processor units), and reliability engineering ported from its mainframe designs. History Unix started life at AT&T's Bell Labs research center in the early 1970s, running on DEC minicomputers. By 1976, the operating system was in use at various academic institutions, including Princeton, where Tom Lyon and others ported it to the S/370, to run as a guest OS under VM/370. This port would later grow out to become UTS, a mainframe Unix offering by IBM's competitor Amdahl Corporation. IBM's own involvement in Unix can be dated to 1979, when it assisted Bell Labs in doing its own Unix port to the 370 (to be used as a build host for the 5ESS switch's software). In the process, IBM made modifications to the TSS/370 Resident Supervisor to better support Unix. It took until 1984 for IBM to offer its own Unix on the S/370 platform, VM/IX, which was developed by Interactive Systems Corporation using Unix System III as its base. VM/IX (and the modified version of VM/370 it required) was not a General Availability product; it was only obtainable as a PRPQ. In 1985, VM/IX was replaced by IBM IX/370, which was a GA product intended by IBM to compete with Amdahl UTS. IX/370 which was based on AT&T's Unix/360 6th Edition port (which only ran on TSS/370 as a time-share application), was updated to Unix System 5 and modified by IBM to run as a VM/370 guest OS. The IX/370 operating system offered special facilities for interoperating with PC/IX, Interactive/IBM's version of Unix for IBM PC compatible hardware, and was licensed at $10,000 per sixteen concurrent users. AIX Version 1, introduced in 1986 for the IBM RT PC workstation, was based on UNIX System V Releases 1 and 2. In developing AIX, IBM and Interactive Systems Corporation (whom IBM contracted) also incorporated source code from 4.2 and 4.3 BSD UNIX. Among other variants, IBM later produced AIX Version 2 (also known as AIX/6000), based on AIX Version 1, for their POWER-based RS/6000 platform. Since 1990, AIX has served as the primary operating system for the RS/6000 series (later renamed IBM eServer pSeries, then IBM System p, and now IBM Power Systems). AIX Version 3, introduced in 1988, for the PS/2 and VM/370 systems, developed by Locus Computing Corporation, added the Transparent Computing Facility. AIX Version 4, introduced in 1994, added symmetric multiprocessing with the introduction of the first RS/6000 SMP servers and continued to evolve through the 1990s, culminating with AIX 4.3.3 in 1999. Version 4.1, in a slightly modified form, was also the standard operating system for the Apple Network Server systems sold by Apple Computer to complement the Macintosh line. In the late 1990s, under Project Monterey, IBM and the Santa Cruz Operation planned to integrate AIX and UnixWare into a single 32-bit/64-bit multiplatform UNIX with particular emphasis on running on Intel IA-64 (Itanium) architecture CPUs. A beta test version of AIX 5L for IA-64 systems was released, but according to documents released in the SCO v. IBM lawsuit, less than forty licenses for the finished Monterey Unix were ever sold before the project was terminated in 2002. In 2003, the SCO Group alleged that (among other infractions) IBM had misappropriated licensed source code from UNIX System V Release 4 for incorporation into AIX; SCO subsequently withdrew IBM's license to develop and distribute AIX. IBM maintains that their license was irrevocable, and continued to sell and support the product until the litigation was adjudicated. AIX was a component of the 2003 SCO v. IBM lawsuit, in which the SCO Group filed a lawsuit against IBM, alleging IBM contributed SCO's intellectual property to the Linux codebase. The SCO Group, who argued they were the rightful owners of the copyrights covering the Unix operating system, attempted to revoke IBM's license to sell or distribute the AIX operating system. In March 2010, a jury returned a verdict finding that Novell, not the SCO Group, owns the rights to Unix. AIX 6 was announced in May 2007, and it ran as an open beta from June 2007 until the general availability (GA) of AIX 6.1 on November 9, 2007. Major new features in AIX 6.1 included full role-based access control, workload partitions (which enable application mobility), enhanced security (Addition of AES encryption type for NFS v3 and v4), and Live Partition Mobility on the POWER6 hardware. AIX 7.1 was announced in April 2010, and an open beta ran until general availability of AIX 7.1 in September 2010. Several new features, including better scalability, enhanced clustering and management capabilities were added. AIX 7.1 includes a new built-in clustering capability called Cluster Aware AIX. AIX is able to organize multiple LPARs through the multipath communications channel to neighboring CPUs, enabling very high-speed communication between processors. This enables multi-terabyte memory address range and page table access to support global petabyte shared memory space for AIX POWER7 clusters so that software developers can program a cluster as if it were a single system, without using message passing (i.e. semaphore-controlled Inter-process Communication). AIX administrators can use this new capability to cluster a pool of AIX nodes. By default, AIX V7.1 pins kernel memory and includes support to allow applications to pin their kernel stack. Pinning kernel memory and the kernel stack for applications with real-time requirements can provide performance improvements by ensuring that the kernel memory and kernel stack for an application is not paged out. AIX 7.2 was announced in October 2015, and released in December 2015. The principal feature of AIX 7.2 is the Live Kernel Update capability, which allows OS fixes to replace the entire AIX kernel with no impact to applications, by live migrating workloads to a temporary surrogate AIX OS partition while the original OS partition is patched. AIX 7.2 was also restructured to remove obsolete components. The networking component, bos.net.tcp.client was repackaged to allow additional installation flexibility. Unlike AIX 7.1, AIX 7.2 is only supported on systems based on POWER7 or later processors. In January 2023, IBM moved development of AIX to its Indian subsidiary. Supported hardware platforms IBM RT PC The original AIX (sometimes called AIX/RT) was developed for the IBM RT PC workstation by IBM in conjunction with Interactive Systems Corporation, who had previously ported UNIX System III to the IBM PC for IBM as PC/IX. According to its developers, the AIX source (for this initial version) consisted of one million lines of code. Installation media consisted of eight 1.2M floppy disks. The RT was based on the IBM ROMP microprocessor, the first commercial RISC chip. This was based on a design pioneered at IBM Research (the IBM 801). One of the novel aspects of the RT design was the use of a microkernel, called Virtual Resource Manager (VRM). The keyboard, mouse, display, disk drives and network were all controlled by a microkernel. One could "hotkey" from one operating system to the next using the Alt-Tab key combination. Each OS in turn would get possession of the keyboard, mouse and display. Besides AIX v2, the PICK OS also included this microkernel. Much of the AIX v2 kernel was written in the PL.8 programming language, which proved troublesome during the migration to AIX v3. AIX v2 included full TCP/IP networking, as well as SNA and two networking file systems: NFS, licensed from Sun Microsystems, and Distributed Services (DS). DS had the distinction of being built on top of SNA, and thereby being fully compatible with DS on and on midrange systems running OS/400 through IBM i. For the graphical user interfaces, AIX v2 came with the X10R3 and later the X10R4 and X11 versions of the X Window System from MIT, together with the Athena widget set. Compilers for Fortran and C were available. IBM PS/2 series AIX PS/2 (also known as AIX/386) was developed by Locus Computing Corporation under contract to IBM. AIX PS/2, first released in October 1988, ran on IBM PS/2 personal computers with Intel 386 and compatible processors. The product was announced in September 1988 with a baseline tag price of $595, although some utilities like UUCP were included in a separate Extension package priced at $250. nroff and troff for AIX were also sold separately in a Text Formatting System package priced at $200. The TCP/IP stack for AIX PS/2 retailed for another $300. The X Window System package was priced at $195, and featured a graphical environment called the AIXwindows Desktop, based on IXI's X.desktop. The C and FORTRAN compilers each had a price tag of $275. Locus also made available their DOS Merge virtual machine environment for AIX, which could run MS DOS 3.3 applications inside AIX; DOS Merge was sold separately for another $250. IBM also offered a $150 AIX PS/2 DOS Server Program, which provided file server and print server services for client computers running PC DOS 3.3. The last version of PS/2 AIX is 1.3. It was released in 1992 and announced to add support for non-IBM (non-microchannel) computers as well. Support for PS/2 AIX ended in March 1995. IBM mainframes In 1988, IBM announced AIX/370, also developed by Locus Computing. AIX/370 was IBM's fourth attempt to offer Unix-like functionality for their mainframe line, specifically the System/370 (the prior versions were a TSS/370-based Unix system developed jointly with AT&T c.1980, a VM/370-based system named VM/IX developed jointly with Interactive Systems Corporation c.1984, and a VM/370-based version of TSS/370 named IX/370 which was upgraded to be compatible with UNIX System V). AIX/370 was released in 1990 with functional equivalence to System V Release 2 and 4.3BSD as well as IBM enhancements. With the introduction of the ESA/390 architecture, AIX/370 was replaced by AIX/ESA in 1991, which was based on OSF/1, and also ran on the System/390 platform. This development effort was made partly to allow IBM to compete with Amdahl UTS. Unlike AIX/370, AIX/ESA ran both natively as the host operating system, and as a guest under VM. AIX/ESA, while technically advanced, had little commercial success, partially because UNIX functionality was added as an option to the existing mainframe operating system, MVS, as MVS/ESA SP Version 4 Release 3 OpenEdition in 1994, and continued as an integral part of MVS/ESA SP Version 5, OS/390 and z/OS, with the name eventually changing from OpenEdition to Unix System Services. IBM also provided OpenEdition in VM/ESA Version 2 through z/VM. IA-64 systems As part of Project Monterey, IBM released a beta test version of AIX 5L for the IA-64 (Itanium) architecture in 2001, but this never became an official product due to lack of interest. Apple Network Servers The Apple Network Server (ANS) systems were PowerPC-based systems designed by Apple Computer to have numerous high-end features that standard Apple hardware did not have, including swappable hard drives, redundant power supplies, and external monitoring capability. These systems were more or less based on the Power Macintosh hardware available at the time but were designed to use AIX (versions 4.1.4 or 4.1.5) as their native operating system in a specialized version specific to the ANS called AIX for Apple Network Servers. AIX was only compatible with the Network Servers and was not ported to standard Power Macintosh hardware. It should not be confused with A/UX, Apple's earlier version of Unix for 68k-based Macintoshes. POWER ISA/PowerPC/Power ISA-based systems The release of AIX version 3 (sometimes called AIX/6000) coincided with the announcement of the first POWER1-based IBM RS/6000 models in 1990. AIX v3 innovated in several ways on the software side. It was the first operating system to introduce the idea of a journaling file system, JFS, which allowed for fast boot times by avoiding the need to ensure the consistency of the file systems on disks (see fsck) on every reboot. Another innovation was shared libraries which avoid the need for static linking from an application to the libraries it used. The resulting smaller binaries used less of the hardware RAM to run, and used less disk space to install. Besides improving performance, it was a boon to developers: executable binaries could be in the tens of kilobytes instead of a megabyte for an executable statically linked to the C library. AIX v3 also scrapped the microkernel of AIX v2, a contentious move that resulted in v3 containing no PL.8 code and being somewhat more "pure" than v2. Other notable subsystems included: IRIS GL, a 3D rendering library, the progenitor of OpenGL. IRIS GL was licensed by IBM from SGI in 1987, then still a fairly small company, which had sold only a few thousand machines at the time. SGI also provided the low-end graphics card for the RS/6000, capable of drawing 20,000 gouraud-shaded triangles per second. The high-end graphics card was designed by IBM, a follow-on to the mainframe-attached IBM 5080, capable of rendering 990,000 vectors per second. PHIGS, another 3D rendering API, popular in automotive CAD/CAM circles, and at the core of CATIA. Full implementation of version 11 of the X Window System, together with Motif as the recommended widget toolkit and window manager. Network file systems: NFS from Sun; AFS, the Andrew File System; and DFS, the Distributed File System. NCS, the Network Computing System, licensed from Apollo Computer (later acquired by HP). DPS on-screen display system. This was notable as a "plan B" in case the X11+Motif combination failed in the marketplace. However, it was highly proprietary, supported only by Sun, NeXT, and IBM. This cemented its failure in the marketplace in the face of the open systems challenge of X11+Motif and its lack of 3D capability. In addition, AIX applications can run in the PASE subsystem under IBM i. Source code IBM formerly made the AIX for RS/6000 source code available to customers for an additional fee; in 1991, IBM customers could order the AIX 3.0 source code for a one-time charge of US$60,000; subsequently, IBM released the AIX 3.1 source code in 1992, and AIX 3.2 in 1993. These source code distributions excluded certain files (authored by third-parties) which IBM did not have rights to redistribute, and also excluded layered products such as the MS-DOS emulator and the C compiler. Furthermore, in order to be able to license the AIX source code, the customer first had to procure source code license agreements with AT&T and the University of California, Berkeley. Versions POWER/PowerPC/Power ISA releases AIX V7.3, December 10, 2021 Requires POWER8 or newer CPUs AIX V7.2, October 5, 2015 Live update for Interim Fixes, Service Packs and Technology Levels replaces the entire AIX kernel without impacting applications Flash based filesystem caching Cluster Aware AIX automation with repository replacement mechanism SRIOV-backed VNIC, or dedicated VNIC virtualized network adapter support RDSv3 over RoCE adds support of the Oracle RDSv3 protocol over the Mellanox Connect RoCE adapters Supports secure boot on POWER9 systems. Requires POWER7 or newer CPUs AIX V7.1, September 10, 2010 Support for 256 cores / 1024 threads in a single LPAR The ability to run AIX V5.2 or V5.3 inside of a Workload Partition An XML profile based system configuration management utility Support for export of Fibre Channel adapters to WPARs VIOS disk support in a WPAR Cluster Aware AIX AIX Event infrastructure Role-based access control (RBAC) with domain support for multi-tenant environments Requires POWER4 or newer CPUs AIX V6.1, November 9, 2007 Workload Partitions (WPARs) operating system-level virtualization Live Application Mobility Live Partition Mobility Security Role Based Access Control RBAC AIX Security Expert a system and network security hardening tool Encrypting JFS2 filesystem Trusted AIX Trusted Execution Integrated Electronic Service Agent for auto error reporting Concurrent Kernel Maintenance Kernel exploitation of POWER6 storage keys ProbeVue dynamic tracing Systems Director Console for AIX Integrated filesystem snapshot Requires POWER4 or newer CPUs AIX 6 withdrawn from Marketing effective April 2016 and from Support effective April 2017 AIX 5L 5.3, August 13, 2004, end of support April 30, 2012 NFS Version 4 Advanced Accounting Virtual SCSI Virtual Ethernet Exploitation of Simultaneous multithreading (SMT) Micro-Partitioning enablement POWER5 exploitation JFS2 quotas Ability to shrink a JFS2 filesystem Kernel scheduler has been enhanced to dynamically increase and decrease the use of virtual processors. AIX 5L 5.2, October 18, 2002, end of support April 30, 2009 Ability to run on the IBM BladeCenter JS20 with the PowerPC 970 Minimum level required for POWER5 hardware MPIO for Fibre Channel disks iSCSI Initiator software Participation in Dynamic LPAR Concurrent I/O (CIO) feature introduced for JFS2 released in Maintenance Level 01 in May 2003 AIX 5L 5.1, May 4, 2001, end of support April 1, 2006 Ability to run on an IA-64 architecture processor, although this never went beyond beta. Minimum level required for POWER4 hardware and the last release that worked on the Micro Channel architecture 64-bit kernel, installed but not activated by default JFS2 Ability to run in a Logical Partition on POWER4 The L stands for Linux affinity Trusted Computing Base (TCB) Support for mirroring with striping AIX 4.3.3, September 17, 1999 Online backup function Workload Manager (WLM) Introduction of topas utility AIX 4.3.2, October 23, 1998 AIX 4.3.1, April 24, 1998 First TCSEC security evaluation, completed December 18, 1998 AIX 4.3, October 31, 1997 Ability to run on 64-bit architecture CPUs IPv6 Web-based System Manager AIX 4.2.1, April 25, 1997 NFS Version 3 Y2K-compliant AIX 4.2, May 17, 1996 AIX 4.1.5, November 8, 1996 AIX 4.1.4, October 20, 1995 AIX 4.1.3, July 7, 1995 CDE 1.0 became the default GUI environment, replacing the AIXwindows Desktop. AIX 4.1.1, October 28, 1994 AIX 4.1, August 12, 1994 AIX Ultimedia Services introduced (multimedia drivers and applications) AIX 4.0, 1994 Run on RS/6000 systems with PowerPC processors and PCI busses. AIX 3.2.5, October 15, 1993 AIX 3.2 1992 AIX 3.1, (General Availability) February 1990 Journaled File System (JFS) filesystem type AIXwindows Desktop (based on X.desktop from IXI Limited) AIX 3.0 1989 (Early Access) LVM (Logical Volume Manager) was incorporated into OSF/1, and in 1995 for HP-UX, and the Linux LVM implementation is similar to the HP-UX LVM implementation. SMIT was introduced. IBM System/370 releases AIX/ESA Version 2 Release 2 Announced December 15, 1992 Available February 26, 1993 Withdrawn Jun 19, 1993 Runs only in S/370-ESA mode AIX/ESA Version 2 Release 1 Announced March 31, 1992 Available June 26, 1992 Withdrawn Jun 19, 1993 Runs only in S/370-ESA mode AIX/370 Version 1 Release 2.1 Announced February 5, 1991 Available February February 22, 1991 Withdrawn December 31, 1992 Does not run in XA, ESA or z mode AIX/370 Version 1 Release 1 Announced March 15, 1988 Available February 16, 1989 Does not run in XA, ESA or z mode IBM PS/2 releases AIX PS/2 v1.3, October 1992 Withdrawn from sale in US, March 1995 Patches supporting IBM ThinkPad 750C family of notebook computers, 1994 Patches supporting non PS/2 hardware and systems, 1993 AIX PS/2 v1.2.1, May 1991 AIX PS/2 v1.2, March 1990 AIX PS/2 v1.1, March 1989 IBM RT releases AIX RT v2.2.1, March 1991 AIX RT v2.2, March 1990 AIX RT v2.1, March 1989 X-Windows included on installation media AIX RT v1.1, 1986 AIX RT v1.0, 1985 User interfaces The default shell was Bourne shell up to AIX version 3, but was changed to KornShell (ksh88) in version 4 for XPG4 and POSIX compliance. Graphical The Common Desktop Environment (CDE) is AIX's default graphical user interface. As part of Linux Affinity and the free AIX Toolbox for Linux Applications (ATLA), open-source KDE Plasma Workspaces and GNOME desktop are also available. System Management Interface Tool SMIT is the System Management Interface Tool for AIX. It allows a user to navigate a menu hierarchy of commands, rather than using the command line. Invocation is typically achieved with the command smit. Experienced system administrators make use of the F6 function key which generates the command line that SMIT will invoke to complete it. SMIT also generates a log of commands that are performed in the smit.script file. The smit.script file automatically records the commands with the command flags and parameters used. The smit.script file can be used as an executable shell script to rerun system configuration tasks. SMIT also creates the smit.log file, which contains additional detailed information that can be used by programmers in extending the SMIT system. smit and smitty refer to the same program, though smitty invokes the text-based version, while smit will invoke an X Window System based interface if possible; however, if smit determines that X Window System capabilities are not present, it will present the text-based version instead of failing. Determination of X Window System capabilities is typically performed by checking for the existence of the DISPLAY variable. Database Object Data Manager (ODM) is a database of system information integrated into AIX, analogous to the registry in Microsoft Windows. A good understanding of the ODM is essential for managing AIX systems. Data managed in ODM is stored and maintained as objects with associated attributes. Interaction with ODM is possible via application programming interface (API) library for programs, and command-line utilities such as odmshow, odmget, odmadd, odmchange and odmdelete for shell scripts and users. SMIT and its associated AIX commands can also be used to query and modify information in the ODM. ODM is stored on disk using Berkeley DB files. Example of information stored in the ODM database are: Network configuration Logical volume management configuration Installed software information Information for logical devices or software drivers List of all AIX supported devices Physical hardware devices installed and their configuration Menus, screens and commands that SMIT uses See also AOS, IBM's educational-market port of 4.3BSD IBM PowerHA SystemMirror (formerly HACMP) List of Unix systems nmon Operating systems timeline Service Update Management Assistant Vital Product Data (VPD) References External links IBM AIX AIX Power ISA operating systems PowerPC operating systems IBM Aix Object-oriented database management systems 1986 software

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%20III

Apple III

The Apple III (styled as apple ///) is a business-oriented personal computer produced by Apple Computer and released in 1980. Running the Apple SOS operating system, it was intended as the successor to the Apple II series, but was largely considered a failure in the market. It was designed to provide key features business users wanted in a personal computer: a true typewriter-style upper/lowercase keyboard (the Apple II only supported uppercase) and an 80-column display. Work on the Apple III started in late 1978 under the guidance of Dr. Wendell Sander. It had the internal code name of "Sara", named after Sander's daughter. The system was announced on May 19, 1980 and released in late November that year. Serious stability issues required a design overhaul and a recall of the first 14,000 machines produced. The Apple III was formally reintroduced on November 9, 1981. Damage to the computer's reputation had already been done, however, and it failed to do well commercially. Development stopped, and the Apple III was discontinued on April 24, 1984. Its last successor, the III Plus, was dropped from the Apple product line in September 1985. An estimated 65,000–75,000 Apple III computers were sold. The Apple III Plus brought this up to approximately 120,000. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak stated that the primary reason for the Apple III's failure was that the system was designed by Apple's marketing department, unlike Apple's previous engineering-driven projects. The Apple III's failure led Apple to reevaluate its plan to phase out the Apple II, prompting the eventual continuation of development of the older machine. As a result, later Apple II models incorporated some hardware and software technologies of the Apple III. Overview Design Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs expected hobbyists to purchase the Apple II, but because of VisiCalc and Disk II, small businesses purchased 90% of the computers. The Apple III was designed to be a business computer and successor. Though the Apple II contributed to the inspirations of several important business products, such as VisiCalc, Multiplan, and Apple Writer, the computer's hardware architecture, operating system, and developer environment are limited. Apple management intended to clearly establish market segmentation by designing the Apple III to appeal to the 90% business market, leaving the Apple II to home and education users. Management believed that "once the Apple III was out, the Apple II would stop selling in six months", Wozniak said. The Apple III is powered by a 1.8-megahertz Synertek 6502A or 6502B 8-bit CPU and, like some of the later machines in the Apple II family, uses bank switching techniques to address memory beyond the 6502's traditional 64 KB limit, up to 256 KB in the III's case. Third-party vendors produced memory upgrade kits that allow the Apple III to reach up to 512 KB of random-access memory (RAM). Other Apple III built-in features include an 80-column, 24-line display with upper and lowercase characters, a numeric keypad, dual-speed (pressure-sensitive) cursor control keys, 6-bit (DAC) audio, and a built-in 140-kilobyte 5.25-inch floppy disk drive. Graphics modes include 560x192 in black and white, and 280x192 with 16 colors or shades of gray. Unlike the Apple II, the Disk III controller is part of the logic board. The Apple III is the first Apple product to allow the user to choose both a screen font and a keyboard layout: either QWERTY or Dvorak. These choices cannot be changed while programs were running, unlike the Apple IIc, which has a keyboard switch directly above the keyboard, allowing the user to switch on the fly. Software The Apple III introduced an advanced operating system called Apple SOS, pronounced "apple sauce". Its ability to address resources by name allows the Apple III to be more scalable than the Apple II's addressing by physical location such as PR#6, CATALOG, D1. Apple SOS allows the full capacity of a storage device to be used as a single volume, such as the Apple ProFile hard disk drive, and it supports a hierarchical file system. Some of the features and code base of Apple SOS were later adopted into the Apple II's ProDOS and GS/OS operating systems, as well as Lisa 7/7 and Mac OS. With a starting price between , the Apple III was more expensive than many of the CP/M-based business computers that were available at the time. Few software applications other than VisiCalc are available for the computer; according to a presentation at KansasFest 2012, fewer than 50 Apple III-specific software packages were ever published, most shipping when the III Plus was released. Because Apple did not view the Apple III as suitable for hobbyists, it did not provide much of the technical software information that accompanies the Apple II. Originally intended as a direct replacement to the Apple II series, it was designed to be backward compatible with Apple II software. However, since Apple did not want to encourage continued development of the II platform, Apple II compatibility exists only in a special Apple II Mode which is limited in its capabilities to the emulation of a basic Apple II Plus configuration with of RAM. Special chips were intentionally added to prevent access from Apple II Mode to the III's advanced features such as its larger amount of memory. Peripherals The Apple III has four expansion slots, a number that inCider in 1986 called "miserly". Apple II cards are compatible but risk violating government RFI regulations, and require Apple III-specific device drivers; BYTE stated that "Apple provides virtually no information on how to write them". As with software, Apple provided little hardware technical information with the computer but Apple III-specific products became available, such as one that made the computer compatible with the Apple IIe. Several new Apple-produced peripherals were developed for the Apple III. The original Apple III has a built-in real-time clock, which is recognized by Apple SOS. The clock was later removed from the "revised" model, and was instead made available as an add-on. Along with the built-in floppy drive, the Apple III can also handle up to three additional external Disk III floppy disk drives. The Disk III is only officially compatible with the Apple III. The Apple III Plus requires an adaptor from Apple to use the Disk III with its DB-25 disk port. With the introduction of the revised Apple III a year after launch, Apple began offering the ProFile external hard disk system. Priced at $3,499 for 5 MB of storage, it also required a peripheral slot for its controller card. Backward compatibility The Apple III has the built-in hardware capability to run Apple II software. In order to do so, an emulation boot disk is required that functionally turns the machine into a standard 48-kilobyte Apple II Plus, until it is powered off. The keyboard, internal floppy drive (and one external Disk III), display (color is provided through the 'B/W video' port) and speaker all act as Apple II peripherals. The paddle and serial ports can also function in Apple II mode, however with some limitations and compatibility issues. Apple engineers added specialized circuitry with the sole purpose of blocking access to its advanced features when running in Apple II emulation mode. This was done primarily to discourage further development and interest in the Apple II line, and to push the Apple III as its successor. For example, no more than of RAM can be accessed, even if the machine has of RAM or higher present. Many Apple II programs require a minimum of of RAM, making them impossible to run on the Apple III. Similarly, access to lowercase support, 80 columns text, or its more advanced graphics and sound are blocked by this hardware circuitry, making it impossible for even skilled software programmers to bypass Apple's lockout. A third-party company, Titan Technologies, sold an expansion board called the III Plus II that allows Apple II mode to access more memory, a standard game port, and with a later released companion card, even emulate the Apple IIe. Certain Apple II slot cards can be installed in the Apple III and used in native III-mode with custom written SOS device drivers, including Grappler Plus and Liron 3.5 Controller. Revisions After overheating issues were attributed to serious design flaws, a redesigned logic board was introduced in mid-December 1981 – which included a lower power supply requirement, wider circuit traces and better-designed chip sockets. The $3,495 revised model also includes 256 KB of RAM as the standard configuration. The 14,000 units of the original Apple III sold were returned and replaced with the entirely new revised model. Apple III Plus Apple discontinued the III in October 1983 because it violated FCC regulations, and the FCC required the company to change the redesigned computer's name. It introduced the Apple III Plus in December 1983 at a price of US$2,995. This newer version includes a built-in clock, video interlacing, standardized rear port connectors, 55-watt power supply, 256 KB of RAM as standard, and a redesigned, Apple IIe-like keyboard. Owners of the Apple III could purchase individual III Plus upgrades, like the clock and interlacing feature, and obtain the newer logic board as a service replacement. A keyboard upgrade kit, dubbed "Apple III Plus upgrade kit" was also made available – which included the keyboard, cover, keyboard encoder ROM, and logo replacements. This upgrade had to be installed by an authorized service technician. Design flaws According to Wozniak, the Apple III "had 100 percent hardware failures". Former Apple executive Taylor Pohlman stated that: Jobs insisted on the idea of having no fan or air vents, in order to make the computer run quietly. He would later push this same ideology onto almost all Apple models he had control of, from the Apple Lisa and Macintosh 128K to the iMac. To allow the computer to dissipate heat, the base of the Apple III was made of heavy cast aluminum, which supposedly acts as a heat sink. One advantage to the aluminum case was a reduction in RFI (Radio Frequency Interference), a problem which had plagued the Apple II series throughout its history. Unlike the Apple II series, the power supply was mounted – without its own shell – in a compartment separate from the logic board. The decision to use an aluminum shell ultimately led to engineering issues which resulted in the Apple III's reliability problems. The lead time for manufacturing the shells was high, and this had to be done before the motherboard was finalized. Later, it was realized that there was not enough room on the motherboard for all of the components unless narrow traces were used. Many Apple IIIs were thought to have failed due to their inability to properly dissipate heat. inCider stated in 1986 that "Heat has always been a formidable enemy of the Apple ///", and some users reported that their Apple IIIs became so hot that the chips started dislodging from the board, causing the screen to display garbled data or their disk to come out of the slot "melted". BYTE wrote, "the integrated circuits tended to wander out of their sockets". It has been rumored Apple advised customers to tilt the front of the Apple III six inches above the desk and then drop it to reseat the chips as a temporary solution. Other analyses blame a faulty automatic chip insertion process, not heat. Case designer Jerry Manock denied the design flaw charges, insisting that tests proved that the unit adequately dissipated the internal heat. The primary cause, he claimed, was a major logic board design problem. The logic board used "fineline" technology that was not fully mature at the time, with narrow, closely spaced traces. When chips were "stuffed" into the board and wave-soldered, solder bridges would form between traces that were not supposed to be connected. This caused numerous short circuits, which required hours of costly diagnosis and hand rework to fix. Apple designed a new circuit board with more layers and normal-width traces. The new logic board was laid out by one designer on a huge drafting board, rather than using the costly CAD-CAM system used for the previous board, and the new design worked. Earlier Apple III units came with a built-in real time clock. The hardware, however, would fail after prolonged use. Assuming that National Semiconductor would test all parts before shipping them, Apple did not perform this level of testing. Apple was soldering chips directly to boards and could not easily replace a bad chip if one was found. Eventually, Apple solved this problem by removing the real-time clock from the Apple III's specification rather than shipping the Apple III with the clock pre-installed, and then sold the peripheral as a level 1 technician add-on. BASIC Microsoft and Apple each developed their own versions of BASIC for the Apple III. Apple III Microsoft BASIC was designed to run on the CP/M platform available for the Apple III. Apple Business BASIC shipped with the Apple III. Donn Denman ported Applesoft BASIC to SOS and reworked it to take advantage of the extended memory of the Apple III. Both languages introduced a number of new or improved features over Applesoft BASIC. Both languages replaced Applesoft's single-precision floating-point variables using 5-byte storage with the somewhat-reduced-precision 4-byte variables, while also adding a larger numerical format. Apple III Microsoft BASIC provides double-precision floating-point variables, taking 8 bytes of storage, while Apple Business BASIC offers an extra-long integer type, also taking 8 bytes for storage. Both languages also retain 2-byte integers, and maximum 255-character strings. Other new features common to both languages include: Incorporation of disk-file commands within the language. Operators for MOD and for integer-division. An optional ELSE clause in IF...THEN statements. HEX$() function for hexadecimal-format output. INSTR function for finding a substring within a string. PRINT USING statement to control format of output. Apple Business BASIC had an option, in addition to directly specifying the format with a string expression, of giving the line number where an IMAGE statement gave the formatting expression, similar to a FORMAT statement in FORTRAN. Some features work differently in each language: Microsoft BASIC additional features function to replace Applesoft's command. statement to input an entire line of text, regardless of punctuation, into a single string variable. and statements to automatically direct output to paper. and statements to left- or right-justify a string expression within a given string variable's character length. function for output, and "&"- or "&O"-formatted expressions, for manipulating octal notation. function for generating blank spaces outside of a statement, and function to do likewise with any character. ... statements, for loop structures built on general Boolean conditions without an index variable. Bitwise Boolean (16-bit) operations (, , ), with additional operators , , . Line number specification in the command. options of (to skip to the statement after that which caused the error) or a specified line number (which replaces the idea of exiting error-handling by -line, thus avoiding Applesoft II's stack error problem). Multiple parameters in user-defined () functions. A return to the old Applesoft One concept of having multiple functions at different addresses, by establishing ten different functions, numbered to , with separate statements to define the address of each. The argument passed to a function can be of any specific type, including string. The returned value can also be of any type, by default the same type as the argument passed. There is no support for graphics provided within the language, nor for reading analog controls or buttons; nor is there a means of defining the active window of the text screen. Business BASIC additional features Apple Business BASIC eliminates all references to absolute memory addresses. Thus, the POKE command and PEEK() function were not included in the language, and new features replaced the CALL statement and USR() function. The functionality of certain features in Applesoft that had been achieved with various PEEK and POKE locations is now provided by: BUTTON() function to read game-controller buttons WINDOW statement to define the active window of the text screen by its coordinates KBD, HPOS, and VPOS system variables External binary subroutines and functions are loaded into memory by a single INVOKE disk-command that loads separately-assembled code modules. A PERFORM statement is then used to call an INVOKEd procedure by name, with an argument-list. INVOKEd functions would be referenced in expressions by EXFN. (floating-point) or EXFN%. (integer), with the function name appended, plus the argument-list for the function. Graphics are supported with an INVOKEd module, with features including displaying text within graphics in various fonts, within four different graphics modes available on the Apple III. Reception Despite devoting the majority of its R&D to the Apple III and so ignoring the II that for a while dealers had difficulty in obtaining the latter, the III's technical problems made marketing the computer difficult. Ed Smith, who after designing the APF Imagination Machine worked as a distributor's representative, described the III as "a complete disaster". He recalled that he "was responsible for going to every dealership, setting up the Apple III in their showroom, and then explaining to them the functions of the Apple III, which in many cases didn't really work". Sales Pohlman reported that Apple was only selling 500 units a month by late 1981, mostly as replacements. The company was able to eventually raise monthly sales to 5,000, but the IBM PC's successful launch had encouraged software companies to develop for it instead, prompting Apple to shift focus to the Lisa and Macintosh. The PC almost ended sales of the Apple III, the most closely comparable Apple computer model. By early 1984, sales were primarily to existing III owners, Apple itself—its 4,500 employees were equipped with some 3,000-4,500 units—and some small businesses. Apple finally discontinued the Apple III series on April 24, 1984, four months after introducing the III Plus, after selling only 65,000-75,000 units and replacing 14,000 defective units. Jobs said that the company lost "infinite, incalculable amounts" of money on the Apple III. Wozniak estimated that Apple had spent $100 million on the III, instead of improving the II and better competing against IBM. Pohlman claimed that there was a "stigma" at Apple associated with having contributed to the computer. Most employees who worked on the III reportedly left Apple. Legacy The file system and some design ideas from Apple SOS, the Apple III's operating system, were part of Apple ProDOS and Apple GS/OS, the major operating systems for the Apple II series following the demise of the Apple III, as well as the Apple Lisa, which was the de facto business-oriented successor to the Apple III. The hierarchical file system influenced the evolution of the Macintosh: while the original Macintosh File System (MFS) was a flat file system designed for a floppy disk without subdirectories, subsequent file systems were hierarchical. By comparison, the IBM PC's first file system (again designed for floppy disks) was also flat and later versions (designed for hard disks) were hierarchical. In popular culture At the start of the Walt Disney Pictures film TRON, lead character Kevin Flynn (played by Jeff Bridges) is seen hacking into the ENCOM mainframe using an Apple III. References Sources External links The Ill-Fated Apple III Many manuals and diagrams Sara – Apple /// emulator The Ill-Fated Apple III Low End Mac Apple III Chaos: Apple's First Failure Low End Mac Apple II family Computer-related introductions in 1980 Products and services discontinued in 1984 Discontinued Apple Inc. products 8-bit computers

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVL%20tree

AVL tree

In computer science, an AVL tree (named after inventors Adelson-Velsky and Landis) is a self-balancing binary search tree. In an AVL tree, the heights of the two child subtrees of any node differ by at most one; if at any time they differ by more than one, rebalancing is done to restore this property. Lookup, insertion, and deletion all take time in both the average and worst cases, where is the number of nodes in the tree prior to the operation. Insertions and deletions may require the tree to be rebalanced by one or more tree rotations. The AVL tree is named after its two Soviet inventors, Georgy Adelson-Velsky and Evgenii Landis, who published it in their 1962 paper "An algorithm for the organization of information". It is the oldest self-balancing binary search tree data structure to be invented. AVL trees are often compared with red–black trees because both support the same set of operations and take time for the basic operations. For lookup-intensive applications, AVL trees are faster than red–black trees because they are more strictly balanced. Similar to red–black trees, AVL trees are height-balanced. Both are, in general, neither weight-balanced nor -balanced for any ; that is, sibling nodes can have hugely differing numbers of descendants. Definition Balance factor In a binary tree the balance factor of a node X is defined to be the height difference of its two child sub-trees rooted by node X. A binary tree is defined to be an AVL tree if the invariant holds for every node X in the tree. A node X with is called "left-heavy", one with is called "right-heavy", and one with is sometimes simply called "balanced". Properties Balance factors can be kept up-to-date by knowing the previous balance factors and the change in height – it is not necessary to know the absolute height. For holding the AVL balance information, two bits per node are sufficient. The height (counted as the maximal number of levels) of an AVL tree with nodes lies in the interval: where   is the golden ratio and This is because an AVL tree of height contains at least nodes where is the Fibonacci sequence with the seed values Operations Read-only operations of an AVL tree involve carrying out the same actions as would be carried out on an unbalanced binary search tree, but modifications have to observe and restore the height balance of the sub-trees. Searching Searching for a specific key in an AVL tree can be done the same way as that of any balanced or unbalanced binary search tree. In order for search to work effectively it has to employ a comparison function which establishes a total order (or at least a total preorder) on the set of keys. The number of comparisons required for successful search is limited by the height and for unsuccessful search is very close to , so both are in . Traversal As a read-only operation the traversal of an AVL tree functions the same way as on any other binary tree. Exploring all nodes of the tree visits each link exactly twice: one downward visit to enter the subtree rooted by that node, another visit upward to leave that node's subtree after having explored it. Once a node has been found in an AVL tree, the next or previous node can be accessed in amortized constant time. Some instances of exploring these "nearby" nodes require traversing up to links (particularly when navigating from the rightmost leaf of the root's left subtree to the root or from the root to the leftmost leaf of the root's right subtree; in the AVL tree of figure 1, navigating from node P to the next-to-the-right node Q takes 3 steps). Since there are links in any tree, the amortized cost is , or approximately 2. Insert When inserting a node into an AVL tree, you initially follow the same process as inserting into a Binary Search Tree. If the tree is empty, then the node is inserted as the root of the tree. If the tree is not empty, then we go down the root, and recursively go down the tree searching for the location to insert the new node. This traversal is guided by the comparison function. In this case, the node always replaces a NULL reference (left or right) of an external node in the tree i.e., the node is either made a left-child or a right-child of the external node. After this insertion, if a tree becomes unbalanced, only ancestors of the newly inserted node are unbalanced. This is because only those nodes have their sub-trees altered. So it is necessary to check each of the node's ancestors for consistency with the invariants of AVL trees: this is called "retracing". This is achieved by considering the balance factor of each node. Since with a single insertion the height of an AVL subtree cannot increase by more than one, the temporary balance factor of a node after an insertion will be in the range For each node checked, if the temporary balance factor remains in the range from –1 to +1 then only an update of the balance factor and no rotation is necessary. However, if the temporary balance factor is ±2, the subtree rooted at this node is AVL unbalanced, and a rotation is needed. With insertion as the code below shows, the adequate rotation immediately perfectly rebalances the tree. In figure 1, by inserting the new node Z as a child of node X the height of that subtree Z increases from 0 to 1. Invariant of the retracing loop for an insertion The height of the subtree rooted by Z has increased by 1. It is already in AVL shape. for (X = parent(Z); X != null; X = parent(Z)) { // Loop (possibly up to the root) // BF(X) has to be updated: if (Z == right_child(X)) { // The right subtree increases if (BF(X) > 0) { // X is right-heavy // ==> the temporary BF(X) == +2 // ==> rebalancing is required. G = parent(X); // Save parent of X around rotations if (BF(Z) < 0) // Right Left Case (see figure 3) N = rotate_RightLeft(X, Z); // Double rotation: Right(Z) then Left(X) else // Right Right Case (see figure 2) N = rotate_Left(X, Z); // Single rotation Left(X) // After rotation adapt parent link } else { if (BF(X) < 0) { BF(X) = 0; // Z’s height increase is absorbed at X. break; // Leave the loop } BF(X) = +1; Z = X; // Height(Z) increases by 1 continue; } } else { // Z == left_child(X): the left subtree increases if (BF(X) < 0) { // X is left-heavy // ==> the temporary BF(X) == -2 // ==> rebalancing is required. G = parent(X); // Save parent of X around rotations if (BF(Z) > 0) // Left Right Case N = rotate_LeftRight(X, Z); // Double rotation: Left(Z) then Right(X) else // Left Left Case N = rotate_Right(X, Z); // Single rotation Right(X) // After rotation adapt parent link } else { if (BF(X) > 0) { BF(X) = 0; // Z’s height increase is absorbed at X. break; // Leave the loop } BF(X) = -1; Z = X; // Height(Z) increases by 1 continue; } } // After a rotation adapt parent link: // N is the new root of the rotated subtree // Height does not change: Height(N) == old Height(X) parent(N) = G; if (G != null) { if (X == left_child(G)) left_child(G) = N; else right_child(G) = N; } else tree->root = N; // N is the new root of the total tree break; // There is no fall thru, only break; or continue; } // Unless loop is left via break, the height of the total tree increases by 1. In order to update the balance factors of all nodes, first observe that all nodes requiring correction lie from child to parent along the path of the inserted leaf. If the above procedure is applied to nodes along this path, starting from the leaf, then every node in the tree will again have a balance factor of −1, 0, or 1. The retracing can stop if the balance factor becomes 0 implying that the height of that subtree remains unchanged. If the balance factor becomes ±1 then the height of the subtree increases by one and the retracing needs to continue. If the balance factor temporarily becomes ±2, this has to be repaired by an appropriate rotation after which the subtree has the same height as before (and its root the balance factor 0). The time required is for lookup, plus a maximum of retracing levels ( on average) on the way back to the root, so the operation can be completed in time. Delete The preliminary steps for deleting a node are described in section Binary search tree#Deletion. There, the effective deletion of the subject node or the replacement node decreases the height of the corresponding child tree either from 1 to 0 or from 2 to 1, if that node had a child. Starting at this subtree, it is necessary to check each of the ancestors for consistency with the invariants of AVL trees. This is called "retracing". Since with a single deletion the height of an AVL subtree cannot decrease by more than one, the temporary balance factor of a node will be in the range from −2 to +2. If the balance factor remains in the range from −1 to +1 it can be adjusted in accord with the AVL rules. If it becomes ±2 then the subtree is unbalanced and needs to be rotated. (Unlike insertion where a rotation always balances the tree, after delete, there may be BF(Z) ≠ 0 (see figures 2 and 3), so that after the appropriate single or double rotation the height of the rebalanced subtree decreases by one meaning that the tree has to be rebalanced again on the next higher level.) The various cases of rotations are described in section Rebalancing. Invariant of the retracing loop for a deletion The height of the subtree rooted by N has decreased by 1. It is already in AVL shape. for (X = parent(N); X != null; X = G) { // Loop (possibly up to the root) G = parent(X); // Save parent of X around rotations // BF(X) has not yet been updated! if (N == left_child(X)) { // the left subtree decreases if (BF(X) > 0) { // X is right-heavy // ==> the temporary BF(X) == +2 // ==> rebalancing is required. Z = right_child(X); // Sibling of N (higher by 2) b = BF(Z); if (b < 0) // Right Left Case (see figure 3) N = rotate_RightLeft(X, Z); // Double rotation: Right(Z) then Left(X) else // Right Right Case (see figure 2) N = rotate_Left(X, Z); // Single rotation Left(X) // After rotation adapt parent link } else { if (BF(X) == 0) { BF(X) = +1; // N’s height decrease is absorbed at X. break; // Leave the loop } N = X; BF(N) = 0; // Height(N) decreases by 1 continue; } } else { // (N == right_child(X)): The right subtree decreases if (BF(X) < 0) { // X is left-heavy // ==> the temporary BF(X) == -2 // ==> rebalancing is required. Z = left_child(X); // Sibling of N (higher by 2) b = BF(Z); if (b > 0) // Left Right Case N = rotate_LeftRight(X, Z); // Double rotation: Left(Z) then Right(X) else // Left Left Case N = rotate_Right(X, Z); // Single rotation Right(X) // After rotation adapt parent link } else { if (BF(X) == 0) { BF(X) = -1; // N’s height decrease is absorbed at X. break; // Leave the loop } N = X; BF(N) = 0; // Height(N) decreases by 1 continue; } } // After a rotation adapt parent link: // N is the new root of the rotated subtree parent(N) = G; if (G != null) { if (X == left_child(G)) left_child(G) = N; else right_child(G) = N; } else tree->root = N; // N is the new root of the total tree if (b == 0) break; // Height does not change: Leave the loop // Height(N) decreases by 1 (== old Height(X)-1) } // If (b != 0) the height of the total tree decreases by 1. The retracing can stop if the balance factor becomes ±1 (it must have been 0) meaning that the height of that subtree remains unchanged. If the balance factor becomes 0 (it must have been ±1) then the height of the subtree decreases by one and the retracing needs to continue. If the balance factor temporarily becomes ±2, this has to be repaired by an appropriate rotation. It depends on the balance factor of the sibling Z (the higher child tree in figure 2) whether the height of the subtree decreases by one –and the retracing needs to continue– or does not change (if Z has the balance factor 0) and the whole tree is in AVL-shape. The time required is for lookup, plus a maximum of retracing levels ( on average) on the way back to the root, so the operation can be completed in time. Set operations and bulk operations In addition to the single-element insert, delete and lookup operations, several set operations have been defined on AVL trees: union, intersection and set difference. Then fast bulk operations on insertions or deletions can be implemented based on these set functions. These set operations rely on two helper operations, Split and Join. With the new operations, the implementation of AVL trees can be more efficient and highly-parallelizable. The function Join on two AVL trees and and a key will return a tree containing all elements in , as well as . It requires to be greater than all keys in and smaller than all keys in . If the two trees differ by height at most one, Join simply create a new node with left subtree , root and right subtree . Otherwise, suppose that is higher than for more than one (the other case is symmetric). Join follows the right spine of until a node which is balanced with . At this point a new node with left child , root and right child is created to replace c. The new node satisfies the AVL invariant, and its height is one greater than . The increase in height can increase the height of its ancestors, possibly invalidating the AVL invariant of those nodes. This can be fixed either with a double rotation if invalid at the parent or a single left rotation if invalid higher in the tree, in both cases restoring the height for any further ancestor nodes. Join will therefore require at most two rotations. The cost of this function is the difference of the heights between the two input trees. function JoinRightAVL(TL, k, TR) (l, k', c) = expose(TL) if (Height(c) <= Height(TR)+1) T' = Node(c, k, TR) if (Height(T') <= Height(l)+1) then return Node(l, k', T') else return rotateLeft(Node(l, k', rotateRight(T'))) else T' = JoinRightAVL(c, k, TR) T'' = Node(l, k', T') if (Height(T') <= Height(l)+1) return T'' else return rotateLeft(T'') function JoinLeftAVL(TL, k, TR) /* symmetric to JoinRightAVL */ function Join(TL, k, TR) if (Height(TL)>Height(TR)+1) return JoinRightAVL(TL, k, TR) if (Height(TR)>Height(TL)+1) return JoinLeftAVL(TL, k, TR) return Node(TL, k, TR) Here Height(v) is the height of a subtree (node) . (l,k,r) = expose(v) extracts 's left child , the key of 's root, and the right child . Node(l,k,r) means to create a node of left child , key , and right child . To split an AVL tree into two smaller trees, those smaller than key , and those greater than key , first draw a path from the root by inserting into the AVL. After this insertion, all values less than will be found on the left of the path, and all values greater than will be found on the right. By applying Join, all the subtrees on the left side are merged bottom-up using keys on the path as intermediate nodes from bottom to top to form the left tree, and the right part is asymmetric. The cost of Split is , order of the height of the tree. function Split(T, k) if (T = nil) return (nil, false, nil) (L,m,R) = expose(T) if (k = m) return (L, true, R) if (k<m) (L',b,R') = Split(L,k) return (L', b, Join(R', m, R)) if (k>m) (L',b,R') = Split(R, k) return (Join(L, m, L'), b, R')) The union of two AVL trees and representing sets and , is an AVL that represents . function Union(t1, t2): if t1 = nil: return t2 if t2 = nil: return t1 (t<, b, t>) = Split(t2, t1.root) return Join(Union(left(t1), t<), t1.root, Union(right(t1), t>)) Here, Split is presumed to return two trees: one holding the keys less its input key, one holding the greater keys. (The algorithm is non-destructive, but an in-place destructive version exists as well.) The algorithm for intersection or difference is similar, but requires the Join2 helper routine that is the same as Join but without the middle key. Based on the new functions for union, intersection or difference, either one key or multiple keys can be inserted to or deleted from the AVL tree. Since Split calls Join but does not deal with the balancing criteria of AVL trees directly, such an implementation is usually called the "join-based" implementation. The complexity of each of union, intersection and difference is for AVL trees of sizes and . More importantly, since the recursive calls to union, intersection or difference are independent of each other, they can be executed in parallel with a parallel depth . When , the join-based implementation has the same computational DAG as single-element insertion and deletion. Rebalancing If during a modifying operation the height difference between two child subtrees changes, this may, as long as it is < 2, be reflected by an adaption of the balance information at the parent. During insert and delete operations a (temporary) height difference of 2 may arise, which means that the parent subtree has to be "rebalanced". The given repair tools are the so-called tree rotations, because they move the keys only "vertically", so that the ("horizontal") in-order sequence of the keys is fully preserved (which is essential for a binary-search tree). Let X be the node that has a (temporary) balance factor of −2 or +2. Its left or right subtree was modified. Let Z be the child with the higher subtree (see figures 2 and 3). Note that both children are in AVL shape by induction hypothesis. In case of insertion this insertion has happened to one of Z's children in a way that Z's height has increased. In case of deletion this deletion has happened to the sibling t1 of Z in a way so that t1's height being already lower has decreased. (This is the only case where Z's balance factor may also be 0.) There are four possible variants of the violation: And the rebalancing is performed differently: Thereby, the situations are denoted as where C (= child direction) and B (= balance) come from the set } with The balance violation of case is repaired by a simple rotation whereas the case is repaired by a double rotation The cost of a rotation, either simple or double, is constant. Simple rotation Figure 2 shows a Right Right situation. In its upper half, node X has two child trees with a balance factor of +2. Moreover, the inner child t23 of Z (i.e., left child when Z is right child, or right child when Z is left child) is not higher than its sibling t4. This can happen by a height increase of subtree t4 or by a height decrease of subtree t1. In the latter case, also the pale situation where t23 has the same height as t4 may occur. The result of the left rotation is shown in the lower half of the figure. Three links (thick edges in figure 2) and two balance factors are to be updated. As the figure shows, before an insertion, the leaf layer was at level h+1, temporarily at level h+2 and after the rotation again at level h+1. In case of a deletion, the leaf layer was at level h+2, where it is again, when t23 and t4 were of same height. Otherwise the leaf layer reaches level h+1, so that the height of the rotated tree decreases. Code snippet of a simple left rotation node *rotate_Left(node *X, node *Z) { // Z is by 2 higher than its sibling t23 = left_child(Z); // Inner child of Z right_child(X) = t23; if (t23 != null) parent(t23) = X; left_child(Z) = X; parent(X) = Z; // 1st case, BF(Z) == 0, // only happens with deletion, not insertion: if (BF(Z) == 0) { // t23 has been of same height as t4 BF(X) = +1; // t23 now higher BF(Z) = –1; // t4 now lower than X } else { // 2nd case happens with insertion or deletion: BF(X) = 0; BF(Z) = 0; } return Z; // return new root of rotated subtree } Double rotation Figure 3 shows a Right Left situation. In its upper third, node X has two child trees with a balance factor of +2. But unlike figure 2, the inner child Y of Z is higher than its sibling t4. This can happen by the insertion of Y itself or a height increase of one of its subtrees t2 or t3 (with the consequence that they are of different height) or by a height decrease of subtree t1. In the latter case, it may also occur that t2 and t3 are of the same height. The result of the first, the right, rotation is shown in the middle third of the figure. (With respect to the balance factors, this rotation is not of the same kind as the other AVL single rotations, because the height difference between Y and t4 is only 1.) The result of the final left rotation is shown in the lower third of the figure. Five links (thick edges in figure 3) and three balance factors are to be updated. As the figure shows, before an insertion, the leaf layer was at level h+1, temporarily at level h+2 and after the double rotation again at level h+1. In case of a deletion, the leaf layer was at level h+2 and after the double rotation it is at level h+1, so that the height of the rotated tree decreases. Code snippet of a right-left double rotation node *rotate_RightLeft(node *X, node *Z) { // Z is by 2 higher than its sibling Y = left_child(Z); // Inner child of Z // Y is by 1 higher than sibling t3 = right_child(Y); left_child(Z) = t3; if (t3 != null) parent(t3) = Z; right_child(Y) = Z; parent(Z) = Y; t2 = left_child(Y); right_child(X) = t2; if (t2 != null) parent(t2) = X; left_child(Y) = X; parent(X) = Y; // 1st case, BF(Y) == 0 if (BF(Y) == 0) { BF(X) = 0; BF(Z) = 0; } else if (BF(Y) > 0) { // t3 was higher BF(X) = –1; // t1 now higher BF(Z) = 0; } else { // t2 was higher BF(X) = 0; BF(Z) = +1; // t4 now higher } BF(Y) = 0; return Y; // return new root of rotated subtree } Comparison to other structures Both AVL trees and red–black (RB) trees are self-balancing binary search trees and they are related mathematically. Indeed, every AVL tree can be colored red–black, but there are RB trees which are not AVL balanced. For maintaining the AVL (or RB) tree's invariants, rotations play an important role. In the worst case, even without rotations, AVL or RB insertions or deletions require inspections and/or updates to AVL balance factors (or RB colors). RB insertions and deletions and AVL insertions require from zero to three tail-recursive rotations and run in amortized time, thus equally constant on average. AVL deletions requiring rotations in the worst case are also on average. RB trees require storing one bit of information (the color) in each node, while AVL trees mostly use two bits for the balance factor, although, when stored at the children, one bit with meaning «lower than sibling» suffices. The bigger difference between the two data structures is their height limit. For a tree of size an AVL tree's height is at most where   the golden ratio,   and  . a RB tree's height is at most  . AVL trees are more rigidly balanced than RB trees with an asymptotic relation AVL/RB ≈0.720 of the maximal heights. For insertions and deletions, Ben Pfaff shows in 79 measurements a relation of AVL/RB between 0.677 and 1.077 with median ≈0.947 and geometric mean ≈0.910. See also WAVL tree Weight-balanced tree Splay tree Scapegoat tree B-tree T-tree List of data structures References Further reading Donald Knuth. The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 3: Sorting and Searching, Third Edition. Addison-Wesley, 1997. . Pages 458–475 of section 6.2.3: Balanced Trees. . External links 1962 in computing Articles with example pseudocode Binary trees Soviet inventions Search trees Amortized data structures

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliphatic%20compound

Aliphatic compound

In organic chemistry, hydrocarbons (compounds composed solely of carbon and hydrogen) are divided into two classes: aromatic compounds and aliphatic compounds (; G. aleiphar, fat, oil). Aliphatic compounds can be saturated (in which all the C-C bonds are single requiring the structure to be completed, or 'saturated', by hydrogen) like hexane, or unsaturated, like hexene and hexyne. Open-chain compounds, whether straight or branched, and which contain no rings of any type, are always aliphatic. Cyclic compounds can be aliphatic if they are not aromatic. Structure Aliphatic compounds can be saturated, joined by single bonds (alkanes), or unsaturated, with double bonds (alkenes) or triple bonds (alkynes). If other elements (heteroatoms) are bound to the carbon chain, the most common being oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur, and chlorine, it is no longer a hydrocarbon, and therefore no longer an aliphatic compound. However, such compounds may still be referred to as aliphatic if the hydrocarbon portion of the molecule is aliphatic, e.g. aliphatic amines, to differentiate them from aromatic amines. The least complex aliphatic compound is methane (CH4). Properties Most aliphatic compounds are flammable, allowing the use of hydrocarbons as fuel, such as methane in natural gas for stoves or heating; butane in torches and lighters; various aliphatic (as well as aromatic) hydrocarbons in liquid transportation fuels like petrol/gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel; and other uses such as ethyne (acetylene) in welding. Examples of aliphatic compounds The most important aliphatic compounds are: n-, iso- and cyclo-alkanes (saturated hydrocarbons) n-, iso- and cyclo-alkenes and -alkynes (unsaturated hydrocarbons). Important examples of low-molecular aliphatic compounds can be found in the list below (sorted by the number of carbon-atoms): References Organic compounds

2123

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abyssinia%20%28disambiguation%29

Abyssinia (disambiguation)

Abyssinia is a historical name for the Ethiopian Empire. Abyssinia may also refer to: Arts and media Abyssinia, a theatrical show by Bert Williams Abyssinia (1987 musical), a show first staged in 1987 Abyssinia (1906 musical), 1906 Broadway musical by Will Marion Cook, Bert Williams, Jesse A. Shipp, and Alex Rogers "Abyssinia", a song by the Patti Smith Group on Radio Ethiopia Abyssinia, a 2003 novel by Ursula Dubosarsky "Abyssinia, Henry", an episode of the television series M*A*S*H Places Abyssinia Lines, a neighbourhood of Jamshed Town in Karachi, Sindh, Pakistan Apostolic Vicariate of Abyssinia, the former Eastern Catholic missionary Vessels HMS Abyssinia (1870), a British armoured ship SS Abyssinia, an 1870 Canadian Pacific steamship Other uses Abyssinian languages, family of languages spoken in Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Sudan Abyssinian peoples, ethnic or pan-ethnic identifier used to refer to Ethiopians and Eritreans Abyssinia (battle honour) Abyssinia Creek, The Pilbara, Western Australia See also Abyssinian (disambiguation) Habash (disambiguation) Habishi (disambiguation) History of Ethiopia

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algebraic%20extension

Algebraic extension

In mathematics, an algebraic extension is a field extension such that every element of the larger field is algebraic over the smaller field ; that is, every element of is a root of a non-zero polynomial with coefficients in . A field extension that is not algebraic, is said to be transcendental, and must contain transcendental elements, that is, elements that are not algebraic. The algebraic extensions of the field of the rational numbers are called algebraic number fields and are the main objects of study of algebraic number theory. Another example of a common algebraic extension is the extension of the real numbers by the complex numbers. Some properties All transcendental extensions are of infinite degree. This in turn implies that all finite extensions are algebraic. The converse is not true however: there are infinite extensions which are algebraic. For instance, the field of all algebraic numbers is an infinite algebraic extension of the rational numbers. Let be an extension field of , and . The smallest subfield of that contains and is commonly denoted If is algebraic over , then the elements of can be expressed as polynomials in with coefficients in K; that is, is also the smallest ring containing and . In this case, is a finite extension of (it is a finite dimensional -vector space), and all its elements are algebraic over . These properties do not hold if is not algebraic. For example, and they are both infinite dimensional vector spaces over An algebraically closed field F has no proper algebraic extensions, that is, no algebraic extensions E with F < E. An example is the field of complex numbers. Every field has an algebraic extension which is algebraically closed (called its algebraic closure), but proving this in general requires some form of the axiom of choice. An extension L/K is algebraic if and only if every sub K-algebra of L is a field. Properties The following three properties hold: If E is an algebraic extension of F and F is an algebraic extension of K then E is an algebraic extension of K. If E and F are algebraic extensions of K in a common overfield C, then the compositum EF is an algebraic extension of K. If E is an algebraic extension of F and E > K > F then E is an algebraic extension of K. These finitary results can be generalized using transfinite induction: This fact, together with Zorn's lemma (applied to an appropriately chosen poset), establishes the existence of algebraic closures. Generalizations Model theory generalizes the notion of algebraic extension to arbitrary theories: an embedding of M into N is called an algebraic extension if for every x in N there is a formula p with parameters in M, such that p(x) is true and the set is finite. It turns out that applying this definition to the theory of fields gives the usual definition of algebraic extension. The Galois group of N over M can again be defined as the group of automorphisms, and it turns out that most of the theory of Galois groups can be developed for the general case. Relative algebraic closures Given a field k and a field K containing k, one defines the relative algebraic closure of k in K to be the subfield of K consisting of all elements of K that are algebraic over k, that is all elements of K that are a root of some nonzero polynomial with coefficients in k. See also Integral element Lüroth's theorem Galois extension Separable extension Normal extension Notes References Field extensions

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ani%20DiFranco

Ani DiFranco

Angela Maria "Ani" DiFranco (; born September 23, 1970) is an American-Canadian singer-songwriter. She has released more than 20 albums. DiFranco's music has been classified as folk rock and alternative rock, although it has additional influences from punk, funk, hip hop and jazz. She has released all her albums on her own record label, Righteous Babe. DiFranco supports many social and political movements by performing benefit concerts, appearing on benefit albums and speaking at rallies. Through the Righteous Babe Foundation, DiFranco has backed grassroots cultural and political organizations supporting causes including abortion rights and LGBT visibility. She counts American folk singer and songwriter Pete Seeger among her mentors. DiFranco released a memoir, No Walls and the Recurring Dream, on May 7, 2019, via Viking Books and made The New York Times Best Seller list. On February 9, 2024, DiFranco made her Broadway debut in Hadestown as Persephone, reprising the role she played in the concept album of the same name. Early life and education DiFranco was born in Buffalo, New York, on September 23, 1970, the daughter of Elizabeth (Ross) and Dante Americo DiFranco, who had met while attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her father was of Italian descent, and her mother was from Montreal. DiFranco started playing Beatles covers at local bars and busking with her guitar teacher, Michael Meldrum, at the age of nine. By 14 she was writing her own songs. She played them at bars and coffee houses throughout her teens. DiFranco graduated from the Buffalo Academy for Visual and Performing Arts high school at 16 and began attending classes at Buffalo State College. She was living by herself, having moved out of her mother's apartment after she became an emancipated minor when she was 15. Career DiFranco started her own record company, Righteous Babe Records, in 1989 at age 19. She released her self-titled debut album in the winter of 1990, shortly after relocating to New York City. There, she took poetry classes at The New School, where she met poet Sekou Sundiata, who was to become a friend and mentor. She toured steadily for the next 15 years, pausing only to record albums. Appearances at Canadian folk festivals and increasingly larger venues in the U.S. reflected her increasing popularity on the North American folk and roots scene. Throughout the early and mid-1990s DiFranco toured solo and also as a duo with Canadian drummer Andy Stochansky. In September 1995, DiFranco participated in a concert at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland Ohio, inaugurating the opening of the Woody Guthrie Archives in New York City. She later released a CD on Righteous Babe of the concert Til We Outnumber Em featuring artists such as DiFranco, Billy Bragg, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Arlo Guthrie, Indigo Girls, Dave Pirner, Tim Robbins, and Bruce Springsteen with 100 percent of proceeds going to the Woody Guthrie Foundation and Archives and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum educational department. In 1996, bassist Sara Lee joined the touring group, whose live rapport is showcased on the 1997 album Living in Clip. DiFranco would later release Lee's solo album Make It Beautiful on Righteous Babe. In 1998, Stochansky left to pursue a solo career as a singer-songwriter. A new touring ensemble consisting of Jason Mercer on bass, Julie Wolf on keyboards, and Daren Hahn on drums, augmented at times by a horn section, accompanied DiFranco on tour between 1998 and 2002. The 1990s were a period of heightened exposure for DiFranco, as she continued playing ever larger venues around the world and attracted international attention of the press, including cover stories in Spin, Ms., and Magnet, among others, as well as appearances on MTV and VH1. Her playfully ironic cover of the Bacharach/David song "Wishin' and Hopin'" appeared under the opening titles of the film My Best Friend's Wedding. She guest starred on a 1998 episode of the Fox sitcom King of the Hill, as the voice of Peggy's feminist guitar teacher, Emily. Beginning in 1999, Righteous Babe Records began releasing albums by other artists including Sara Lee, Sekou Sundiata, Arto Lindsay, Bitch and Animal, That One Guy, Utah Phillips, Hamell on Trial, Andrew Bird, Kurt Swinghammer, Buddy Wakefield, Anaïs Mitchell and Nona Hendryx. On September 11, 2001, DiFranco was in Manhattan and later penned the poem "Self Evident" about the experience. The poem was featured in the book It's a Free Country: Personal Freedom in America After September 11. The poem's title also became the name of DiFranco's first book of poetry released exclusively in Italy by Minimum Fax. It was later also featured in Verses, a book of her poetry published in the U.S. by Seven Stories press. DiFranco has written and performed many spoken-word pieces throughout her career and was showcased as a poet on the HBO series Def Poetry in 2005. Since her 2005 release Knuckle Down (co-produced by Joe Henry) DiFranco's touring band and recordings have featured bass player Todd Sickafoose and in turns other musicians such as Allison Miller, Andy Borger, Herlin Riley, and Terence Higgins on drums and Mike Dillon on percussion and vibes. On September 11, 2007, she released the first retrospective of her career, a two-disc compilation entitled Canon and simultaneously a retrospective collection of poetry book Verses. On September 30, 2008, she released Red Letter Year. In 2009, DiFranco appeared at Pete Seeger's 90th birthday celebration at Madison Square Garden, debuting her revamped version of the 1930s labor anthem "Which Side Are You On?" in a duet with Bruce Cockburn and also duetting with Kris Kristofferson on the folk classic "There's a Hole in the Bucket". DiFranco released an album on January 17, 2012, ¿Which Side Are You On?. It includes collaborations with Pete Seeger, Ivan Neville, Cyril Neville, Skerik, Adam Levy, Righteous Babe recording artist Anaïs Mitchell, CC Adcock, and a host of New Orleans-based horn players known for their work in such outfits as Galactic, Bonerama, and Rebirth Brass Band. In 2014, she released her eighteenth album, Allergic to Water. In 2017, she released her nineteenth, Binary. On May 7, 2019, DiFranco released a memoir, No Walls and the Recurring Dream, via Viking Books. It is described as a "coming-of-age story". In 2021, DiFranco released the album Revolutionary Love which was largely inspired by Valarie Kaur's book See No Stranger. DiFranco signed the October 2023 Artists4Ceasefire open letter to Joe Biden calling for a ceasefire during the Israeli bombardment of Gaza. Personal life DiFranco came out as bisexual in her twenties, and has written songs about love and sex with women and men. She addressed the controversy about her sexuality in the song "In or Out" on the album Imperfectly (1992). However, in 2015 she told the blog GoPride.com that she was "not so queer anymore, but definitely a woman-centered woman and just a human rights-centered artist." In a 2019 interview with Jezebel, she stated that she preferred the term "queer" because "bisexual" "always sounded very medical, like something you do to a frog in 9th grade science or something", and further added that "the irony is I'm pretty fuckin' hetero, which is unfortunate for me because many of my deepest connections are with women. But, naw, I just like what's in boys' pants better." In 1998, she married her sound engineer Andrew Gilchrist in a Unitarian Universalist service in Canada. DiFranco and Gilchrist divorced in 2003. In 1990, she wrote "Lost Woman Song", which was inspired by abortions she had at ages eighteen and twenty. DiFranco's father died in the summer of 2004. In July 2005, DiFranco developed tendinitis and took a nine-month hiatus from touring. In January 2007 DiFranco gave birth to her first child, a daughter, at her Buffalo home. She married the child's father, Mike Napolitano, also her regular producer, in 2009. In an interview on September 13, 2012, DiFranco mentioned that she was pregnant with her second child. In April 2013, she gave birth to her second child, a son. DiFranco has resided in the Bywater, New Orleans, neighborhood since 2008. DiFranco has described herself as an atheist. On the subject of religion, DiFranco has stated: DiFranco has spoken critically of cancel culture, saying it is "just gonna get us nowhere" and "The human family can't divorce each other". DiFranco herself has received criticism for planning a 2013 songwriting retreat at Nottoway, a former slave plantation. She cancelled the retreat three days after the news broke, writing on her website, "I needed a wake-up call and you gave it to me." In a 2019 interview, she said of her choices at the time, "I should have found the ultimate humility to put down my own hurt, and all of the misconceptions or mis-truths out there. You have to make yourself accountable. There’s a greater pain that’s bigger than me, and it’s more important." DiFranco wrote in her memoir that she "[sympathized] with both sides" regarding the controversial trans-exclusionary policies of the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival. In a 2019 interview, she elaborated on this statement, discussing her perception that cisgender women were being "asked again ... to move over and make room for somebody else," and later expressed that she understood the difficulty "for anybody outside of a very specific group to experience it the way that group does," saying that "maybe [women's spaces] should be a little more [inclusive]". Critical reception DiFranco has been a critical success for much of her career, with a career album average of 55 on Metacritic. Living in Clip, DiFranco's 1998 double live album, is the only one to achieve gold record status to date. DiFranco was praised by The Buffalo News in 2006 as "Buffalo's leading lady of rock music". Starting in 2003, DiFranco was nominated four consecutive times for Best Recording Package at the Grammy Awards, winning in 2004 for Evolve. On July 21, 2006, DiFranco received the Woman of Courage Award at the National Organization for Women (NOW) Conference and Young Feminist Summit in Albany, New York. DiFranco was one of the first musicians to receive the award, given each year to a woman who has set herself apart by her contributions to the feminist movement. In 2009, DiFranco received the Woody Guthrie Award for being a voice of positive social change. Music Style DiFranco's guitar playing is often characterized by a signature staccato style, rapid fingerpicking and many alternate tunings. She delivers many of her lines in a speaking style notable for its rhythmic variation. Her lyrics, which often include alliteration, metaphor, word play and a more or less gentle irony, have also received praise for their sophistication. Although DiFranco's music has been classified as both folk rock and alternative rock, she has reached across genres since her earliest albums incorporating first punk, then funk, hiphop, and jazz influences. While primarily an acoustic guitarist she has used a variety of instruments and styles: brass instrumentation was prevalent in 1998's Little Plastic Castle; a simple walking bass in her 1997 cover of Hal David and Burt Bacharach's "Wishin' and Hopin' "; strings on the 1997 live album Living in Clip and 2004's Knuckle Down; and electronics and synthesizers in 1999's To the Teeth and 2006's Reprieve. DiFranco has stated that "folk music is not an acoustic guitar – that's not where the heart of it is. I use the word 'folk' in reference to punk music and rap music. It's an attitude, it's an awareness of one's heritage, and it's a community. It's subcorporate music that gives voice to different communities and their struggle against authority." Musical collaborations, cover versions, and samples DiFranco has collaborated with a wide range of artists. In 1997, she appeared on Canadian songwriter Bruce Cockburn's Charity of Night album. In 1998, she produced fellow folksinger Dan Bern's album Fifty Eggs. She developed a deep association with folksinger and social activist Utah Phillips throughout the mid-1990s, sharing her stage and her audience with the older musician until his death in 2008 and resulting in two collaborative albums: The Past Didn't Go Anywhere (1996) and Fellow Workers (1999, with liner notes by Howard Zinn). The Past is built around Phillips's storytelling, an important part of his art that had not previously been documented on recordings; on the album, DiFranco provides musical settings for his speaking voice. The followup, Fellow Workers, was recorded live in Daniel Lanois's Kingsway Studio in New Orleans and features Phillips fronting DiFranco's touring band for a collection of songs and stories. Prince recorded two songs with DiFranco in 1999, "Providence" on her To the Teeth album, and "Eye Love U, But Eye Don't Trust U Anymore" on Prince's Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic album. Funk and soul jazz musician Maceo Parker and rapper Corey Parker have both appeared on DiFranco's albums and featured appearances by her on theirs. Parker and DiFranco toured together in 1999. She has appeared on several compilations of the songs of Pete Seeger and frequented his Hudson Clearwater Revival Festival. In 2001, she appeared on Brazilian artist Lenine's album Falange Canibal. In 2002, her rendition of Greg Brown's "The Poet Game" appeared on Going Driftless: An Artist's Tribute to Greg Brown. Also in 2002 she recorded a duet with Jackie Chan of the Irving Gordon song "Unforgettable" for a record of unlikely collaborations, When Pigs Fly: Songs You Never Thought You'd Hear. In 2005, she appeared on Dar Williams' record My Better Self, duetting on William's cover of Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb". She performed with Cyndi Lauper on "Sisters of Avalon" a track from Lauper's 2005 The Body Acoustic album. In 2006, she produced Hamell on Trial's album Songs for Parents Who Enjoy Drugs. In 2008, she appeared on Todd Sickafoose's album Tiny Resisters. In 2010, she co-produced a track with Margaret Cho called "Captain Cameltoe" for the comedian's Cho Dependant album. In 2011, she appeared on Rob Wasserman's album Note of Hope, an exploration of the writings of Woody Guthrie with musical accompaniment, though the track in which she appeared, "Voice", was actually recorded 13 years earlier. Also in 2011 she duetted with Greg Dulli on the Twilight Singers record Dynamite Steps. Other artists have covered and sampled DiFranco's work throughout the years. Her spoken word poem "Self Evident" was covered by Public Enemy founder Chuck D's group called Impossebulls. Alana Davis had some commercial success with DiFranco's song "32 Flavors". Samples from the track "Coming Up" were used by DJ Spooky in his album Live Without Dead Time, produced for AdBusters Magazine in 2003. In 2010, DiFranco played Persephone on Anaïs Mitchell's album Hadestown. DiFranco was approached by Zoe Boekbinder to work on their Prison Music Project, an album of collaborations between incarcerated and formerly incarcerated writers and musicians on the outside. DiFranco co-produced the project with Boekbinder and co-wrote and performed "Nowhere but Barstow and Prison." The album Long Time Gone was released on Righteous Babe Records in 2020 after ten years in the making. Lyrical content Although much of DiFranco's material is autobiographical, it is often also strongly political. Many of her songs are concerned with contemporary social issues such as racism, sexism, sexual abuse, homophobia, reproductive rights, poverty, and war. In 2008, she donated a song to Aid Still Required's CD to assist with the restoration of the devastation done to Southeast Asia from the 2004 tsunami. The combination of personal and political is partially responsible for DiFranco's early popularity among politically active college students, particularly those of the left wing, some of whom set up fan pages on the web to document DiFranco's career as early as 1994. DiFranco's rapid rise in popularity in the mid-1990s was fueled mostly by personal contact and word of mouth rather than mainstream media. Label independence Ani cites her anti-corporate ethos for the main reason she decided to start her own label. This has allowed her a considerable degree of creative freedom over the years, including, for example, providing all instrumentals and vocals and recording the album herself at her home on an analog 8-track reel to reel, and handling much of the artwork and packaging design for her 2004 album Educated Guess. She has referenced this independence from major labels in song more than once, including "The Million You Never Made" (Not a Pretty Girl), which discusses the act of turning down a lucrative contract, "The Next Big Thing" (Not So Soft), which describes an imagined meeting with a label head-hunter who evaluates the singer based on her looks, and "Napoleon" (Dilate), which sympathizes sarcastically with an unnamed friend who did sign with a label. The business grew organically starting in 1990 with the first cassette tape. Connections were made when women in colleges started duplicating and sharing tapes. Offers to play at colleges started coming in and her popularity grew largely by word of mouth and through women's groups or organizations. Zango and Goldenrod, two music distributors specializing in women's music, started carrying DiFranco's music. In general they sold music to independent music stores and women's book stores. In 1995, Righteous Babe Records signed with Koch International for DiFranco's release of Not a Pretty Girl. Her records could then be found in large and small record stores alike. DiFranco has occasionally joined with Prince in discussing publicly the problems associated with major record companies. Righteous Babe Records employs a number of people in her hometown of Buffalo. In a 1997 open letter to Ms. magazine she expressed displeasure that what she considers a way to ensure her own artistic freedom was seen by others solely in terms of its financial success. Activism From the earliest days of her career, DiFranco has lent her voice and her name to a broad range of social movements, performing benefit concerts, appearing on benefit albums, speaking at rallies, and offering info table space to organizations at her concerts and the virtual equivalent on her website, among other methods and actions. In 1999, she created her own not-for-profit organization; as the Buffalo News has reported, "Through the Righteous Babe Foundation, DiFranco has backed various grassroots cultural and political organizations, supporting causes ranging from abortion rights to gay visibility." During the first Gulf War, DiFranco participated in the anti-war movement. In early 1993 she played Pete Seeger's Clearwater Folk Festival for the first time. In 1998, she was a featured performer in the Dead Man Walking benefit concert series raising money for Sister Helen Prejean's "Not in Our Name" anti-death penalty organization. DiFranco's commitment to opposing the death penalty is longstanding; she has also been a long time supporter of the Southern Center for Human Rights. During the 2000 U.S. presidential election, she actively supported and voted for Green Party candidate Ralph Nader, though in an open letter she made clear that if she lived in a swing state, she would vote for Al Gore to prevent George W. Bush from being elected. In 2004, DiFranco visited Burma in order to learn about the Burmese resistance movement and the country's fight for democracy. During her travels she met with then-detained resistance leader Aung San Suu Kyi. Her song "In The Way" was later featured on For the Lady, a benefit CD that donated all proceeds to the United States Campaign for Burma. During the 2004 presidential primaries, she supported liberal, anti-war Democrat Dennis Kucinich, who appeared on stage with her during several of her concerts. After the primary season ended, and John Kerry was the clear Democratic candidate, DiFranco launched a "Vote Dammit!" tour of swing states encouraging audience members to vote. In 2005, she lobbied Congress against the proliferation of nuclear power in general and the placement of nuclear waste dumps on Indian land in particular. In 2008, she again backed Kucinich in his bid for the presidency. In 2002, Righteous Babe Records established the "Aiding Buffalo's Children" program in conjunction with members of the local community to raise funds for Buffalo's public school system. To kick off the program, DiFranco donated "a day's pay"—the performance fee from her concert that year at Shea's Performing Arts Center— to ABC and challenged her fans to do the same. Aiding Buffalo's Children has since been folded into the Community Foundation of Greater Buffalo, contributing to a variety of charitable funds. In 2005, when Hurricane Katrina devastated DiFranco's newly adopted home town of New Orleans, she collected donations from fans around the world through The Righteous Babe Store website for the Katrina Piano Fund, helping musicians replace instruments lost in the hurricane, raising over $47,500 for the cause. In 2010, after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, she performed at the "For Our Coast" benefit concert joining Marianne Faithfull, C. C. Adcock and others at the Acadiana Center for the Arts Theater in Lafayette, raising money for Gulf Aid Acadiana, and the Gulf Aid show with Lenny Kravitz, Mos Def, and others at Mardi Gras World River City in New Orleans, both shows raising money to help protect the wetlands, clean up the coast and to assist the fishermen and their families affected by the spill. DiFranco also sits on the board for The Roots of Music, founded by Rebirth Brass Band drummer Derrick Tabb. The organization provides free marching band instruction to children in the New Orleans area in addition to academic tutoring and mentoring. DiFranco joined about 500,000 people at the March for Women's Lives in DC in April 2004. As an honored guest she marched in the front row for the three-mile route, along with Margaret Cho, Janeane Garofalo, Whoopi Goldberg, Gloria Steinem and others. Later in the day, Ani played a few songs on the main stage in front of the Capitol, including "Your Next Bold Move". Scot Fisher, formerly Righteous Babe label president and DiFranco's manager for many years, has been a longtime advocate of the preservation movement in Buffalo. In 1999, he and DiFranco purchased a decaying church on the verge of demolition in downtown Buffalo and began the lengthy process of restoring it. In 2006, the building opened its doors again, first briefly as "The Church" and then as "Babeville," housing two concert venues, the record label's business office, and Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center. DiFranco is also a member of the Toronto-based charity Artists Against Racism for which she participated in a radio PSA. In October 2023, DiFranco signed an open letter to Joe Biden, President of the United States, of artists calling for a ceasefire of the Israeli bombardment of Gaza. Awards and nominations Discography Studio albums Ani DiFranco (1990) Not So Soft (1991) Imperfectly (1992) Puddle Dive (1993) Out of Range (1994) Not a Pretty Girl (1995) Dilate (1996) Little Plastic Castle (1998) Up Up Up Up Up Up (1999) To the Teeth (1999) Revelling/Reckoning (2001) Evolve (2003) Educated Guess (2004) Knuckle Down (2005) Reprieve (2006) Red Letter Year (2008) ¿Which Side Are You On? (2012) Allergic to Water (2014) Binary (2017) Revolutionary Love (2021) Unprecedented Sh!t (2024) with Utah Phillips The Past Didn't Go Anywhere (1996) Fellow Workers (1999) Live albums 1994 – An Acoustic Evening With 1994 – Women in (E)motion (German Release) 1997 – Living in Clip 2002 – So Much Shouting, So Much Laughter 2004 – Atlanta – 10.9.03 (Official Bootleg series #1) 2004 – Sacramento – 10.25.03 (Official Bootleg series #1) 2004 – Portland – 4.7.04 (Official Bootleg series #1) 2005 – Boston – 11.16.03 (Official Bootleg series #1) 2005 – Chicago – 1.17.04 (Official Bootleg series #1) 2005 – Madison – 1.25.04 (Official Bootleg series #1) 2005 – Rome – 11.15.04 (Official Bootleg series #1) 2006 – Carnegie Hall – 4.6.02 (Official Bootleg series No. 1 – available in stores) 2007 – Boston – 11.10.06 (Official Bootleg series #1) 2008 – Hamburg – 10.18.07 (Official Bootleg series #1) 2009 – Saratoga, CA – 9.18.06 (Official Bootleg series #1) 2009 – Chicago – 9.22.07 (Official Bootleg series #1) 2010 – Live at Bull Moose Music (Limited edition) 2012 – Buffalo – April 22, 2012 (Official Bootleg series #2) 2013 – London – October 29, 2008 (Official Bootleg series #2) 2014 – Ridgefield, CT – November 18, 2009 (Official Bootleg series #2) 2014 – Harrisburg, PA – January 23, 2008 (Official Bootleg series #2) 2015 – New York, NY – March 30, 1995 (Official Bootleg series #2) 2016 – Glenside, PA – November 11, 2012 (Official Bootleg series #2) 2016 – Melbourne, FL – January 19, 2016 (Official Bootleg series #2) 2018 – Charlottesville, VA 5.12.18 (Official Bootleg series #3) 2019 – Woodstock, NY Jun 16, 2019 (Official Bootleg series #3) 2020 – Keene, NH Nov 16, 2019 (Official Bootleg series #3) 2021 – Revolutionary Love: Live at Big Blue EPs 1996 – More Joy, Less Shame 1999 – Little Plastic Remixes (limited distribution) 2000 – Swing Set 2016 – Play God Videos 2002 – Render: Spanning Time with Ani DiFranco 2004 – Trust 2008 – Live at Babeville Compilations 1993 – Like I Said: Songs 1990–91 1995 – Live from Mountain Stage, Vol. 8 – "Buildings & Bridges (live)" 1996 – Women's Work – "Cradle and All (live)" 1996 – Women: Live from Mountain Stage – "Egos Like Hairdos (live)" 1997 – Divine Divas: A World of Women's Voices – "Amazing Grace" 1998 – Live at World Café Vol. 6 – "Buildings & Bridges (live)" 1998 – Modern Day Storytellers – "Buildings & Bridges" 1998 – Rare on Air Vol. 4 (KCRW) – "Gravel (live)" 1998 – Where Have All the Flowers Gone: Songs of Pete Seeger – "My Name is Lisa Kalvelage" 1998 – Women of Spirit – "Done Wrong" 1999 – Respect: A Century of Women in Music – "32 Flavors" 2000 – Badlands: A Tribute to Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska – "Used Cars" 2000 – Best of Hard Rock Café Live – "Little Plastic Castle (live)" 2000 – 'Til We Outnumber 'Em – Performed "Do Re Mi" solo and "Ramblin' Round" with Indigo Girls; Producer 2001 – Live @ The World Café Vol. 10 – "32 Flavors" 2001 – Best of Sessions at West 54th – "32 Flavors" 2002 – Gascd – "Your Next Bold Move" 2002 – Going Driftless: An Artist Tribute to Greg Brown – "The Poet Game" 2002 – When Pigs Fly: Songs You Never Thought You'd Hear – "Unforgettable" w/ Jackie Chan 2003 – Peace Not War – "Self Evident" 2004 – Peace Not War Vol. 2 – "Animal" 2004 – For the Lady – "In the Way" 2005 – Bonnaroo Music Festival 2004 (CD & DVD) – "Evolve (live)" 2006 – Music Is Hope – "Napoleon (remix)" 2006 – Dead Man Walking: Music from and Inspired by the Motion Picture – "Crime for Crime", "Fuel", "Up Up Up Up Up Up" 2007 – Canon 2007 – Sowing the Seed: The 10th Anniversary Appleseed Recordings – "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy" 2007 – Cool as Folk: Cambridge Folk Festival – "Cradle and All (live)" 2009 – Singing Through the Hard Times: A Utah Phillips Celebration – "The International" 2011 – Note of Hope: A Celebration of Woody Guthrie – "Voice" 2011 – Every Mother Counts – "Present/Infant" (Remix) 2012 – Occupy This Album – "Which Side Are You On? (a capella)" 2019 – No Walls Mixtape 2020 – Prison Music Project: Long Time Gone – "Nowhere but Barstow and Prison" As producer 1998 – Dan Bern – Fifty Eggs 2010 – Margaret Cho – Cho Dependent – co-producer on "Captain Cameltoe" 2017 – Peter Mulvey – Are You Listening? 2020 – Prison Music Project: Long Time Gone Other contributions 1989 – Demo tape (unreleased) 2001 – John Gorka – The Company You Keep – backing vocals on "Oh Abraham" 2006 – Jason Karaban – Doomed to Make Choices 2006 – Twilight Singers – Powder Burns – Featured on "Bonnie Brae," "Candy Cane Crawl," and "Powder Burns" 2008 – Dr. John – The City That Care Forgot – Contributed backing vocals to the title track. 2009 – Jason Karaban – Sobriety Kills 2010 – Anaïs Mitchell – Hadestown 2010 – Preservation Hall Jazz Band – Preservation: An Album to Benefit Preservation Hall & The Preservation Hall Music Outreach Program – Featured on "Freight Train" 2011 – Twilight Singers – Dynamite Steps – Featured on "Blackbird and the Fox" 2016 – Ryan Harvey – Featured on "Old Man Trump" 2019 – Rising Appalachia – Leylines – Featured on "Speak Out" 2021 – Pieta Brown – Featured on "We Are Not Machines" Poetry 2004 – Self-evident: poesie e disegni 2007 – Verses References External links The Righteous Babe homepage Ani DiFranco at Rolling Stone 1970 births American activists 20th-century American women guitarists 20th-century American guitarists 20th-century atheists 20th-century American LGBT people 21st-century American bass guitarists 21st-century American composers 21st-century American singer-songwriters 21st-century American women guitarists 21st-century American women singers 21st-century atheists 21st-century American LGBT people 21st-century American women composers Activists from New York (state) American abortion-rights activists American acoustic guitarists American anti–death penalty activists American atheists American contraltos American folk guitarists American folk rock musicians American folk singers American gun control activists American people of Canadian descent American people of Italian descent American rock songwriters American buskers American women rock singers American women singer-songwriters Anti-corporate activists Atheist feminists Bisexual feminists Bisexual singers Bisexual composers Bisexual songwriters Bisexual women musicians Buffalo State College alumni American feminist musicians Grammy Award winners Guitarists from New York (state) LGBT people from New York (state) American LGBT rights activists American LGBT singers American LGBT songwriters American LGBT composers Living people Musicians from Buffalo, New York The New School alumni Righteous Babe Records artists Singer-songwriters from New York (state) American women bass guitarists American bisexual women American bisexual musicians American bisexual writers

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Arene (disambiguation)

An Arene, or aromatic hydrocarbon, is a hydrocarbon with alternating double and single bonds between carbon atoms forming rings. Arene may also refer to: Arene (gastropod), a genus of marine snails in the family Areneidae Arene (mythology), the wife of Aphareus and mother of Idas and Lynceus in Greek mythology Arene, Elis, an ancient town in Elis, Greece, also known as Samiko Jean Arènes (1898–1960), French botanist who described many new species of the genus Dombeya Paul Arène (1843–1896), Provençal poet and French writer See also Arena (disambiguation)

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Aesthetics

Aesthetics (also spelled esthetics) is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of beauty and the nature of taste; and functions as the philosophy of art. Aesthetics examines the philosophy of aesthetic value, which is determined by critical judgements of artistic taste; thus, the function of aesthetics is the "critical reflection on art, culture and nature". Aesthetics studies natural and artificial sources of experiences and how people form a judgement about those sources of experience. It considers what happens in our minds when we engage with objects or environments such as viewing visual art, listening to music, reading poetry, experiencing a play, watching a fashion show, movie, sports or exploring various aspects of nature. The philosophy of art specifically studies how artists imagine, create, and perform works of art, as well as how people use, enjoy, and criticize art. Aesthetics considers why people like some works of art and not others, as well as how art can affect our moods and our beliefs. Both aesthetics and the philosophy of art try to find answers to what exactly is art and what makes good art. Etymology The word aesthetic is derived from the Ancient Greek (, "perceptive, sensitive, pertaining to sensory perception"), which in turn comes from (, "I perceive, sense, learn") and is related to (, "perception, sensation"). Aesthetics in this central sense has been said to start with the series of articles on "The Pleasures of the Imagination", which the journalist Joseph Addison wrote in the early issues of the magazine The Spectator in 1712. The term aesthetics was appropriated and coined with new meaning by the German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten in his dissertation Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus () in 1735; Baumgarten chose "aesthetics" because he wished to emphasize the experience of art as a means of knowing. Baumgarten's definition of aesthetics in the fragment Aesthetica (1750) is occasionally considered the first definition of modern aesthetics. The term was introduced into the English language by Thomas Carlyle in his Life of Friedrich Schiller (1825). History of aesthetics The history of the philosophy of art as aesthetics covering the visual arts, the literary arts, the musical arts and other artists forms of expression can be dated back at least to Aristotle and the ancient Greeks. Aristotle writing of the literary arts in his Poetics stated that epic poetry, tragedy, comedy, dithyrambic poetry, painting, sculpture, music, and dance are all fundamentally acts of mimesis, each varying in imitation by medium, object, and manner. Aristotle applies the term mimesis both as a property of a work of art and also as the product of the artist's intention and contends that the audience's realisation of the mimesis is vital to understanding the work itself. Aristotle states that mimesis is a natural instinct of humanity that separates humans from animals and that all human artistry "follows the pattern of nature". Because of this, Aristotle believed that each of the mimetic arts possesses what Stephen Halliwell calls "highly structured procedures for the achievement of their purposes." For example, music imitates with the media of rhythm and harmony, whereas dance imitates with rhythm alone, and poetry with language. The forms also differ in their object of imitation. Comedy, for instance, is a dramatic imitation of men worse than average; whereas tragedy imitates men slightly better than average. Lastly, the forms differ in their manner of imitation – through narrative or character, through change or no change, and through drama or no drama. Erich Auerbach has extended the discussion of history of aesthetics in his book titled Mimesis. Aesthetics and the philosophy of art Some distinguish aesthetics from the philosophy of art, claiming that the former is the study of beauty and taste while the latter is the study of works of art. But aesthetics typically considers questions of beauty as well as of art. It examines topics such as art works, aesthetic experience, and aesthetic judgement. Aesthetic experience refers to the sensory contemplation or appreciation of an object (not necessarily a work of art), while artistic judgement refers to the recognition, appreciation or criticism of art in general or a specific work of art. In the words of one philosopher, "Philosophy of art is about art. Aesthetics is about many things—including art. But it is also about our experience of breathtaking landscapes or the pattern of shadows on the wall opposite your office. Philosophers of art weigh a culturally contingent conception of art versus one that is purely theoretical. They study the varieties of art in relation to their physical, social, and cultural environments. Aesthetic philosophers sometimes also refer to psychological studies to help understand how people see, hear, imagine, think, learn, and act in relation to the materials and problems of art. Aesthetic psychology studies the creative process and the aesthetic experience. Aesthetic judgement, universals, and ethics Aesthetic judgement Aesthetics examines affective domain response to an object or phenomenon. Judgements of aesthetic value rely on the ability to discriminate at a sensory level. However, aesthetic judgements usually go beyond sensory discrimination. For David Hume, delicacy of taste is not merely "the ability to detect all the ingredients in a composition", but also the sensitivity "to pains as well as pleasures, which escape the rest of mankind." Thus, sensory discrimination is linked to capacity for pleasure. For Immanuel Kant (Critique of Judgment, 1790), "enjoyment" is the result when pleasure arises from sensation, but judging something to be "beautiful" has a third requirement: sensation must give rise to pleasure by engaging reflective contemplation. Judgements of beauty are sensory, emotional and intellectual all at once. Kant observed of a man "if he says that 'Canary wine is pleasant,' he is quite content if someone else corrects his expression and remind him that he ought to say instead: 'It is pleasant to me,'" because "every one has his own [sense of] taste". The case of "beauty" is different from mere "pleasantness" because "if he gives out anything as beautiful, he supposes in others the same satisfaction—he judges not merely for himself, but for every one, and speaks of beauty as if it were a property of things." Viewer interpretations of beauty may on occasion be observed to possess two concepts of value: aesthetics and taste. Aesthetics is the philosophical notion of beauty. Taste is a result of an education process and awareness of elite cultural values learned through exposure to mass culture. Bourdieu examined how the elite in society define the aesthetic values like taste and how varying levels of exposure to these values can result in variations by class, cultural background, and education. According to Kant, beauty is subjective and universal; thus certain things are beautiful to everyone. In the opinion of Władysław Tatarkiewicz, there are six conditions for the presentation of art: beauty, form, representation, reproduction of reality, artistic expression and innovation. However, one may not be able to pin down these qualities in a work of art. The question of whether there are facts about aesthetic judgments belongs to the branch of metaphilosophy known as meta-aesthetics. Factors involved in aesthetic judgement Aesthetic judgement is closely tied to disgust. Responses like disgust show that sensory detection is linked in instinctual ways to facial expressions including physiological responses like the gag reflex. Disgust is triggered largely by dissonance; as Darwin pointed out, seeing a stripe of soup in a man's beard is disgusting even though neither soup nor beards are themselves disgusting. Aesthetic judgements may be linked to emotions or, like emotions, partially embodied in physical reactions. For example, the awe inspired by a sublime landscape might physically manifest with an increased heart-rate or pupil dilation. As seen, emotions are conformed to 'cultural' reactions, therefore aesthetics is always characterized by 'regional responses', as Francis Grose was the first to affirm in his Rules for Drawing Caricaturas: With an Essay on Comic Painting (1788), published in W. Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, Bagster, London s.d. (1791? [1753]), pp. 1–24. Francis Grose can therefore be claimed to be the first critical 'aesthetic regionalist' in proclaiming the anti-universality of aesthetics in contrast to the perilous and always resurgent dictatorship of beauty. 'Aesthetic Regionalism' can thus be seen as a political statement and stance which vies against any universal notion of beauty to safeguard the counter-tradition of aesthetics related to what has been considered and dubbed un-beautiful just because one's culture does not contemplate it, e.g. Edmund Burke's sublime, what is usually defined as 'primitive' art, or un-harmonious, non-cathartic art, camp art, which 'beauty' posits and creates, dichotomously, as its opposite, without even the need of formal statements, but which will be 'perceived' as ugly. Likewise, aesthetic judgments may be culturally conditioned to some extent. Victorians in Britain often saw African sculpture as ugly, but just a few decades later, Edwardian audiences saw the same sculptures as beautiful. Evaluations of beauty may well be linked to desirability, perhaps even to sexual desirability. Thus, judgments of aesthetic value can become linked to judgments of economic, political, or moral value. In a current context, a Lamborghini might be judged to be beautiful partly because it is desirable as a status symbol, or it may be judged to be repulsive partly because it signifies over-consumption and offends political or moral values. The context of its presentation also affects the perception of artwork; artworks presented in a classical museum context are liked more and rated more interesting than when presented in a sterile laboratory context. While specific results depend heavily on the style of the presented artwork, overall, the effect of context proved to be more important for the perception of artwork than the effect of genuineness (whether the artwork was being presented as original or as a facsimile/copy). Aesthetic judgments can often be very fine-grained and internally contradictory. Likewise aesthetic judgments seem often to be at least partly intellectual and interpretative. What a thing means or symbolizes is often what is being judged. Modern aestheticians have asserted that will and desire were almost dormant in aesthetic experience, yet preference and choice have seemed important aesthetics to some 20th-century thinkers. The point is already made by Hume, but see Mary Mothersill, "Beauty and the Critic's Judgment", in The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics, 2004. Thus aesthetic judgments might be seen to be based on the senses, emotions, intellectual opinions, will, desires, culture, preferences, values, subconscious behaviour, conscious decision, training, instinct, sociological institutions, or some complex combination of these, depending on exactly which theory is employed. A third major topic in the study of aesthetic judgments is how they are unified across art forms. For instance, the source of a painting's beauty has a different character to that of beautiful music, suggesting their aesthetics differ in kind. The distinct inability of language to express aesthetic judgment and the role of social construction further cloud this issue. Aesthetic universals The philosopher Denis Dutton identified six universal signatures in human aesthetics: Expertise or virtuosity. Humans cultivate, recognize, and admire technical artistic skills. Nonutilitarian pleasure. People enjoy art for art's sake, and do not demand that it keep them warm or put food on the table. Style. Artistic objects and performances satisfy rules of composition that place them in a recognizable style. Criticism. People make a point of judging, appreciating, and interpreting works of art. Imitation. With a few important exceptions like abstract painting, works of art simulate experiences of the world. Special focus. Art is set aside from ordinary life and made a dramatic focus of experience. Artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn have indicated that there are too many exceptions to Dutton's categories. For example, Hirschhorn's installations deliberately eschew technical virtuosity. People can appreciate a Renaissance Madonna for aesthetic reasons, but such objects often had (and sometimes still have) specific devotional functions. "Rules of composition" that might be read into Duchamp's Fountain or John Cage's 4′33″ do not locate the works in a recognizable style (or certainly not a style recognizable at the time of the works' realization). Moreover, some of Dutton's categories seem too broad: a physicist might entertain hypothetical worlds in his/her imagination in the course of formulating a theory. Another problem is that Dutton's categories seek to universalize traditional European notions of aesthetics and art forgetting that, as André Malraux and others have pointed out, there have been large numbers of cultures in which such ideas (including the idea "art" itself) were non-existent. Aesthetic ethics Aesthetic ethics refers to the idea that human conduct and behaviour ought to be governed by that which is beautiful and attractive. John Dewey has pointed out that the unity of aesthetics and ethics is in fact reflected in our understanding of behaviour being "fair"—the word having a double meaning of attractive and morally acceptable. More recently, James Page has suggested that aesthetic ethics might be taken to form a philosophical rationale for peace education. Beauty Beauty is one of the main subjects of aesthetics, together with art and taste. Many of its definitions include the idea that an object is beautiful if perceiving it is accompanied by aesthetic pleasure. Among the examples of beautiful objects are landscapes, sunsets, humans and works of art. Beauty is a positive aesthetic value that contrasts with ugliness as its negative counterpart. Different intuitions commonly associated with beauty and its nature are in conflict with each other, which poses certain difficulties for understanding it. On the one hand, beauty is ascribed to things as an objective, public feature. On the other hand, it seems to depend on the subjective, emotional response of the observer. It is said, for example, that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder". It may be possible to reconcile these intuitions by affirming that it depends both on the objective features of the beautiful thing and the subjective response of the observer. One way to achieve this is to hold that an object is beautiful if it has the power to bring about certain aesthetic experiences in the perceiving subject. This is often combined with the view that the subject needs to have the ability to correctly perceive and judge beauty, sometimes referred to as "sense of taste". Various conceptions of how to define and understand beauty have been suggested. Classical conceptions emphasize the objective side of beauty by defining it in terms of the relation between the beautiful object as a whole and its parts: the parts should stand in the right proportion to each other and thus compose an integrated harmonious whole. Hedonist conceptions, on the other hand, focus more on the subjective side by drawing a necessary connection between pleasure and beauty, e.g. that for an object to be beautiful is for it to cause disinterested pleasure. Other conceptions include defining beautiful objects in terms of their value, of a loving attitude towards them or of their function. New Criticism and "The Intentional Fallacy" During the first half of the twentieth century, a significant shift to general aesthetic theory took place which attempted to apply aesthetic theory between various forms of art, including the literary arts and the visual arts, to each other. This resulted in the rise of the New Criticism school and debate concerning the intentional fallacy. At issue was the question of whether the aesthetic intentions of the artist in creating the work of art, whatever its specific form, should be associated with the criticism and evaluation of the final product of the work of art, or, if the work of art should be evaluated on its own merits independent of the intentions of the artist. In 1946, William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley published a classic and controversial New Critical essay entitled "The Intentional Fallacy", in which they argued strongly against the relevance of an author's intention, or "intended meaning" in the analysis of a literary work. For Wimsatt and Beardsley, the words on the page were all that mattered; importation of meanings from outside the text was considered irrelevant, and potentially distracting. In another essay, "The Affective Fallacy," which served as a kind of sister essay to "The Intentional Fallacy", Wimsatt and Beardsley also discounted the reader's personal/emotional reaction to a literary work as a valid means of analyzing a text. This fallacy would later be repudiated by theorists from the reader-response school of literary theory. One of the leading theorists from this school, Stanley Fish, was himself trained by New Critics. Fish criticizes Wimsatt and Beardsley in his essay "Literature in the Reader" (1970). As summarized by Berys Gaut and Livingston in their essay "The Creation of Art": "Structuralist and post-structuralists theorists and critics were sharply critical of many aspects of New Criticism, beginning with the emphasis on aesthetic appreciation and the so-called autonomy of art, but they reiterated the attack on biographical criticisms' assumption that the artist's activities and experience were a privileged critical topic." These authors contend that: "Anti-intentionalists, such as formalists, hold that the intentions involved in the making of art are irrelevant or peripheral to correctly interpreting art. So details of the act of creating a work, though possibly of interest in themselves, have no bearing on the correct interpretation of the work." Gaut and Livingston define the intentionalists as distinct from formalists stating that: "Intentionalists, unlike formalists, hold that reference to intentions is essential in fixing the correct interpretation of works." They quote Richard Wollheim as stating that, "The task of criticism is the reconstruction of the creative process, where the creative process must in turn be thought of as something not stopping short of, but terminating on, the work of art itself." Derivative forms of aesthetics A large number of derivative forms of aesthetics have developed as contemporary and transitory forms of inquiry associated with the field of aesthetics which include the post-modern, psychoanalytic, scientific, and mathematical among others. Post-modern aesthetics and psychoanalysis Early-twentieth-century artists, poets and composers challenged existing notions of beauty, broadening the scope of art and aesthetics. In 1941, Eli Siegel, American philosopher and poet, founded Aesthetic Realism, the philosophy that reality itself is aesthetic, and that "The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites." Various attempts have been made to define Post-Modern Aesthetics. The challenge to the assumption that beauty was central to art and aesthetics, thought to be original, is actually continuous with older aesthetic theory; Aristotle was the first in the Western tradition to classify "beauty" into types as in his theory of drama, and Kant made a distinction between beauty and the sublime. What was new was a refusal to credit the higher status of certain types, where the taxonomy implied a preference for tragedy and the sublime to comedy and the Rococo. Croce suggested that "expression" is central in the way that beauty was once thought to be central. George Dickie suggested that the sociological institutions of the art world were the glue binding art and sensibility into unities. Marshall McLuhan suggested that art always functions as a "counter-environment" designed to make visible what is usually invisible about a society. Theodor Adorno felt that aesthetics could not proceed without confronting the role of the culture industry in the commodification of art and aesthetic experience. Hal Foster attempted to portray the reaction against beauty and Modernist art in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Arthur Danto has described this reaction as "kalliphobia" (after the Greek word for beauty, κάλλος kallos). André Malraux explains that the notion of beauty was connected to a particular conception of art that arose with the Renaissance and was still dominant in the eighteenth century (but was supplanted later). The discipline of aesthetics, which originated in the eighteenth century, mistook this transient state of affairs for a revelation of the permanent nature of art. Brian Massumi suggests to reconsider beauty following the aesthetical thought in the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari. Walter Benjamin echoed Malraux in believing aesthetics was a comparatively recent invention, a view proven wrong in the late 1970s, when Abraham Moles and Frieder Nake analyzed links between beauty, information processing, and information theory. Denis Dutton in "The Art Instinct" also proposed that an aesthetic sense was a vital evolutionary factor. Jean-François Lyotard re-invokes the Kantian distinction between taste and the sublime. Sublime painting, unlike kitsch realism, "... will enable us to see only by making it impossible to see; it will please only by causing pain." Sigmund Freud inaugurated aesthetical thinking in Psychoanalysis mainly via the "Uncanny" as aesthetical affect. Following Freud and Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Lacan theorized aesthetics in terms of sublimation and the Thing. The relation of Marxist aesthetics to post-modern aesthetics is still a contentious area of debate. Aesthetics and science The field of experimental aesthetics was founded by Gustav Theodor Fechner in the 19th century. Experimental aesthetics in these times had been characterized by a subject-based, inductive approach. The analysis of individual experience and behaviour based on experimental methods is a central part of experimental aesthetics. In particular, the perception of works of art, music, or modern items such as websites or other IT products is studied. Experimental aesthetics is strongly oriented towards the natural sciences. Modern approaches mostly come from the fields of cognitive psychology (aesthetic cognitivism) or neuroscience (neuroaesthetics). Truth in beauty and mathematics Mathematical considerations, such as symmetry and complexity, are used for analysis in theoretical aesthetics. This is different from the aesthetic considerations of applied aesthetics used in the study of mathematical beauty. Aesthetic considerations such as symmetry and simplicity are used in areas of philosophy, such as ethics and theoretical physics and cosmology to define truth, outside of empirical considerations. Beauty and Truth have been argued to be nearly synonymous, as reflected in the statement "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" in the poem "Ode on a Grecian Urn" by John Keats, or by the Hindu motto "Satyam Shivam Sundaram" (Satya (Truth) is Shiva (God), and Shiva is Sundaram (Beautiful)). The fact that judgments of beauty and judgments of truth both are influenced by processing fluency, which is the ease with which information can be processed, has been presented as an explanation for why beauty is sometimes equated with truth. Recent research found that people use beauty as an indication for truth in mathematical pattern tasks. However, scientists including the mathematician David Orrell and physicist Marcelo Gleiser have argued that the emphasis on aesthetic criteria such as symmetry is equally capable of leading scientists astray. Computational approaches Computational approaches to aesthetics emerged amid efforts to use computer science methods "to predict, convey, and evoke emotional response to a piece of art. It this field, aesthetics is not considered to be dependent on taste but is a matter of cognition, and, consequently, learning. In 1928, the mathematician George David Birkhoff created an aesthetic measure as the ratio of order to complexity. In the 1960s and 1970s, Max Bense, Abraham Moles and Frieder Nake were among the first to analyze links between aesthetics, information processing, and information theory. Max Bense, for example, built on Birkhoff's aesthetic measure and proposed a similar information theoretic measure , where is the redundancy and the entropy, which assigns higher value to simpler artworks. In the 1990s, Jürgen Schmidhuber described an algorithmic theory of beauty. This theory takes the subjectivity of the observer into account and postulates that among several observations classified as comparable by a given subjective observer, the most aesthetically pleasing is the one that is encoded by the shortest description, following the direction of previous approaches. Schmidhuber's theory explicitly distinguishes between that which is beautiful and that which is interesting, stating that interestingness corresponds to the first derivative of subjectively perceived beauty. He supposes that every observer continually tries to improve the predictability and compressibility of their observations by identifying regularities like repetition, symmetry, and fractal self-similarity. Since about 2005, computer scientists have attempted to develop automated methods to infer aesthetic quality of images. Typically, these approaches follow a machine learning approach, where large numbers of manually rated photographs are used to "teach" a computer about what visual properties are of relevance to aesthetic quality. A study by Y. Li and C.J. Hu employed Birkhoff's measurement in their statistical learning approach where order and complexity of an image determined aesthetic value. The image complexity was computed using information theory while the order was determined using fractal compression. There is also the case of the Acquine engine, developed at Penn State University, that rates natural photographs uploaded by users. There have also been relatively successful attempts with regard to chess and music. Computational approaches have also been attempted in film making as demonstrated by a software model developed by Chitra Dorai and a group of researchers at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. The tool predicted aesthetics based on the values of narrative elements. A relation between Max Bense's mathematical formulation of aesthetics in terms of "redundancy" and "complexity" and theories of musical anticipation was offered using the notion of Information Rate. Evolutionary aesthetics Evolutionary aesthetics refers to evolutionary psychology theories in which the basic aesthetic preferences of Homo sapiens are argued to have evolved in order to enhance survival and reproductive success. One example being that humans are argued to find beautiful and prefer landscapes which were good habitats in the ancestral environment. Another example is that body symmetry and proportion are important aspects of physical attractiveness which may be due to this indicating good health during body growth. Evolutionary explanations for aesthetical preferences are important parts of evolutionary musicology, Darwinian literary studies, and the study of the evolution of emotion. Applied aesthetics As well as being applied to art, aesthetics can also be applied to cultural objects, such as crosses or tools. For example, aesthetic coupling between art-objects and medical topics was made by speakers working for the US Information Agency. Art slides were linked to slides of pharmacological data, which improved attention and retention by simultaneous activation of intuitive right brain with rational left. It can also be used in topics as diverse as cartography, mathematics, gastronomy, fashion and website design. Other approaches Guy Sircello has pioneered efforts in analytic philosophy to develop a rigorous theory of aesthetics, focusing on the concepts of beauty, love and sublimity. In contrast to romantic theorists, Sircello argued for the objectivity of beauty and formulated a theory of love on that basis. British philosopher and theorist of conceptual art aesthetics, Peter Osborne, makes the point that "'post-conceptual art' aesthetic does not concern a particular type of contemporary art so much as the historical-ontological condition for the production of contemporary art in general ...". Osborne noted that contemporary art is 'post-conceptual' in a public lecture delivered in 2010. Gary Tedman has put forward a theory of a subjectless aesthetics derived from Karl Marx's concept of alienation, and Louis Althusser's antihumanism, using elements of Freud's group psychology, defining a concept of the 'aesthetic level of practice'. Gregory Loewen has suggested that the subject is key in the interaction with the aesthetic object. The work of art serves as a vehicle for the projection of the individual's identity into the world of objects, as well as being the irruptive source of much of what is uncanny in modern life. As well, art is used to memorialize individuated biographies in a manner that allows persons to imagine that they are part of something greater than themselves. Criticism The philosophy of aesthetics as a practice has been criticized by some sociologists and writers of art and society. Raymond Williams, for example, argues that there is no unique and or individual aesthetic object which can be extrapolated from the art world, but rather that there is a continuum of cultural forms and experience of which ordinary speech and experiences may signal as art. By "art" we may frame several artistic "works" or "creations" as so though this reference remains within the institution or special event which creates it and this leaves some works or other possible "art" outside of the frame work, or other interpretations such as other phenomenon which may not be considered as "art". Pierre Bourdieu disagrees with Kant's idea of the "aesthetic". He argues that Kant's "aesthetic" merely represents an experience that is the product of an elevated class habitus and scholarly leisure as opposed to other possible and equally valid "aesthetic" experiences which lay outside Kant's narrow definition. Timothy Laurie argues that theories of musical aesthetics "framed entirely in terms of appreciation, contemplation or reflection risk idealizing an implausibly unmotivated listener defined solely through musical objects, rather than seeing them as a person for whom complex intentions and motivations produce variable attractions to cultural objects and practices". See also Aestheticism Aesthetics of science Art and Theosophy Art periods Esthesic and poietic Everyday Aesthetics History of aesthetics before the 20th century Japanese aesthetics Medieval aesthetics Mise en scène Theological aesthetics Theory of art References Sources Further reading Mario Perniola, 20th Century Aesthetics. Towards A Theory of Feeling, translated by Massimo Verdicchio, London, New Delhi, New York, Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2013, . Handbook of Phenomenological Aesthetics. Edited by Hans Rainer Sepp and Lester Embree. (Series: Contributions To Phenomenology, Vol. 59) Springer, Dordrecht / Heidelberg / London / New York 2010. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Ayn Rand, The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature, New York: New American Library, 1971 Derek Allan, Art and the Human Adventure, Andre Malraux's Theory of Art, Rodopi, 2009 Derek Allan. Art and Time, Cambridge Scholars, 2013. Augros, Robert M., Stanciu, George N., The New Story of Science: mind and the universe, Lake Bluff, Ill.: Regnery Gateway, 1984. (has significant material on Art, Science and their philosophies) John Bender and Gene Blocker, Contemporary Philosophy of Art: Readings in Analytic Aesthetics 1993. René Bergeron. L'Art et sa spiritualité. Québec, QC.: Éditions du Pelican, 1961. Christine Buci-Glucksmann (2003), Esthétique de l'éphémère, Galilée. (French) Ralf van Bühren, ed. (2024). Writing: what for and for whom. The joys and travails of the artist. Roma: EDUSC. Noël Carroll (2000), Theories of Art Today, University of Wisconsin Press. Mario Costa (1999) (in Italian), L'estetica dei media. Avanguardie e tecnologia, Milan: Castelvecchi, . Benedetto Croce (1922), Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic. E.S. Dallas (1866), The Gay Science, 2 volumes, on the aesthetics of poetry. Danto, Arthur (2003), The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art, Open Court. Stephen Davies (1991), Definitions of Art. Terry Eagleton (1990), The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Blackwell. Susan L. Feagin and Patrick Maynard (1997), Aesthetics. Oxford Readers. Penny Florence and Nicola Foster (eds.) (2000), Differential Aesthetics. London: Ashgate. Berys Gaut and Dominic McIver Lopes (eds.), Routledge Companion to Aesthetics. 3rd ed. London and New York: Routledge, 2013. Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert (1995), Einführung in die Ästhetik, Munich, W. Fink. David Goldblatt and Lee B. Brown, ed. (2010), Aesthetics: A Reader in the Philosophy of the Arts. 3rd ed. Pearson Publishing. Theodore Gracyk (2011), The Philosophy of Art: An Introduction. Polity Press. Greenberg, Clement (1960), "Modernist Painting", The Collected Essays and Criticism 1957–1969, The University of Chicago Press, 1993, 85–92. Evelyn Hatcher (ed.), Art as Culture: An Introduction to the Anthropology of Art. 1999 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1975), Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T.M. Knox, 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hans Hofmann and Sara T Weeks; Bartlett H Hayes; Addison Gallery of American Art; Search for the real, and other essays (Cambridge, Massachusetts, M.I.T. Press, 1967) Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey (eds.), Art History and Visual Studies. Yale University Press, 2002. Carol Armstrong and Catherine de Zegher (eds.), Women Artists at the Millennium. Massachusetts: October Books/MIT Press, 2006. Kant, Immanuel (1790), Critique of Judgement, Translated by Werner S. Pluhar, Hackett Publishing Co., 1987. Kelly, Michael (Editor in Chief) (1998) Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. New York, Oxford, Oxford University Press. 4 vol. pp. xvii–521, pp. 555, pp. 536, pp. 572; 2224 total pages; 100 b/w photos; . Covers philosophical, historical, sociological, and biographical aspects of Art and Aesthetics worldwide. Søren Kierkegaard (1843), Either/Or, translated by Alastair Hannay, London, Penguin, 1992 Peter Kivy (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics. 2004 Carolyn Korsmeyer (ed.), Aesthetics: The Big Questions. 1998 Lyotard, Jean-François (1979), The Postmodern Condition, Manchester University Press, 1984. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1969), The Visible and the Invisible, Northwestern University Press. David Novitz (1992), The Boundaries of Art. Mario Perniola, The Art and Its Shadow, foreword by Hugh J. Silverman, translated by Massimo Verdicchio, London-New York, Continuum, 2004. Griselda Pollock, "Does Art Think?" In: Dana Arnold and Margaret Iverson (eds.) Art and Thought. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2003. 129–174. . Griselda Pollock, Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space and the Archive. Routledge, 2007. . Griselda Pollock, Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts. Routledge, 1996. . George Santayana (1896), The Sense of Beauty. Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory. New York, Modern Library, 1955. Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton, 2001. Friedrich Schiller, (1795), On the Aesthetic Education of Man. Dover Publications, 2004. Alan Singer and Allen Dunn (eds.), Literary Aesthetics: A Reader. Blackwell Publishing Limited, 2000. Jadranka Skorin-Kapov, The Intertwining of Aesthetics and Ethics: Exceeding of Expectations, Ecstasy, Sublimity. Lexington Books, 2016. Władysław Tatarkiewicz, A History of Six Ideas: an Essay in Aesthetics, The Hague, 1980. Władysław Tatarkiewicz, History of Aesthetics, 3 vols. (1–2, 1970; 3, 1974), The Hague, Mouton. Markand Thakar Looking for the 'Harp' Quartet: An Investigation into Musical Beauty. University of Rochester Press, 2011. Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art?, Penguin Classics, 1995. Roger Scruton, Beauty: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2009. Roger Scruton, The Aesthetic Understanding: Essays in the Philosophy of Art and Culture (1983) The London Philosophy Study Guide offers many suggestions on what to read, depending on the student's familiarity with the subject: Aesthetics John M. Valentine, Beginning Aesthetics: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art. McGraw-Hill, 2006. von Vacano, Diego, "The Art of Power: Machiavelli, Nietzsche and the Making of Aesthetic Political Theory," Lanham MD: Lexington: 2007. Thomas Wartenberg, The Nature of Art. 2006. John Whitehead, Grasping for the Wind. 2001. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures on aesthetics, psychology and religious belief, Oxford, Blackwell, 1966. Richard Wollheim, Art and its objects, 2nd edn, 1980, Cambridge University Press, Gino Zaccaria, The Enigma of Art. On the Provenance of Artistic Creation, 2021, Brill, Ben Shneiderman, The Power of Aesthetic: Enhancing Visual Appeal in Your Designs , Ben, 1968. Jean-Marc Rouvière, Au prisme du readymade, incises sur l'identité équivoque de l'objet préface de Philippe Sers et G. Litichevesky, Paris L'Harmattan 2023 Indian aesthetics External links Aesthetics in Continental Philosophy article in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy Medieval Theories of Aesthetics article in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy Revue online Appareil Postscript 1980 – Some Old Problems in New Perspectives Aesthetics in Art Education: A Look Toward Implementation More about Art, culture and Education The Concept of the Aesthetic Aesthetics entry in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy Philosophy of Aesthetics entry in the Philosophy Archive Washington State Board for Community & Technical Colleges: Introduction to Aesthetics Beauty , BBC Radio 4 discussion with Angie Hobbs, Susan James & Julian Baggini (In Our Time, 19 May 2005) 1730s neologisms Humanities

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aster%20CT-80

Aster CT-80

The Aster CT-80 is a 1982 personal computer developed by the small Dutch company MCP (later renamed to Aster Computers), was sold in its first incarnation as a kit for hobbyists. Later it was sold ready to use. It consisted of several Eurocard PCB's with DIN 41612 connectors, and a backplane all based on a 19-inch rack configuration. It was the first commercially available Dutch personal/home computer. The Aster computer could use the software written for the popular Tandy TRS-80 computer while fixing many of the problems of that computer, but it could also run CP/M software, with a large amount of free memory Transient Program Area, (TPA) and a full 80×25 display, and it could be used as a Videotext terminal. Although the Aster was a clone of the TRS-80 Model I it was in fact more compatible with the TRS-80 Model III and ran all the software of these systems including games. It also had a built-in speaker which was compatible with such games software. Models Three models were sold. The first model (launched June 1982) looked like the IBM PC, a rectangular base unit with two floppy drives on the front, and a monitor on top with a separate detachable keyboard. The second incarnation was a much smaller unit the width of two 5" floppy drives stacked on top of each other, and the third incarnation looked like a flattened Apple with a built-in keyboard. All units ran much faster than the original TRS-80, at 4 MHz, (with a software selectable throttle to the original speed for compatibility purposes) and the display supported upper and lower case, hardware snow suppression (video ram bus arbitration logic), and an improved character font set. The floppy disk interface supported dual density, and disk capacities up to 800 KB, more than four times the capacity of the original TRS-80. A special version of NewDos/80, (an improved TRS-DOS compatible Disk operating system) was used to support these disk capacities when using the TRS-80 compatibility mode. For the educational market a version of the first model was produced with a new plastic enclosure (the First Asters had an all-metal enclosure) that also had an opening on the top in which a cassette recorder could be placed. This model was used in a cluster with one Aster (with disk drives) for the teacher, and eight disk less versions for the pupils. The pupils could download software from the teachers computer through a network based on a fast serial connection, as well as sending back their work to the teachers computer. There was also hardware in place through which the teacher could see the display of each pupils screen on his own monitor. Working modes The Aster used 64 KB of RAM and had the unique feature of supporting two fundamentally different internal architectures: when turned on without a boot floppy or with a TRS-DOS floppy, the Aster would be fully TRS-80 compatible, with 48 KB of RAM. When the boot loader detected a CP/M floppy, the Aster would reconfigure its internal memory architecture on the fly to optimally support CP/M with 60 KB free RAM for programs (TPA) and an 80 x 25 display. This dual-architecture capability only existed on one other TRS-80 clone, the LOBO Max-80. With a special configuration tool, the CT-80 could reconfigure its floppy drivers to read and write the floppies of about 80 other CP/M systems. A third mode was entered with a special boot floppy which turned the Aster into a Videotex terminal with a 40x25 display and a Videotex character set, The software used the built in RS-232 interface of the Aster to control a modem through which it could contact a Prestel service provider. Sales Most Aster CT-80's (about 10 thousand of them) were sold to schools for computer education, in a project first known as the "honderd scholen project" (one hundred schools project), but which later involved many more than just one hundred schools. MCP received this order from the Dutch government because their computer met all the technical and other demands, including the demand that the computers should be of Dutch origin and should be built in the Netherlands. Another important demand was that the computers could be used in a network (Aster developed special software and hardware for that). Later however the Government turned around and gave 50% of the order to Philips and their P2000 homecomputer even though the P2000 did not meet all the technical demands, was made in Austria and did not have network hardware nor software. Company Aster computers was based in the small town of Arkel near the town of Gorinchem. Initially Aster computer b.v. was called MCP (Music print Computer Product), because it was specialized in producing computer assisted printing of sheet music. The director of the company was interested in Microprocessor technology and noticed there was a market for selling kits to computer building amateurs, so they started selling electronic kits to hobbyists, and employed four persons at that time . They also assembled kits for people without soldering skills, especially the "junior Computer" from Elektor (a copy of the KIM-1), and the ZX80 from Sinclair. Among the kits sold there were also alternative floppy disk drives for TRS-80 computers. But these needed the infamous TRS-80 expansion interface, which was very expensive, and had a very unreliable floppy disk controller because it used the WD1771 floppy disk controller chip without an external "data separator". To fix this problem MCP developed a small plugin board which could be plugged into the socket for the WD1771, and which contained a data separator, and a socket for the WD1791 to support dual-density operation. Still, the expansion interface was expensive and due to its design it was also unreliable. So they decided to also develop their own alternative in the form of an improved floppy disk controller and printer interface that could be built right into a floppy disk enclosure. The lack of RAM expansion offered by this solution was solved by a service in which the 16 KB RAM chips inside the base unit would be replaced by 64 KB RAM chips. While this went on MCP renamed itself to MCP CHIP but ran into problems with the German computer magazine CHIP, and had to return to its former name. At that time MCP did also sell imported home computers like the TRS-80, the Video Genie (another TRS-80 clone), the Luxor ABC 80 and the Apple II. They also sold the exotic Olivetti M20, a very early 16-bit personal computer that was one of the very few systems to use a Z8000 CPU. After designing their own fully functional replacement for the TRS-80 expansion interface (which was never commercialized) the company realized that they could do better than just re-designing the expansion interface. They observed that the TRS-80 was a great computer but it lacked in several areas. The display logic and resulting display 'snow' was irritating, as was the missing lower case support, the CPU speed could be improved, the quality and layout of the keyboard was bothersome, and the floppy disk capacity and reliability was low. Also the more interesting software offered for CP/M systems could not run well on a TRS-80. So they decided to design a TRS-80 and CP/M software-compatible computer system, which (following the lead of Apple Computer) they decided to name after a "typical Dutch flower". So they called it the Aster CT-80 (CP/M/Tandy-1980). Why they went with Aster, and not the more well known Tulip is unknown, perhaps they thought it would be to presumptuous, or perhaps the fact that "Aster" is also a Dutch girls' name has something to do with it. Remarkably "Aster" was also the name given to a Dutch Supercomputer much later, in 2002. The first version of the Aster consisted of four "Eurocards", one Z80 CPU card with 64 KB memory, one Motorola MC6845-based video card, one double density floppy disk controller card and one "keyboard/RS-232/cassette interface" card. Plus a "backplane card", (which connected all the other cards) and a keyboard. And was intended for hobbyists, to be sold as a kit consisting of the parts and the PCB's for the computer and attached keyboard. After selling a few kits, MCP became convinced there was a much bigger market for an improved model sold as a completed working system. However the original kit version lacked many features that prevented its use as a serious computer system. Because the original designer had left the company another employee completely redesigned most of the system, (adding a display snow remover circuit, true 80/64 column text mode support, (with different size letters for TRS-80 and CP/M mode, so that in TRS-80 mode the full screen was also used, not just a 64×16 portion of the 80×25 screen) with an improved font set (adding "gray scale" version of the TRS-80 mozaik graphics and many special PETSCII like characters), and a more flexible and reliable floppy disk controller and keyboard interface plus many other small improvements), also an enclosure was developed for the main computer system, (in the form of a 19-inch rack for the Eurocards) and for two floppy disk drives and the power supply. A software engineer was hired to write the special "dual boot mode" BIOS and the special CP/M BIOS. The "dual boot mode" BIOS actually discovered whether a TRS-DOS, or Aster CP/M disk was placed in the drive, and would, depending on the type of disk, reorganise the internal memory architecture of the system, to either be 100% TRS-80 compatible or optimally support CP/M, with as much "workspace" as possible, and the 80×25 video mode. It also was responsible for switching to ROM BASIC when the system was turned on with the break key pressed, and later supported a primitive LAN system, using the RS-232 port with modified cabling. The very first of the ready made computers were sold with the "kit" versions of the euro cards, the version with redesigned cards came a month or so later. Soon the little shop became much too small and they moved to a much larger factory building nearby (formerly a window glass factory), and started mass-producing the Aster for a period of a few years, in which time its staff grew twentyfold. After the Aster having been a few years on the Market Tandy released its own improved model, the TRS-80 Model III computer which solved many of the same problems that the Aster also had solved, but the model 3 still did not fully support CP/M as the Aster did. In the meantime IBM had released its original IBM PC, which incidentally looked remarkably like the Asters base with floppy drives + separate keyboard set-up. The Aster was chosen for Dutch schools by the Dutch ministry of education, in a set-up with eight disk-less Asters, and one Aster with high-capacity floppy drives all connected by a LAN based on the Aster's high-speed serial port hardware, and special cables that permitted that any single computer on the LAN could broadcast to all other computers. The floppy based system was operated by the teacher who could send programs from his floppy disk, and data, to the student's disk-less systems thanks to the special BIOS in those systems. The students could send programs and data back to the teacher through the same LAN, or could save to a cassette recorder built into the disk-less units. Through a special "video-switch" the teacher was also able to see a copy of each student's display on his own screen. About a thousand of such systems were sold for many hundreds of Dutch schools. Because of cash flow problems (resulting from growing too fast, insufficient financial backing, technical problems, and a sudden problem with Z80 processor deliveries) the company suddenly folded even before it came to full fruition. Perhaps the Aster computer inspired another Dutch computer firm to name their computer after another typical Dutch flower—the Tulip's Tulip System-1 which appeared about the same time Aster folded. Most of the engineers who designed the hardware and software of the Aster went on to design hardware and software for the (then new) MSX system for a company called "Micro Technology b.v.". Unreleased add ons To enhance and modernize the Aster CT-80 the company also designed three alternative video display adapters to supplement or replace the TRS-80 compatible video card, (due to the modular nature of the Aster it was simply a matter of changing the video card, and/or CPU card to upgrade the system): A very High resolution monochrome video card with blitter and hardware text line and arc drawing capability, was designed for CAD applications, based on the NEC μPD7220 chip designed for graphic terminals, but was also used by some personal computers like the DEC Rainbow, and notably also for the Tulip System I. A colour video card with sprite capability based on the same TMS9918 video chip as the TI-99/4 and MSX computers, designed for gaming, and more creative and colorful educational software. A working prototype of this card was finished. A replacement card for the original TRS-80 compatible video card, software compatible to the original one, but with added color and very high resolution capabilities. was also on the drawing board. Based on a newer, slightly more flexible, version of the Asters original Motorola MC6845 video chip, the Rockwell 6545, it worked by adding a new video mode, one with the ability to reprogram an extended, (2048 characters instead of 256 characters) version of the character set, supported by an extended character memory of the video card that did not use one (8 bit) byte per character, but an 11 bit "word", so it could address each one of the available 2048 unique programmable characters. This meant it could provide a separate programmable character for all of the 1024 (64x16) or 2000 (80x25) characters on the screen. By filling the character pointer memory with values from zero to 1999 this essentially turned the text mode display into a very high resolution graphics mode, with the "font memory", acting as the high resolution Raster graphics video memory. Because the characters were 8 x 12 pixels this meant that video resolutions of 512 x 192 pixels (in 64x16 character mode), or 640 x 300 pixels (in 80x25 character mode) were created, which was quite high for the time. The "double width" mode of the TRS-80 was also supported, so 256 x 192 pixels (in 32x16 character mode), or 320 x 300 pixels (in 40x25 character mode) were also possible. The video card also supported 16 foreground and 16 background colors per character, by providing one byte per character position (2K) of "color ram". One nibble of such a byte then controlled the foreground color, and the other nibble controlled the background color, a system very similar to the ZX Spectrum, in fact in the 256x192 mode the display mode was virtually identical to the video of the ZX Spectrum. The color memory was also available in the "normal" TRS-80 and CP/M text modes, which meant that existing TRS-80 and CP/M software could be easily modified to add color. This video card would also support fast scrolling of high resolution color screens for games, because it had the indirection of the character pointers, so it was possible to quickly scroll the high resolution display, (or use other effects) by simply manipulating the 1920/1024 bytes of text video instead of the 24,576 bytes of high-resolution video memory. A hard disk interface was also in the works, which would, add a SCSI interface, and the necessary software. A working prototype was developed that added a 40MB hard disk. On the software front, work was being done to implement the replacement for the aging "user interface" of CP/M, (the Command Console Processor CCP) with the more modern ZCPR. Finally a replacement for the aging Z80 processor was being developed in the form of an Intel 8086 board, and additional 512K 16 bit memory boards. Such replacements of CPU and memory system components were possible because the Aster CT-80 was designed to use a backplane that was designed to support both 8 and 16 bit processors, and used a modular Eurocard based design with slots to spare for expansion. In theory the system could support the Z80 and the 8086 simultaneously. Plans were formulated to support CP/M-86 and even MS-DOS. Unfortunately none of these extensions to the system became available because the company folded before any of them could be released. References External links Pictures of the Aster CT-80 model one from a Spanish computer museum, the educational model with an opening for a cassette player is the one on the right A picture of the Aster CT-80 model two used for a business application A picture of the Aster CT-80 model three without cover (Computermuseumgroningen does not have this item anymore) Preliminary manual for the Aster CT-80 (in Dutch) Z80-based home computers Home computers Personal computers TRS-80 Computer-related introductions in 1982 Computers designed in the Netherlands

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur%20Wellesley

Arthur Wellesley

Arthur Wellesley may refer to: Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington (1769–1852), Anglo-Irish soldier and British prime minister Arthur Wellesley, 2nd Duke of Wellington (1807–1884), British soldier and nobleman Arthur Wellesley, 4th Duke of Wellington (1849–1934), British soldier and nobleman Arthur Wellesley, 5th Duke of Wellington (1876–1941), British soldier and nobleman Arthur Wellesley, Marquess of Douro (born 1978), grandson of the 8th Duke Arthur Wellesley Hughes (1870–1950), also known as Arthur Wellesley, Canadian musician and composer Arthur Wellesley, 4th Earl Cowley (1890–1962), British actor and nobleman See also Arthur (disambiguation) Wellesley (disambiguation) Duke of Wellington (disambiguation)

2139

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists%20of%20animated%20television%20series

Lists of animated television series

These are lists of animated television series. Animated television series are television programs produced by means of animation. Animated series produced for theaters are not included in this lists; for those, see List of animated short film series. These lists include compilation series of theatrical shorts such as The Bugs Bunny Show since they often feature some new wrap-around animation. Lists by decade List of animated television series of the 1940s and 1950s List of animated television series of the 1960s List of animated television series of the 1970s List of animated television series of the 1980s List of animated television series of the 1990s List of animated television series of the 2000s List of animated television series of the 2010s List of animated television series of the 2020s Other lists List of animated television series created for syndication List of animated television series by episode count List of children's animated television series List of adult animated television series List of American prime time animated television series List of anime series by episode count List of anime franchises by episode count List of American animated television series List of Canadian animated television series List of Chinese animated television series List of French animated television series List of Indian animated television series List of Korean animated series List of Pakistani animated television series List of South African animated television series List of Flash animated television series List of animated series with LGBTQ characters External links 日本のテレビアニメ作品一覧 - Lists of Japanese animated television series on Japanese Wikipedia Don Markstein's Toonopedia – Very large index page The Big Cartoon Database 80sCartoons – Nostalgia for those who grew up in the 1980s in the West Anime sorted by release date, JP Works DB Lists of television series by genre

2147

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armour

Armour

Armour (Commonwealth English) or armor (American English; see spelling differences) is a covering used to protect an object, individual, or vehicle from physical injury or damage, especially direct contact weapons or projectiles during combat, or from a potentially dangerous environment or activity (e.g. cycling, construction sites, etc.). Personal armour is used to protect soldiers and war animals. Vehicle armour is used on warships, armoured fighting vehicles, and some combat aircraft, mostly ground attack aircraft. A second use of the term armour describes armoured forces, armoured weapons, and their role in combat. After the development of armoured warfare, tanks and mechanised infantry and their combat formations came to be referred to collectively as "armour". Etymology The word "armour" began to appear in the Middle Ages as a derivative of Old French. It is dated from 1297 as a "mail, defensive covering worn in combat". The word originates from the Old French , itself derived from the Latin meaning "arms and/or equipment", with the root meaning "arms or gear". Personal Armour has been used throughout recorded history. It has been made from a variety of materials, beginning with the use of leathers or fabrics as protection and evolving through chain mail and metal plate into today's modern composites. For much of military history the manufacture of metal personal armour has dominated the technology and employment of armour. Armour drove the development of many important technologies of the Ancient World, including wood lamination, mining, metal refining, vehicle manufacture, leather processing, and later decorative metal working. Its production was influential in the industrial revolution, and furthered commercial development of metallurgy and engineering. Armour was the single most influential factor in the development of firearms, which in turn revolutionised warfare. History Significant factors in the development of armour include the economic and technological necessities of its production. For instance, plate armour first appeared in Medieval Europe when water-powered trip hammers made the formation of plates faster and cheaper. At times the development of armour has paralleled the development of increasingly effective weaponry on the battlefield, with armourers seeking to create better protection without sacrificing mobility. Well-known armour types in European history include the lorica hamata, lorica squamata, and the lorica segmentata of the Roman legions, the mail hauberk of the early medieval age, and the full steel plate harness worn by later medieval and renaissance knights, and breast and back plates worn by heavy cavalry in several European countries until the first year of World War I (1914–1915). The samurai warriors of Feudal Japan utilised many types of armour for hundreds of years up to the 19th century. Early Cuirasses and helmets were manufactured in Japan as early as the 4th century. Tankō, worn by foot soldiers and keikō, worn by horsemen were both pre-samurai types of early Japanese armour constructed from iron plates connected together by leather thongs. Japanese lamellar armour (keiko) passed through Korea and reached Japan around the 5th century. These early Japanese lamellar armours took the form of a sleeveless jacket, leggings and a helmet. Armour did not always cover all of the body; sometimes no more than a helmet and leg plates were worn. The rest of the body was generally protected by means of a large shield. Examples of armies equipping their troops in this fashion were the Aztecs (13th to 15th century CE). In East Asia, many types of armour were commonly used at different times by various cultures, including scale armour, lamellar armour, laminar armour, plated mail, mail, plate armour, and brigandine. Around the dynastic Tang, Song, and early Ming Period, cuirasses and plates (mingguangjia) were also used, with more elaborate versions for officers in war. The Chinese, during that time used partial plates for "important" body parts instead of covering their whole body since too much plate armour hinders their martial arts movement. The other body parts were covered in cloth, leather, lamellar, or Mountain pattern. In pre-Qin dynasty times, leather armour was made out of various animals, with more exotic ones such as the rhinoceros. Mail, sometimes called "chainmail", made of interlocking iron rings is believed to have first appeared some time after 300 BC. Its invention is credited to the Celts; the Romans are thought to have adopted their design. Gradually, small additional plates or discs of iron were added to the mail to protect vulnerable areas. Hardened leather and splinted construction were used for arm and leg pieces. The coat of plates was developed, an armour made of large plates sewn inside a textile or leather coat. 13th to 18th century Europe Early plate in Italy, and elsewhere in the 13th–15th century, were made of iron. Iron armour could be carburised or case hardened to give a surface of harder steel. Plate armour became cheaper than mail by the 15th century as it required much less labour and labour had become much more expensive after the Black Death, though it did require larger furnaces to produce larger blooms. Mail continued to be used to protect those joints which could not be adequately protected by plate, such as the armpit, crook of the elbow and groin. Another advantage of plate was that a lance rest could be fitted to the breast plate. The small skull cap evolved into a bigger true helmet, the bascinet, as it was lengthened downward to protect the back of the neck and the sides of the head. Additionally, several new forms of fully enclosed helmets were introduced in the late 14th century. Probably the most recognised style of armour in the world became the plate armour associated with the knights of the European Late Middle Ages, but continuing to the early 17th century Age of Enlightenment in all European countries. By 1400, the full harness of plate armour had been developed in armouries of Lombardy. Heavy cavalry dominated the battlefield for centuries in part because of their armour. In the early 15th century, advances in weaponry allowed infantry to defeat armoured knights on the battlefield. The quality of the metal used in armour deteriorated as armies became bigger and armour was made thicker, necessitating breeding of larger cavalry horses. If during the 14–15th centuries armour seldom weighed more than 15 kg, then by the late 16th century it weighed 25 kg. The increasing weight and thickness of late 16th century armour therefore gave substantial resistance. In the early years of low velocity firearms, full suits of armour, or breast plates actually stopped bullets fired from a modest distance. Crossbow bolts, if still in use, would seldom penetrate good plate, nor would any bullet unless fired from close range. In effect, rather than making plate armour obsolete, the use of firearms stimulated the development of plate armour into its later stages. For most of that period, it allowed horsemen to fight while being the targets of defending arquebusiers without being easily killed. Full suits of armour were actually worn by generals and princely commanders right up to the second decade of the 18th century. It was the only way they could be mounted and survey the overall battlefield with safety from distant musket fire. The horse was afforded protection from lances and infantry weapons by steel plate barding. This gave the horse protection and enhanced the visual impression of a mounted knight. Late in the era, elaborate barding was used in parade armour. Later Gradually, starting in the mid-16th century, one plate element after another was discarded to save weight for foot soldiers. Back and breast plates continued to be used throughout the entire period of the 18th century and through Napoleonic times, in many European heavy cavalry units, until the early 20th century. From their introduction, muskets could pierce plate armour, so cavalry had to be far more mindful of the fire. In Japan, armour continued to be used until the late 19th century, with the last major fighting in which armour was used, this occurred in 1868. Samurai armour had one last short lived use in 1877 during the Satsuma Rebellion. Though the age of the knight was over, armour continued to be used in many capacities. Soldiers in the American Civil War bought iron and steel vests from peddlers (both sides had considered but rejected body armour for standard issue). The effectiveness of the vests varied widely, some successfully deflected bullets and saved lives, but others were poorly made and resulted in tragedy for the soldiers. In any case the vests were abandoned by many soldiers due to their increased weight on long marches, as well as the stigma they got for being cowards from their fellow troops. At the start of World War I, thousands of the French Cuirassiers rode out to engage the German Cavalry. By that period, the shiny metallic cuirass was covered in a dark paint and a canvas wrap covered their elaborate Napoleonic style helmets, to help mitigate the sunlight being reflected off the surfaces, thereby alerting the enemy of their location. Their armour was only meant for protection against edged weapons such as bayonets, sabres, and lances. Cavalry had to be wary of repeating rifles, machine guns, and artillery, unlike the foot soldiers, who at least had a trench to give them some protection. Present Today, ballistic vests, also known as flak jackets, made of ballistic cloth (e.g. kevlar, dyneema, twaron, spectra etc.) and ceramic or metal plates are common among police officers, security guards, corrections officers and some branches of the military. The US Army has adopted Interceptor body armour, which uses Enhanced Small Arms Protective Inserts (ESAPIs) in the chest, sides, and back of the armour. Each plate is rated to stop a range of ammunition including 3 hits from a 7.62×51 NATO AP round at a range of . Dragon Skin is another ballistic vest which is currently in testing with mixed results. As of 2019, it has been deemed too heavy, expensive, and unreliable, in comparison to more traditional plates, and it is outdated in protection compared to modern US IOTV armour, and even in testing was deemed a downgrade from the IBA. The British Armed Forces also have their own armour, known as Osprey. It is rated to the same general equivalent standard as the US counterpart, the Improved Outer Tactical Vest, and now the Soldier Plate Carrier System and Modular Tactical Vest. The Russian Armed Forces also have armour, known as the 6B43, all the way to 6B45, depending on variant. Their armour runs on the GOST system, which, due to regional conditions, has resulted in a technically higher protective level overall. Vehicle The first modern production technology for armour plating was used by navies in the construction of the ironclad warship, reaching its pinnacle of development with the battleship. The first tanks were produced during World War I. Aerial armour has been used to protect pilots and aircraft systems since the First World War. In modern ground forces' usage, the meaning of armour has expanded to include the role of troops in combat. After the evolution of armoured warfare, mechanised infantry were mounted in armoured fighting vehicles and replaced light infantry in many situations. In modern armoured warfare, armoured units equipped with tanks and infantry fighting vehicles serve the historic role of heavy cavalry, light cavalry, and dragoons, and belong to the armoured branch of warfare. History Ships The first ironclad battleship, with iron armour over a wooden hull, , was launched by the French Navy in 1859 prompting the British Royal Navy to build a counter. The following year they launched , which was twice the size and had iron armour over an iron hull. After the first battle between two ironclads took place in 1862 during the American Civil War, it became clear that the ironclad had replaced the unarmoured line-of-battle ship as the most powerful warship afloat. Ironclads were designed for several roles, including as high seas battleships, coastal defence ships, and long-range cruisers. The rapid evolution of warship design in the late 19th century transformed the ironclad from a wooden-hulled vessel which carried sails to supplement its steam engines into the steel-built, turreted battleships and cruisers familiar in the 20th century. This change was pushed forward by the development of heavier naval guns (the ironclads of the 1880s carried some of the heaviest guns ever mounted at sea), more sophisticated steam engines, and advances in metallurgy which made steel shipbuilding possible. The rapid pace of change in the ironclad period meant that many ships were obsolete as soon as they were complete, and that naval tactics were in a state of flux. Many ironclads were built to make use of the ram or the torpedo, which a number of naval designers considered the crucial weapons of naval combat. There is no clear end to the ironclad period, but towards the end of the 1890s the term ironclad dropped out of use. New ships were increasingly constructed to a standard pattern and designated battleships or armoured cruisers. Trains Armoured trains saw use from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century, including the American Civil War (1861–1865), the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871), the First and Second Boer Wars (1880–81 and 1899–1902), the Polish–Soviet War (1919–1921), the First (1914–1918) and Second World Wars (1939–1945) and the First Indochina War (1946–1954). The most intensive use of armoured trains was during the Russian Civil War (1918–1920). Armoured fighting vehicles Ancient siege engines were usually protected by wooden armour, often covered with wet hides or thin metal to prevent being easily burned. Medieval war wagons were horse-drawn wagons that were similarly armoured. These contained guns or crossbowmen that could fire through gun-slits. The first modern armoured fighting vehicles were armoured cars, developed . These started as ordinary wheeled motor-cars protected by iron shields, typically mounting a machine gun. During the First World War, the stalemate of trench warfare during on the Western Front spurred the development of the tank. It was envisioned as an armoured machine that could advance under fire from enemy rifles and machine guns, and respond with its own heavy guns. It used caterpillar tracks to cross ground broken up by shellfire and trenches. Aircraft With the development of effective anti-aircraft artillery in the period before the Second World War, military pilots, once the "knights of the air" during the First World War, became far more vulnerable to ground fire. As a response, armour plating was added to aircraft to protect aircrew and vulnerable areas such as engines and fuel tanks. Self-sealing fuel tanks functioned like armour in that they added protection but also increased weight and cost. Present Tank armour has progressed from the Second World War armour forms, now incorporating not only harder composites, but also reactive armour designed to defeat shaped charges. As a result of this, the main battle tank (MBT) conceived in the Cold War era can survive multiple rocket-propelled grenade strikes with minimal effect on the crew or the operation of the vehicle. The light tanks that were the last descendants of the light cavalry during the Second World War have almost completely disappeared from the world's militaries due to increased lethality of the weapons available to the vehicle-mounted infantry. The armoured personnel carrier (APC) was devised during the First World War. It allows the safe and rapid movement of infantry in a combat zone, minimising casualties and maximising mobility. APCs are fundamentally different from the previously used armoured half-tracks in that they offer a higher level of protection from artillery burst fragments, and greater mobility in more terrain types. The basic APC design was substantially expanded to an infantry fighting vehicle (IFV) when properties of an APC and a light tank were combined in one vehicle. Naval armour has fundamentally changed from the Second World War doctrine of thicker plating to defend against shells, bombs and torpedoes. Passive defence naval armour is limited to kevlar or steel (either single layer or as spaced armour) protecting particularly vital areas from the effects of nearby impacts. Since ships cannot carry enough armour to completely protect against anti-ship missiles, they depend more on defensive weapons destroying incoming missiles, or causing them to miss by confusing their guidance systems with electronic warfare. Although the role of the ground attack aircraft significantly diminished after the Korean War, it re-emerged during the Vietnam War, and in the recognition of this, the US Air Force authorised the design and production of what became the A-10 dedicated anti-armour and ground-attack aircraft that first saw action in the Gulf War. High-voltage transformer fire barriers are often required to defeat ballistics from small arms as well as projectiles from transformer bushings and lightning arresters, which form part of large electrical transformers, per NFPA 850. Such fire barriers may be designed to inherently function as armour, or may be passive fire protection materials augmented by armour, where care must be taken to ensure that the armour's reaction to fire does not cause issues with regards to the fire barrier being armoured to defeat explosions and projectiles in addition to fire, especially since both functions must be provided simultaneously, meaning they must be fire-tested together to provide realistic evidence of fitness for purpose. Combat drones use little to no vehicular armour as they are not crewed vessels, this results in them being lightweight and small in size. Animal armour Horse armour Body armour for war horses has been used since at least 2000 BC. Cloth, leather, and metal protection covered cavalry horses in ancient civilisations, including ancient Egypt, Assyria, Persia, and Rome. Some formed heavy cavalry units of armoured horses and riders used to attack infantry and mounted archers. Armour for horses is called barding (also spelled bard or barb) especially when used by European knights. During the late Middle Ages as armour protection for knights became more effective, their mounts became targets. This vulnerability was exploited by the Scots at the Battle of Bannockburn in the 14th century, when horses were killed by the infantry, and for the English at the Battle of Crécy in the same century where longbowmen shot horses and the then dismounted French knights were killed by heavy infantry. Barding developed as a response to such events. Examples of armour for horses could be found as far back as classical antiquity. Cataphracts, with scale armour for both rider and horse, are believed by many historians to have influenced the later European knights, via contact with the Byzantine Empire. Surviving period examples of barding are rare; however, complete sets are on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Wallace Collection in London, the Royal Armouries in Leeds, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Horse armour could be made in whole or in part of cuir bouilli (hardened leather), but surviving examples of this are especially rare. Elephant armour War elephants were first used in ancient times without armour, but armour was introduced because elephants injured by enemy weapons would often flee the battlefield. Elephant armour was often made from hardened leather, which was fitted onto an individual elephant while moist, then dried to create a hardened shell. Alternatively, metal armour pieces were sometimes sewn into heavy cloth. Later lamellar armour (small overlapping metal plates) was introduced. Full plate armour was not typically used due to its expense and the danger of the animal overheating. See also Battledress Bomb suit High-voltage transformer fire barriers Linothorax Powered exoskeleton Rolled homogeneous armour Commercial uses of armor Notes References "Ballistic Protection Levels." BulletproofME.com Body Armor. ArmorUP L.P., n.d. 19 October 2014 External links Articles containing video clips Safety clothing Military equipment of antiquity

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armoured%20fighting%20vehicle

Armoured fighting vehicle

An armoured fighting vehicle (British English) or armored fighting vehicle (American English) (AFV) is an armed combat vehicle protected by armour, generally combining operational mobility with offensive and defensive capabilities. AFVs can be wheeled or tracked. Examples of AFVs are tanks, armoured cars, assault guns, self-propelled artilleries, infantry fighting vehicles (IFV), and armoured personnel carriers (APC). Armoured fighting vehicles are classified according to their characteristics and intended role on the battlefield. The classifications are not absolute; two countries may classify the same vehicle differently, and the criteria change over time. For example, relatively lightly armed armoured personnel carriers were largely superseded by infantry fighting vehicles with much heavier armament in a similar role. Successful designs are often adapted to a wide variety of applications. For example, the MOWAG Piranha, originally designed as an APC, has been adapted to fill numerous roles such as a mortar carrier, infantry fighting vehicle, and assault gun. Armoured fighting vehicles began to appear in use in World War I with the armoured car, the tank, the self-propelled gun, and the personnel carrier seeing use. By World War II, armies had large numbers of AFVs, together with other vehicles to carry troops this permitted highly mobile manoeuvre warfare. Evolution The concept of a highly mobile and protected fighting unit has been around for centuries; from Hannibal's war elephants to Leonardo's contraptions, military strategists endeavoured to maximize the mobility and survivability of their soldiers. Armoured fighting vehicles were not possible until internal combustion engines of sufficient power became available at the start of the 20th century. History Pre-modern Modern armoured fighting vehicles represent the realization of an ancient concept – that of providing troops with mobile protection and firepower. Armies have deployed war machines and cavalries with rudimentary armour in battle for millennia. Use of these animals and engineering designs sought to achieve a balance between the conflicting paradoxical needs of mobility, firepower and protection. Siege machine Siege engines, such as battering rams and siege towers, would often be armoured in order to protect their crews from enemy action. Polyidus of Thessaly developed a very large movable siege tower, the helepolis, as early as 340 BC, and Greek forces used such structures in the Siege of Rhodes (305 BC). The idea of a protected fighting vehicle has been known since antiquity. Frequently cited is Leonardo da Vinci's 15th-century sketch of a mobile, protected gun-platform; the drawings show a conical, wooden shelter with apertures for cannons around the circumference. The machine was to be mounted on four wheels which would be turned by the crew through a system of hand cranks and cage (or "lantern") gears. Leonardo claimed: "I will build armoured wagons which will be safe and invulnerable to enemy attacks. There will be no obstacle which it cannot overcome." Modern replicas have demonstrated that the human crew would have been able to move it over only short distances. War wagon Hussite forces in Bohemia developed war wagons – medieval horse-drawn wagons that doubled as wagon forts – around 1420 during the Hussite Wars. These heavy wagons were given protective sides with firing slits; their heavy firepower came from either a cannon or from a force of hand-gunners and crossbowmen, supported by light cavalry and infantry using pikes and flails. Heavy arquebuses mounted on wagons were called arquebus à croc. These carried a ball of about . Modern By the end of World War II, most modern armies had vehicles to carry infantry, artillery and anti-aircraft weaponry. Most modern AFVs are superficially similar in design to their World War II counterparts, but with significantly better armour, weapons, engines, electronics, and suspension. The increase in the capacity of transport aircraft makes possible and practicable the transport of AFVs by air. Many armies are replacing some or all of their traditional heavy vehicles with lighter airmobile versions, often with wheels instead of tracks. Armed and armoured car The first modern AFVs were armed cars, dating back virtually to the invention of the motor car. The British inventor F. R. Simms designed and built the Motor Scout in 1898. It was the first armed, petrol-engine powered vehicle ever built. It consisted of a De Dion-Bouton quadracycle with a Maxim machine gun mounted on the front bar. An iron shield offered some protection for the driver from the front, but it lacked all-around protective armour. The armoured car was the first modern fully armoured fighting vehicle. The first of these was the Simms's Motor War Car, also designed by Simms and built by Vickers, Sons & Maxim in 1899. The vehicle had Vickers armour 6 mm thick and was powered by a four-cylinder 3.3-litre 16 hp Cannstatt Daimler engine giving it a maximum speed of around . The armament, consisting of two Maxim guns, was carried in two turrets with 360° traverse. Another early armoured car of the period was the French Charron, Girardot et Voigt 1902, presented at the Salon de l'Automobile et du cycle in Brussels, on 8 March 1902. The vehicle was equipped with a Hotchkiss machine gun, and with 7 mm armour for the gunner. Armoured cars were first used in large numbers on both sides during World War I as scouting vehicles. Tank In 1903, H. G. Wells published the short story "The Land Ironclads," positing indomitable war machines that would bring a new age of land warfare, the way steam-powered ironclad warships had ended the age of sail. Wells's literary vision was realized in 1916, when, amidst the pyrrhic standstill of the Great War, the British Landship Committee deployed revolutionary armoured vehicles to break the stalemate. The tank was envisioned as an armoured machine that could cross ground under fire from machine guns and reply with its own mounted machine guns and naval artillery. These first British tanks of World War I moved on caterpillar tracks that had substantially lower ground pressure than wheeled vehicles, enabling them to pass the muddy, pocked terrain and slit trenches of the Battle of the Somme. Troop transport The tank eventually proved highly successful and, as technology improved, it became a weapon that could cross large distances at much higher speeds than supporting infantry and artillery. The need to provide the units that would fight alongside the tank led to the development of a wide range of specialised AFVs, especially during the Second World War (1939–1945). The armoured personnel carrier, designed to transport infantry troops to the frontline, emerged towards the end of World War I. During the first actions with tanks, it had become clear that close contact with infantry was essential in order to secure ground won by the tanks. Troops on foot were vulnerable to enemy fire, but they could not be transported in the tank because of the intense heat and noxious atmosphere. In 1917, Lieutenant G. J. Rackham was ordered to design an armoured vehicle that could fight and carry troops or supplies. The Mark IX tank was built by Armstrong, Whitworth & Co., although just three vehicles had been finished at the time of the Armistice in November 1918, and only 34 were built in total. Tankette Different tank classifications emerged in the interwar period. The tankette was conceived as a mobile, two-man model, mainly intended for reconnaissance. In 1925, Sir John Carden and Vivian Loyd produced the first such design to be adopted – the Carden Loyd tankette. Tankettes saw use in the Royal Italian Army during the Italian invasion of Ethiopia (1935–1936), the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), and almost everywhere Italian soldiers fought during World War II. The Imperial Japanese Army used tankettes for jungle warfare. Self-propelled artillery The British Gun Carrier Mark I, the first Self-propelled artillery, was fielded in 1917. It was based on the first tank, the British Mark I, and carried a heavy field-gun. The next major advance was the Birch gun (1925), developed for the British motorised warfare experimental brigade (the Experimental Mechanized Force). This mounted a field gun, capable of the usual artillery trajectories and even anti-aircraft use, on a tank chassis. During World War II, most major military powers developed self-propelled artillery vehicles. These had guns mounted on a tracked chassis (often that of an obsolete or superseded tank) and provided an armoured superstructure to protect the gun and its crew. The first British design, "Bishop", carried the 25 pdr gun-howitzer in an extemporised mounting on a tank chassis that severely limited the gun's performance. It was replaced by the more effective Sexton. The Germans built many lightly armoured self-propelled anti-tank guns using captured French equipment (for example Marder I), their own obsolete light tank chassis (Marder II), or ex-Czech chassis (Marder III). These led to better-protected tank destroyers, built on a medium-tank chassis such as the Jagdpanzer IV or the Jagdpanther. Anti-aircraft vehicle The Self-propelled anti-aircraft weapon debuted in WWI. The German 88 mm anti-aircraft gun was truck-mounted and used to great effect against British tanks, and the British QF 3-inch 20 cwt was mounted on trucks for use on the Western Front. Although the Birch gun was a general purpose artillery piece on an armoured tracked chassis, it was capable of elevation for anti-aircraft use. Vickers Armstrong developed one of the first SPAAGs based on the chassis of the Mk.E 6-ton light tank/Dragon Medium Mark IV tractor, mounting a Vickers QF-1 "Pom-Pom" gun of 40 mm. The Germans fielded the Sd.Kfz. 10/4 and 6/2, cargo halftracks mounting single 20 mm or 37 mm AA guns (respectively) by the start of the war. Self-propelled multiple rocket-launcher Rocket launchers such as the Soviet Katyusha originated in the late 1930s. The Wehrmacht fielded self-propelled rocket artillery in World War II – the Panzerwerfer and Wurfrahmen 40 equipped half-track armoured fighting vehicles. Many modern multiple rocket launchers are self propelled by either truck or tank chassis. Design Survivability The level of armour protection between AFVs varies greatly – a main battle tank will normally be designed to take hits from other tank guns and anti-tank missiles, whilst light reconnaissance vehicles are often only armoured "just in case". Whilst heavier armour provides better protection, it makes vehicles less mobile (for a given engine power), limits its air-transportability, increases cost, uses more fuel and may limit the places it can go – for example, many bridges may be unable to support the weight of a main battle tank. A trend toward composite armour is taking the place of steel – composites are stronger for a given weight, allowing the tank to be lighter for the same protection as steel armour, or better protected for the same weight. Armour is being supplemented with active protection systems on a number of vehicles, allowing the AFV to protect itself from incoming projectiles. The level of protection also usually varies considerably throughout the individual vehicle too, depending on the role of the vehicle and the likely direction of attack. For example, a main battle tank will usually have the heaviest armour on the hull front and the turret, lighter armour on the sides of the hull and the thinnest armour on the top and bottom of the tank. Other vehicles – such as the MRAP family – may be primarily armoured against the threat from IEDs and so will have heavy, sloped armour on the bottom of the hull. Firepower Weaponry varies by a very wide degree between AFVs – lighter vehicles for infantry carrying, reconnaissance or specialist roles may have only a autocannon or machine gun (or no armament at all), whereas heavy self-propelled artillery will carry howitzers, mortars or rocket launchers. These weapons may be mounted on a pintle, affixed directly to the vehicle or placed in a turret or cupola. The greater the recoil of the weapon on an AFV, the larger the turret ring needs to be. A larger turret ring necessitates a larger vehicle. To avoid listing to the side, turrets on amphibious vehicles are usually located at the centre of the vehicle. Grenade launchers provide a versatile launch platform for a plethora of munitions including, smoke, phosphorus, tear gas, illumination, anti-personnel, infrared and radar-jamming rounds. Turret stabilization is an important capability because it enables firing on the move and prevents crew fatigue. Maneuverability Modern AFVs have primarily used either petrol (gasoline) or diesel piston engines. More recently, gas turbines have been used. Most early AFVs used petrol engines, as they offer a good power-to-weight ratio. However, they fell out of favour during World War II due to the flammability of the fuel. Most current AFVs are powered by a diesel engine; modern technology, including the use of turbo-charging, helps to overcome the lower power-to-weight ratio of diesel engines compared to petrol. Gas turbine (turboshaft) engines offer a very high power-to-weight ratio and were starting to find favour in the late 20th century – however, they offer very poor fuel consumption and as such some armies are switching from gas turbines back to diesel engines (i.e. the Russian T-80 used a gas turbine engine, whereas the later T-90 does not). The US M1 Abrams is a notable example of a gas turbine powered tank. Modern classification by type and role Notable armoured fighting vehicles extending from post-World War I to today. Tank The tank is an all terrain AFV incorporating artillery which is designed to fill almost all battlefield roles and to engage enemy forces by the use of direct fire in the frontal assault role. Though several configurations have been tried, particularly in the early experimental "golden days" of tank development, a standard, mature design configuration has since emerged to a generally accepted pattern. This features a main tank gun or artillery gun, mounted in a fully rotating turret atop a tracked automotive hull, with various additional secondary weapon systems throughout. Philosophically, the tank is, by its very nature, an offensive weapon. Being a protective encasement with at least one gun position, it is essentially a pillbox or small fortress (though these are static fortifications of a purely defensive nature) that can move toward the enemy – hence its offensive utility. Psychologically, the tank is a force multiplier that has a positive morale effect on the infantry it accompanies. It also instills fear in the opposing force who can often hear and even feel their arrival. Tank classifications Tanks were classified either by size or by role. Classification by relative size was common, as this also tended to influence the tanks' role. Light tanks are smaller tanks with thinner armour and lower-powered guns, allowing for better tactical mobility and ease of strategic transport. These are intended for armoured reconnaissance, skirmishing, artillery observation, expeditionary warfare and supplementing airborne or naval landings. Light tanks are typically cheaper to build and maintain, but fare poorly against heavier tanks. They may be held in reserve for exploiting any breakthroughs in enemy lines, with the goal of disrupting communications and supply lines. Medium tanks are mid-sized tanks with adequate armour and guns, and fair mobility, allowing for a balance of fighting abilities, mobility, cost-effectiveness, and transportability. Medium tanks are effective in groups when used against enemy tanks. Heavy tanks are larger tanks with thick armour and more powerful guns, but less mobile and more difficult to transport. They were intended to be more than a match for typical enemy medium tanks, easily penetrating their armour while being much less susceptible to their attacks. Heavy tanks cost more to both build and maintain, and their heavy armour proved most effective when deployed in support infantry assaulting entrenched fortifications. Over time, tanks tended to be designed with heavier armour and weapons, increasing the weight of all tanks, so these classifications are relative to the average for the nation's tanks for any given period. An older tank design might be reclassified over time, such as a tank being first deployed as a medium tank, but in later years relegated to light tank roles. Tanks were also classified by roles that were independent of size, such as cavalry tank, cruiser tank, fast tank, infantry tank, "assault" tank, or "breakthrough" tank. Military theorists initially tended to assign tanks to traditional military infantry, cavalry, and artillery roles, but later developed more specialized roles unique to tanks. In modern use, the heavy tank has fallen out of favour, being supplanted by more heavily armed and armoured descendant of the medium tanks – the universal main battle tank. The light tank has, in many armies, lost favour to cheaper, faster, lighter armoured cars; however, light tanks (or similar vehicles with other names) are still in service with a number of forces as reconnaissance vehicles, most notably the Russian Marines with the PT-76, the British Army with the Scimitar, and the Chinese Army with the Type 63. Main battle tank Modern main battle tanks or "universal tanks" incorporate recent advances in automotive, artillery, armour, and electronic technology to combine the best characteristics of the historic medium and heavy tanks into a single, all-around type. They are also the most expensive to mass-produce. A main battle tank is distinguished by its high level of firepower, mobility and armour protection relative to other vehicles of its era. It can cross comparatively rough terrain at high speeds, but its heavy dependency on fuel, maintenance, and ammunition makes it logistically demanding. It has the heaviest armour of any AFVs on the battlefield, and carries a powerful precision-guided munition weapon systems that may be able to engage a wide variety of both ground targets and air targets. Despite significant advances in anti-tank warfare, it still remains the most versatile and fearsome land-based weapon-systems of the 21st-century, valued for its shock action and high survivability. Tankette A tankette is a tracked armed and armoured vehicle resembling a small "ultra-light tank" or "super-light tank" roughly the size of a car, mainly intended for light infantry support or scouting. Tankettes were introduced in the mid-1920s as a reconnaissance vehicle and a mobile machine gun position They were one or two-man vehicles armed with a machine gun. Colloquially it may also simply mean a "small tank". Tankettes were designed and built by several nations between the 1920s and 1940s following the British Carden Loyd tankette which was a successful implementation of "one man tank" ideas from Giffard Le Quesne Martel, a British Army engineer. They were very popular with smaller countries. Some saw some combat (with limited success) in World War II. However, the vulnerability of their light armour eventually caused the concept to be abandoned. However, the German Army uses a modern design of air-transportable armoured weapons carriers, the Wiesel AWC, which resembles the concept of a tankette. Super-heavy tank The term "super-heavy tank" has been used to describe armoured fighting vehicles of extreme size, generally over 75 tonnes. Programs have been initiated on several occasions with the aim of creating an invincible siegeworks/breakthrough vehicle for penetrating enemy formations and fortifications without fear of being destroyed in combat. Examples were designed in World War I and World War II (such as the Panzer VIII Maus), along with a few in the Cold War. However, few working prototypes were built and there is no clear evidence any of these vehicles saw combat, as their immense size would have made most designs impractical. Missile tank A missile tank is a tank fulfilling the role of a main battle tank, but using only anti-tank surface-to-surface missiles for main armament. Several nations have experimented with prototypes, notably the Soviet Union during the tenure of Nikita Khrushchev (projects Object 167, Object 137Ml, Object 155Ml, Object 287, Object 775), Flame tank A flame tank is an otherwise-standard tank equipped with a flamethrower, most commonly used to supplement combined arms attacks against fortifications, confined spaces, or other obstacles. The type only reached significant use in the Second World War, during which the United States, Soviet Union, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United Kingdom (including members of the British Commonwealth) all produced flamethrower-equipped tanks. Usually, the flame projector replaced one of the tank's machineguns, however, some flame projectors replaced the tank's main gun. Fuel for the flame weapon was generally carried inside the tank, although a few designs mounted the fuel externally, such as the armoured trailer used on the Churchill Crocodile. Flame tanks have been superseded by thermobaric weapons such as the Russian TOS-1. Infantry tank The idea for this tank was developed during World War I by British and French. The infantry tank was designed to work in concert with infantry in the assault, moving mostly at a walking pace, and carrying heavy armour to survive defensive fire. Its main purpose was to suppress enemy fire, crush obstacles such as barbed-wire entanglements, and protect the infantry on their advance into and through enemy lines by giving mobile overwatch and cover. The French Renault FT was the first iteration of this concept. The British and French retained the concept between the wars and into the Second World War era. Because infantry tanks did not need to be fast, they could carry heavy armour. One of the best-known infantry tanks was the Matilda II of World War II. Other examples include the French R-35, the British Valentine, and the British Churchill. Cruiser tank A cruiser tank, or cavalry tank, was designed to move fast and exploit penetrations of the enemy front. The idea originated in "Plan 1919", a British plan to break the trench deadlock of World War I in part via the use of high-speed tanks. The first cruiser tank was the British Whippet. Between the wars, this concept was implemented in the "fast tanks" pioneered by J. Walter Christie. These led to the Soviet BT tank series and the British cruiser tank series. During World War II, British cruiser tanks were designed to complement infantry tanks, exploiting gains made by the latter to attack and disrupt the enemy rear areas. In order to give them the required speed, cruiser designs sacrificed armour and armament compared to the infantry tanks. Pure British cruisers were generally replaced by more capable medium tanks such as the US Sherman and, to a lesser extent, the Cromwell by 1943. The Soviet fast tank (bistrokhodniy tank, or BT tank) classification also came out of the infantry/cavalry concept of armoured warfare and formed the basis for the British cruisers after 1936. The T-34 was a development of this line of tanks as well, though their armament, armour, and all-round capability places them firmly in the medium tank category. Armoured car The armoured car is a wheeled, often lightly armoured, vehicle adapted as a fighting machine. Its earliest form consisted of a motorised ironside chassis fitted with firing ports. By World War I, this had evolved into a mobile fortress equipped with command equipment, searchlights, and machine guns for self-defence. It was soon proposed that the requirements for the armament and layout of armoured cars be somewhat similar to those on naval craft, resulting in turreted vehicles. The first example carried a single revolving cupola with a Vickers gun; modern armoured cars may boast heavier armament – ranging from twin machine guns to large calibre cannon. Some multi-axled wheeled fighting vehicles can be quite heavy, and superior to older or smaller tanks in terms of armour and armament. Others are often used in military marches and processions, or for the escorting of important figures. Under peacetime conditions, they form an essential part of most standing armies. Armoured car units can move without the assistance of transporters and cover great distances with fewer logistical problems than tracked vehicles. During World War II, armoured cars were used for reconnaissance alongside scout cars. Their guns were suitable for some defence if they encountered enemy armoured fighting vehicles, but they were not intended to engage enemy tanks. Armoured cars have since been used in the offensive role against tanks with varying degrees of success, most notably during the South African Border War, Toyota War, the Invasion of Kuwait, and other lower-intensity conflicts. Aerosledge An aerosledge is a type of propeller-driven snowmobile, running on skis, used for communications, mail deliveries, medical aid, emergency recovery and border patrolling in northern Russia, as well as for recreation. Aerosledges were used by the Soviet Red Army during the Winter War and World War II. Some early aerosledges were built by young Igor Sikorsky in 1909–10, before he built multi-engine airplanes and helicopters. They were very light plywood vehicles on skis, propelled by old airplane engines and propellers. Scout car A scout car is a military armoured reconnaissance vehicle, capable of off-road mobility and often carrying mounted weapons such as machine guns for offensive capabilities and crew protection. They often only carry an operational crew aboard, which differentiates them from wheeled armoured personnel carriers (APCs) and infantry mobility vehicles (IMVs), but early scout cars, such as the open-topped US M3 scout car could carry a crew of seven. The term is often used synonymously with the more general term armoured car, which also includes armoured civilian vehicles. They are also differentiated by being designed and built for purpose, as opposed to improvised "technicals" which might serve in the same role. Reconnaissance vehicle A reconnaissance vehicle, also known as a scout vehicle, is a military vehicle used for forward reconnaissance. Both tracked and wheeled reconnaissance vehicles are in service. In some countries, light tanks such as the M551 Sheridan and AMX-13 are also used by scout platoons. Reconnaissance vehicles are usually designed with a low profile or small size and are lightly armoured, relying on speed and cover to escape detection. Their armament ranges from a medium machine gun to an autocannon. Modern examples are often fitted with ATGMs and a wide range of sensors. Some armoured personnel carriers and infantry mobility vehicle, such as the M113, TPz Fuchs, and Cadillac Gage Commando double in the reconnaissance role. Internal security vehicle An internal security vehicle (ISV), also known as an armoured security vehicle (ASV), is a combat vehicle used for suppressing civilian unrest. Security vehicles are typically armed with a turreted heavy machine gun and auxiliary medium machine gun. The vehicle is designed to minimize firepower dead space. Non-lethal water cannons and tear gas cannons can provide suppressive fire in lieu of unnecessary deadly fire. The vehicle must be protected against weapons typical of riots. Protection from improvised incendiary devices is achieved though coverage of the air intake and exhaust ports as well as a strong locking mechanism on the fuel opening. Turret and door locks prevent access to the interior of the vehicle by rioters. Vision blocks, ballistic glass and window shutters and outside surveillance cameras allow protected observation from within the vehicle. Wheeled 4x4 and 6x6 configurations are typical of security vehicles. Tracked security vehicles are often cumbersome and leave negative political connotations for being perceived as an imperial invading force. Military light utility vehicle Military light utility vehicles are the lightest weight class of military vehicles. It refers to light 4x4 military vehicles with light or no armour and all-terrain mobility. This type of vehicle originated in the first half of the 20th century when horses and other draft animals were replaced with mechanization. Light utility vehicles such as the Willys Jeep were frequently mounted with .50-calibre machineguns and other small weapons for hit-and-run tactics in WWII, especially by the British Special Air Service who used Jeeps to raid Axis airfields during the North Africa campaign. After WWII, vehicles like the Toyota Mega Cruiser and Humvee filled this role. In the 21st century, improvised explosive devices continue to pose threat to mobile infantry resulting in light utility vehicles being made heavier and with more armour. Improvised fighting vehicle An improvised fighting vehicle is a combat vehicle resulting from modifications to a civilian or military non-combat vehicle in order to give it a fighting capability. Such modifications usually consist of the grafting of armour plating and weapon systems. Various militaries have procured such vehicles, ever since the introduction of the first automobiles into military service. During the early days, the absence of a doctrine for the military use of automobiles or of an industry dedicated to producing them, lead to much improvisation in the creation of early armoured cars, and other such vehicles. Later, despite the advent of arms industries in many countries, several armies still resorted to using ad hoc contraptions, often in response to unexpected military situations, or as a result of the development of new tactics for which no available vehicle was suitable. The construction of improvised fighting vehicles may also reflect a lack of means for the force that uses them. This is especially true in underdeveloped countries and even in developing countries, where various armies and guerrilla forces have used them, as they are more affordable than military-grade combat vehicles. Modern examples include military gun truck used by units of regular armies or other official government armed forces, based on a conventional military cargo truck, that is able to carry a large weight of weapons and armour. They have mainly been used by regular armies to escort military convoys in regions subject to ambush by guerrilla forces. "Narco tanks", used by Mexican drug cartels in the Mexican drug war, are built from such trucks, which combines operational mobility, tactical offensive, and defensive capabilities. Troop carriers Troop-carrying AFVs are divided into three main types – armoured personnel carriers (APCs), infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs) and infantry mobility vehicles (IMV). The main difference between the three is their intended role – the APC is designed purely to transport troops and is armed for self-defence only – whereas the IFV is designed to provide close-quarters and anti-armour fire support to the infantry it carries. IMV is a wheeled armoured personnel carrier serving as a military patrol, reconnaissance or security vehicle. Armoured personnel carrier Armoured personnel carriers (APCs) are intended to carry infantry quickly and relatively safely to the point where they are deployed. In the Battle of Amiens, 8 August 1918, the British Mk V* tank (a lengthened Mark V) carried a small number of machine gunners as an experiment, but the men were debilitated by the conditions inside the vehicle. Later that year the first purpose-built APC, the British Mk IX tank (Mark Nine), appeared. In 1944, the Canadian general Guy Simonds ordered the conversion of redundant armoured vehicles to carry troops (generically named "Kangaroos"). This proved highly successful, even without training, and the concept was widely used in the 21st Army Group. Post-war, specialised designs were built, such as the Soviet BTR-60 and US M113. Infantry fighting vehicle An infantry fighting vehicle (IFV), also known as a mechanized infantry combat vehicle (MICV), is a type of armoured fighting vehicle used to carry infantry into battle and provide direct fire support. The first example of an IFV was the West German Schützenpanzer Lang HS.30 which served in the Bundeswehr from 1958 until the early 1980s. IFVs are similar to armoured personnel carriers (APCs) and infantry carrier vehicles (ICVs), designed to transport a section or squad of infantry (generally between five and ten men) and their equipment. They are differentiated from APCswhich are purely "troop-transport" vehicles armed only for self-defencebecause they are designed to give direct fire support to the dismounted infantry and so usually have significantly enhanced armament. IFVs also often have improved armour and some have firing ports (allowing the infantry to fire personal weapons while mounted). They are typically armed with an autocannon of 20 to 57 mm calibre, 7.62mm machine guns, anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs) and/or surface-to-air missiles (SAMs). IFVs are usually tracked, but some wheeled vehicles fall into this category. IFVs are generally less heavily armed and armoured than main battle tanks. They sometimes carry anti-tank missiles to protect and support infantry against armoured threats, such as the NATO TOW missile and Soviet Bastion, which offer a significant threat to tanks. Specially equipped IFVs have taken on some of the roles of light tanks; they are used by reconnaissance organizations, and light IFVs are used by airborne units which must be able to fight without the heavy firepower of tanks. Infantry mobility vehicle An infantry mobility vehicle (IMV) or protected patrol vehicle (PPV) is a wheeled armoured personnel carrier (APC) serving as a military patrol, reconnaissance or security vehicle. Examples include the ATF Dingo, AMZ Dzik, AMZ Tur, Mungo ESK, and Bushmaster IMV. This term also applies to the vehicles currently being fielded as part of the MRAP program. IMVs were developed in response to the threats of modern counterinsurgency warfare, with an emphasis on Ambush Protection and Mine-Resistance. Similar vehicles existed long before the term IMV was coined, such as the French VAB and South African Buffel. The term is coming more into use to differentiate light 4x4 wheeled APCs from the traditional 8x8 wheeled APCs. It is a neologism for what might have been classified in the past as an armoured scout car, such as the BRDM, but the IMV is distinguished by having a requirement to carry dismountable infantry. The up-armoured M1114 Humvee variant can be seen as an adaptation of the unarmoured Humvee to serve in the IMV role. Amphibious vehicles Many modern military vehicles, ranging from light wheeled command and reconnaissance, through armoured personnel carriers and tanks, are manufactured with amphibious capabilities. Contemporary wheeled armoured amphibians include the French Véhicule de l'Avant Blindé and Véhicule Blindé Léger. The latter is a small, lightly armoured 4×4 all-terrain vehicle that is fully amphibious and can swim at 5.4 km/h. The VAB (Véhicule de l'Avant Blindé – 'armoured vanguard vehicle') is a fully amphibious armoured personnel carrier powered in the water by two water jets, that entered service in 1976 and produced in numerous configurations, ranging from basic personnel carrier, anti-tank missile platform. During the Cold War the Soviet bloc states developed a number of amphibious APCs, fighting vehicles and tanks, both wheeled and tracked. Most of the vehicles the Soviets designed were amphibious, or could ford deep water. Wheeled examples are the BRDM-1 and BRDM-2 4x4 armoured scout cars, as well as the BTR-60, BTR-70, BTR-80, BTR-94 and BTR-90 8x8 armoured personnel carriers. The United States started developing a long line of Landing Vehicle Tracked (LVT) designs from . The US Marine Corps currently uses the AAV7-A1 Assault Amphibious Vehicle, which was to be succeeded by the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, which was capable of planing on water and can achieve water speeds of 37–46 km/h. The EFV project has been cancelled. A significant number of tracked armoured vehicles that are primarily intended for land-use, have some amphibious capability, tactically useful inland, reducing dependence on bridges. They use their tracks, sometimes with added propeller or water jets for propulsion. As long as the banks have a shallow enough slopes to enter or leave the water they can cross rivers and water obstacles. Some heavy tanks can operate amphibiously with a fabric skirt to add buoyancy. The Sherman DD tank used in the Normandy landings had this setup. When in water the waterproof float screen was raised and propellers deployed. Some modern vehicles use a similar skirt. Airborne vehicles Lightweight armoured fighting vehicles designed or modified to be carried by aircraft and delivered by air drop, helicopter lift, glider, or air landing with infantry to provide heavier tactical firepower and mobility. The air-equivalent to amphibious vehicles, the main advantage of airborne forces is their ability to be deployed into combat zones without land passage, as long as the airspace is accessible. Airborne vehicles are limited only by the tonnage capacity of their transport aircraft. Airborne vehicles typically lack the armour and supplies necessary for prolonged combat, so they are utilized for establishing an airhead to bring in larger forces before carrying out other combat objectives. One modern example is the German Wiesel AWC. The USA also created the M22 Locust as a way to aid paratroopers/ being paradropped in as it was very lightly armoured and very small. Armoured engineering vehicle Modern engineering AFV's utilize chassis based on main battle tank platforms: these vehicles are as well armoured and protected as tanks, designed to keep up with tanks, breach obstacles to help tanks get to wherever it needs to be, perform utility functions necessary to expedite mission objectives of tanks, and to conduct other earth-moving and engineering work on the battlefield. These vehicles go by different names depending upon the country of use or manufacture. In the United States the term "combat engineer vehicle (CEV)" is used, in the United Kingdom the term "Armoured Vehicle Royal Engineers (AVRE)" is used, while in Canada and other commonwealth nations the term "armoured engineer vehicle (AEV)" is used. There is no set template for what such a vehicle will look like, yet likely features include a large dozer blade or mine ploughs, a large calibre demolition cannon, augers, winches, excavator arms and cranes, or lifting booms. Although the term "armoured engineer vehicle" is used specifically to describe these multi-purpose tank-based engineering vehicles, that term is also used more generically in British and Commonwealth militaries to describe all heavy tank-based engineering vehicles used in the support of mechanized forces. Thus, "armoured engineer vehicle" used generically would refer to AEV, AVLB, Assault Breachers, and so on. Good examples of this type of vehicle include the UK Trojan AVRE, the Russian IMR, and the US M728 Combat Engineer Vehicle. Breaching vehicle A breaching vehicle is especially designed to clear pathways for troops and other vehicles through minefields and along roadside bombs and other improvised explosive devices. These vehicles are equipped with mechanical or other means for the breaching of man-made obstacles. Common types of breaching vehicles include mechanical flails, mine plough vehicles, and mine roller vehicles. Armoured bulldozer The armoured bulldozer is a basic tool of combat engineering. These combat engineering vehicles combine the earth moving capabilities of the bulldozer with armour which protects the vehicle and its operator in or near combat. Most are civilian bulldozers modified by addition of vehicle armour/military equipment, but some are tanks stripped of armament and fitted with a dozer blade. Some tanks have bulldozer blades while retaining their armament, but this does not make them armoured bulldozers as such, because combat remains the primary role – earth moving is a secondary task. Armoured recovery vehicle An armoured recovery vehicle (ARV) is a type of vehicle recovery armoured fighting vehicle used to repair battle- or mine-damaged as well as broken-down armoured vehicles during combat, or to tow them out of the danger zone for more extensive repairs. To this end the term armoured repair and recovery vehicle (ARRV) is also used. ARVs are normally built on the chassis of a main battle tank (MBT), but some are also constructed on the basis of other armoured fighting vehicles, mostly armoured personnel carriers (APCs). ARVs are usually built on the basis of a vehicle in the same class as they are supposed to recover; a tank-based ARV is used to recover tanks, while an APC-based one recovers APCs, but does not have the power to tow a much heavier tank. Armoured vehicle-launched bridge An armoured vehicle-launched bridge (AVLB) is a combat support vehicle, sometimes regarded as a subtype of combat engineering vehicle, designed to assist militaries in rapidly deploying tanks and other armoured fighting vehicles across rivers. The AVLB is usually a tracked vehicle converted from a tank chassis to carry a folding metal bridge instead of weapons. The AVLB's job is to allow armoured or infantry units to cross water, when a river too deep for vehicles to wade through is reached, and no bridge is conveniently located (or sufficiently sturdy, a substantial concern when moving 60-ton tanks). The bridge layer unfolds and launches its cargo, providing a ready-made bridge across the obstacle in only minutes. Once the span has been put in place, the AVLB vehicle detaches from the bridge, and moves aside to allow traffic to pass. Once all of the vehicles have crossed, it crosses the bridge itself and reattaches to the bridge on the other side. It then retracts the span ready to move off again. A similar procedure can be employed to allow crossings of small chasms or similar obstructions. AVLBs can carry bridges of or greater in length. By using a tank chassis, the bridge layer is able to cover the same terrain as main battle tanks, and the provision of armour allows them to operate even in the face of enemy fire. However, this is not a universal attribute: some exceptionally sturdy 6x6 or 8x8 truck chassis have lent themselves to bridge-layer applications. Combat engineer section carriers Combat engineer section carriers are used to transport sappers (combat engineers) and can be fitted with bulldozers' blades and other mine-breaching devices. They are often used as APCs because of their carrying ability and heavy protection. They are usually armed with machine guns and grenade launchers and usually tracked to provide enough tractive force to push blades and rakes. Some examples are the U.S. M113 APC, IDF Puma, Nagmachon, Husky, and U.S. M1132 ESV (a Stryker variant). Air defence vehicles An anti-aircraft vehicle, also known as a self-propelled anti-aircraft gun (SPAAG) or self-propelled air defense system (SPAD), is a mobile vehicle with a dedicated anti-aircraft capability. Specific weapon systems used include machine guns, anti-aircraft autocannons, larger anti-air guns, or surface-to-air-missiles, and some mount both guns and longer-ranged missiles (e.g. the Pantsir-S1). Platforms used include both trucks and heavier combat vehicles such as armored personnel carriers and tanks, which add protection from aircraft, artillery, and small arms fire for front line deployment. Anti-aircraft guns are usually mounted in a quickly-traversing turret with a high rate of elevation, for tracking fast-moving aircraft. They are often in dual or quadruple mounts, allowing a high rate of fire. In addition, most anti-aircraft guns can be used in a direct-fire role against surface targets to great effect. In the early 21st century, missiles (generally mounted on similar turrets) largely supplanted anti-aircraft guns, though guns have recently shown revived utility against slow, low-flying drones. Self-propelled artillery Self-propelled artillery vehicles give mobility to artillery. Within the term are covered self-propelled guns (or howitzers) and rocket artillery. They are highly mobile, usually based on tracked chassis carrying either a large howitzer or other field gun or alternatively a mortar or some form of rocket or missile launcher. They are usually used for long-range indirect bombardment support on the battlefield. In the past, self-propelled artillery has included direct-fire "Gun Motor Carriage" vehicles, such as assault guns and tank destroyers (also known as self-propelled anti-tank guns). These have been heavily armoured vehicles, the former providing danger-close fire-support for infantry and the latter acting as specialized anti-tank vehicles. Modern self-propelled artillery vehicles may superficially resemble tanks, but they are generally lightly armoured, too lightly to survive in direct-fire combat. However, they protect their crews against shrapnel and small arms and are therefore usually included as armoured fighting vehicles. Many are equipped with machine guns for defence against enemy infantry. The key advantage of self-propelled over towed artillery is that it can be brought into action much faster. Before towed artillery can be used, it has to stop, unlimber and the guns set up. To move position, the guns must be limbered up again and brought – usually towed – to the new location. By comparison, self-propelled artillery in combination with modern communications, can stop at a chosen location and begin firing almost immediately, then quickly move on to a new position. This ability is very useful in a mobile conflict and particularly on the advance. Conversely, towed artillery was and remains cheaper to build and maintain. It is also lighter and can be taken to places that self-propelled guns cannot reach, so despite the advantages of the self-propelled artillery, towed guns remain in the arsenals of many modern armies. Assault gun An assault gun is a gun or howitzer mounted on a motor vehicle or armoured chassis, designed for use in the direct fire role in support of infantry when attacking other infantry or fortified positions. Historically, the custom-built fully armoured assault guns usually mounted the gun or howitzer in a fully enclosed casemate on a tank chassis. The use of a casemate instead of a gun turret limited these weapons' field of fire, but allowed a larger gun to be fitted relative to the chassis, more armour to be fitted for the same weight, and provided a cheaper construction. In most cases, these turretless vehicles also presented a lower profile as a target for the enemy. Self-propelled siege mortar A siege mortar is a form of self-propelled gun that holds a siege mortar. The only siege mortar ever built was the Karl-Gerät. It could be argued that these could be classified as a Mortar carrier. Mortar carrier A mortar carrier is a self-propelled artillery vehicle carrying a mortar as its primary weapon. Mortar carriers cannot be fired while on the move and some must be dismounted to fire. In U.S. Army doctrine, mortar carriers provide close and immediate indirect fire support for maneuver units while allowing for rapid displacement and quick reaction to the tactical situation. The ability to relocate not only allows fire support to be provided where it is needed faster, but also allows these units to avoid counter-battery fire. Mortar carriers have traditionally avoided direct contact with the enemy. Many units report never using secondary weapons in combat. Prior to the Iraq War, American 120 mm mortar platoons reorganized from six M1064 mortar carriers and two M577 fire direction centres (FDC) to four M1064 and one FDC. The urban environment of Iraq made it difficult to utilize mortars. New technologies such as mortar ballistic computers and communication equipment and are being integrated. Modern era combat is becoming more reliant on direct fire support from mortar carrier machine guns. Multiple rocket launcher A multiple rocket launcher is a type of unguided rocket artillery system. Like other rocket artillery, multiple rocket launchers are less accurate and have a much lower (sustained) rate of fire than batteries of traditional artillery guns. However, they have the capability of simultaneously dropping many hundreds of kilograms of explosive, with devastating effect. The Korean Hwacha is an example of an early weapon system with a resemblance to the modern-day multiple rocket launcher. The first self-propelled multiple rocket launchers – and arguably the most famous – were the Soviet BM-13 Katyushas, first used during World War II and exported to Soviet allies afterwards. They were simple systems in which a rack of launch rails was mounted on the back of a truck. This set the template for modern multiple rocket launchers. The first modern multiple rocket launcher was the German 15 cm Nebelwerfer 41 of the 1930s, a small towed artillery piece. Only later in World War II did the British deploy similar weapons in the form of the Land Mattress.The Americans mounted tubular launchers atop M4 Sherman tanks to create the T34 Calliope rocket launching tank, only used in small numbers, as their closest equivalent to the Katyusha. Missile vehicle Missile vehicles are trucks or tractor units designed to carry rockets or missiles. The missile vehicle may be a self-propelled unit, or the missile holder/launcher may be on a trailer towed by a prime mover. They are used in the military forces of a number of countries in the world. Long missiles are commonly transported parallel to the ground on these vehicles, but elevated into an inclined or vertical position for launching. A Transporter erector launcher (TEL) is a missile vehicle with an integrated prime mover (tractor unit) that can carry, elevate to firing position and launch one or more missiles. Such vehicles exist for both surface-to-air missiles and surface-to-surface missiles. Tank destroyer Tank destroyers and tank hunters are armed with an anti-tank gun or anti-tank missile launcher, and are designed specifically to engage enemy armoured vehicles. Many have been based on a tracked tank chassis, while others are wheeled. Since World War II, main battle tanks have largely replaced gun-armed tank destroyers; although lightly armoured anti-tank guided missile (ATGM) carriers are commonly used for supplementary long-range anti-tank engagements. In post-Cold War conflict, the resurgence of expeditionary warfare has seen the emergence of gun-armed wheeled vehicles, sometimes called "protected gun systems", which may bear a superficial resemblance to tank destroyers, but are employed as direct fire support units typically providing support in low intensity operations such as Iraq and Afghanistan. These have the advantage of easier deployment, as only the largest air transports can carry a main battle tank, and their smaller size makes them more effective in urban combat. Many forces' IFVs carry anti-tank missiles in every infantry platoon, and attack helicopters have also added anti-tank capability to the modern battlefield. But there are still dedicated anti-tank vehicles with very heavy long-range missiles, or intended for airborne use. There have also been dedicated anti-tank vehicles built on ordinary armoured personnel carrier or armoured car chassis. Examples include the U.S. M901 ITV (Improved TOW Vehicle) and the Norwegian NM142, both on an M113 chassis, several Soviet ATGM launchers based on the BRDM scout car, the British FV438 Swingfire and FV102 Striker and the German Raketenjagdpanzer series built on the chassis of the HS 30 and Mardar IFVs. Armoured train An armoured train is a railway train protected with armour. They are usually equipped with rail cars armed with artillery, autocannons, machine guns, tank turrets and anti-aircraft guns. They were mostly used during the late 19th to mid-20th century, when they offered an innovative way to quickly move large amounts of firepower. Their use was discontinued in most countries when road vehicles became much more powerful and offered more flexibility, and because armoured trains were too vulnerable to track sabotage and attacks from the air. However, the Russian Federation used improvised armoured trains in the Second Chechen War in the late 1990s and 2000s. Armoured trains carrying ballistic missiles have also been used. The rail cars on an armoured train were designed for many tasks, such as carrying artillery and machine guns, infantry units, anti-tank and anti-aircraft guns. During World War II, the Germans would sometimes put a Fremdgerät (captured AFVs such as the French Somua S-35 or Czech PzKpfw 38(t)), or obsolescent Panzer II light tanks on a flatbed rail car, which could quickly be offloaded by means of a ramp and used away from the railway line to chase down enemy partisans. Different types of armour were used to protect armoured trains from attack. In addition to various metal plates, concrete and sandbags were used in some cases on armoured trains. Armoured trains were sometimes escorted by a kind of rail-tank called a draisine. One such example was the Italian 'Littorina' armoured trolley, which had a cab in the front and rear, each with a control set so it could be driven down the tracks in either direction. Littorina mounted two dual 7.92mm MG13 machine gun turrets from Panzer I light tanks. See also References Sources External links US Wheeled armoured fighting vehicles Military vehicles by type

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All%20Quiet%20on%20the%20Western%20Front

All Quiet on the Western Front

All Quiet on the Western Front () is a novel by Erich Maria Remarque, a German veteran of World War I. The book describes the German soldiers' extreme physical and mental trauma during the war as well as the detachment from civilian life felt by many upon returning home from the war. The novel was first published in November and December 1928 in the German newspaper and in book form in late January 1929. The book and its sequel, The Road Back (1930), were among the books banned and burned in Nazi Germany. All Quiet on the Western Front sold 2.5 million copies in 22 languages in its first 18 months in print. Three film adaptations of the book have been made, each of which was lauded. The 1930 American adaptation, directed by Lewis Milestone, won two Academy Awards. The 1979 British-American adaptation, a television film by Delbert Mann, won a Golden Globe Award and an Emmy Award. The 2022 German adaptation, directed by Edward Berger, won four Academy Awards. The book entered the public domain in the United States in 2024, with the 1930 film adaptation set to do so in 2026. Title and translation The English translation by Arthur Wesley Wheen gives the title as All Quiet on the Western Front. The literal translation of "" is "Nothing New in the West," with "West" being the Western Front; the phrase refers to the content of an official communiqué at the end of the novel. Brian Murdoch's 1993 translation rendered the phrase as "there was nothing new to report on the Western Front" within the narrative. However, in the foreword, he explains his retention of the original book title: Although it does not match the German exactly, Wheen's title has justly become part of the English language and is retained here with gratitude. The phrase "" has become a colloquial expression meaning stagnation, or lack of visible change, in any context. Murdoch also explains how, owing to the time it was published, Wheen's translation was obliged to Anglicise some lesser-known German references and lessen the impact of certain passages while omitting others entirely. Murdoch's translation is more accurate to the original text and completely unexpurgated. Plot summary The book centers on Paul Bäumer, a German soldier on the Western Front during World War I. Before the war, Paul lived with his parents and sister in a charming German village. He attended school, where the patriotic speeches of his teacher Kantorek led the whole class to volunteer for the Imperial German Army shortly after the start of the Great War. At the training camp, where they meet Himmelstoß, his class is scattered over the platoons amongst Frisian fishermen, peasants and labourers, with whom they soon become friends. Bäumer arrives at the Western Front with his friends and schoolmates (Leer, Müller, Kropp, Kemmerich and a number of other characters). There they meet Stanislaus Katczinsky, an older recalled reservist, nicknamed Kat, who becomes Paul's mentor. While fighting at the front, Bäumer and his comrades engage in frequent battles and endure the treacherous and filthy conditions of trench warfare. The battles fought here have no names and only meager pieces of land are gained, which are often lost again later. Remarque often refers to the living soldiers as old and dead, emotionally drained and shaken. Paul visits home, and the contrast with civilian life highlights the cost of the war on his psyche. The town has not changed since he went off to war, but he has: he finds that he does "not belong here any more, it is a foreign world". Paul recovers the books and writings he had left in his childhood room, but finds his passion for literature to have been completely erased by the trauma of war. He feels disconnected from most of the townspeople, who ask him "stupid and distressing" questions about his experiences or lecture him about strategy and advancing to Paris while insisting that Paul and his friends know only their "own little sector" but nothing of the big picture. Indeed, the only person he remains connected to is his dying mother, with whom he shares a tender yet restrained relationship. In the end, he concludes that he "ought never to have come [home] on leave". Paul is glad to return and reunite with his comrades. Soon after, he volunteers to go on a patrol and kills a Frenchman in hand-to-hand combat for the first time. He watches the man die slowly in agony for hours. He is remorseful and devastated, asking for forgiveness from the man's corpse. He later confesses to Kat and Albert, who try to comfort him and reassure him that it is only part of the war. Paul and his company receive a temporary reprieve from the horrid rations and living conditions of the trenches when they are instead sent to a supply depot in an occupied French town. They enjoy food and luxuries taken from the depot or looted from the town but continue to lose men to Allied shelling, culminating in Paul and Albert being wounded while evacuating civilians and needing to be diverted to a Catholic hospital far behind the lines. Albert eventually has his leg amputated, whilst Paul is deemed fit for service and returned to the front. By the closing months of the war, German morale is almost nonexistent as the men realize they are only fighting to delay an armistice. The Americans have recently joined the war as both they and the English begin outperforming the far more poorly equipped Germans. In despair Paul watches as his friends fall one by one. Kat's death is the last straw that finally causes Paul to lose his will to live. In the final chapter he comments that peace is coming soon but he does not see the future as bright and shining with hope. Paul feels that he has no aims left in life and that their generation will be different and misunderstood. In October 1918 Paul is finally killed on a remarkably peaceful day. The situation report from the frontline states a simple phrase: "All quiet on the Western Front." Paul's corpse displays a calm expression on its face, "as though almost glad the end had come." Themes At the beginning of the book, Remarque writes, "This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped (its) shells, were destroyed by the war." The book does not focus on heroic stories of bravery, but rather gives a view of the conditions in which the soldiers find themselves. The monotony between battles, the constant threat of artillery fire and bombardments, the struggle to find food, the lack of training of young recruits (meaning lower chances of survival), and the overarching role of random chance in the lives and deaths of the soldiers are described in detail. The novel also portrays the difficulty experienced by former soldiers trying to revert to civilian life after having experienced extreme combat situations. This internal destruction can be found as early as the first chapter as Paul comments that, although all the boys are young, their youth has already left them. In addition, the massive loss of life and negligible gains from the fighting are constantly emphasized. Soldiers' lives are thrown away by their commanding officers who are stationed comfortably away from the front, ignorant of and indifferent to the suffering and terror of the front lines. Another major theme is the concept of blind nationalism. Remarque often emphasizes that the boys were not forced to join the war effort against their will, but rather by a sense of patriotism and pride. Kantorek called Paul's platoon the "Iron Youth", teaching his students a romanticized version of warfare with glory and duty to the Fatherland. It is only when the boys go to war and have to live and fight in dirty, cramped trenches with little protection from enemy bullets and shells while contending with hunger and sickness that they realize just how dispiriting it is to actually serve in the army. Characters Paul Bäumer The main character and central figure of the novel. Albert Kropp Kropp is in Paul's class at school and is described as the clearest thinker of the group as well as the smallest. Kropp is wounded towards the end of the novel and undergoes a leg amputation. Both he and Bäumer end up spending time in a Catholic hospital together, Bäumer suffering from shrapnel wounds to the leg and arm. Although Kropp initially plans to commit suicide if he requires an amputation, he postponed suicide because of the strength of military camaraderie and a lack of a revolver. Kropp and Bäumer part ways when Bäumer is recalled to his regiment after recovering. Paul comments that saying farewell was "very hard, but it is something a soldier learns to deal with." Haie Westhus Haie is tall and strong with a good sense of humor, and a peat-digger by profession. His size and behavior make him seem older than Paul, yet he is the same age as Paul and his school-friends, who are roughly 19 at the start of the book. During combat, he is fatally injured in his back (Chapter 6)—the resulting wound is large enough for Paul to see Haie's breathing lung while Himmelstoß (Himmelstoss) carries him to safety. He later dies of this injury. Friedrich Müller Müller is one of Bäumer's classmates, and is 19 when he also volunteers to join the German army. Carrying his old school books with him to the battlefield, he constantly reminds himself of the importance of learning and education. Even while under enemy fire, he "mutters propositions in physics." He takes a liking to Kemmerich's boots and inherits them when Kemmerich dies early in the novel. He is killed later after being shot point-blank in the stomach with a flare gun. As he was dying "quite conscious and in terrible pain", he gave his boots which he inherited from Kemmerich to Paul. Stanislaus "Kat" Katczinsky Katczinsky, a recalled reserve militiaman, was a cobbler in civilian life. He is older than Paul Bäumer and his comrades, about 40 years old, and serves as their leadership figure. He also represents a literary model highlighting the differences between the younger and older soldiers. While the older men have already had a life of professional and personal experience before the war, Paul and the men of his age have had little life experience or time for personal growth. Kat is well known for his ability to scavenge nearly any item needed, especially food. At one point he secures four boxes of lobster. Paul describes Kat as possessing a sixth sense. One night, Paul along with a group of other soldiers are held up in a factory with neither rations nor comfortable bedding. Katczinsky leaves for a short while, returning with straw to put over the bare wires of the beds. Later, to feed the hungry men, Kat brings bread, a bag of horse flesh, a lump of fat, a pinch of salt and a pan in which to cook the food. Kat is hit by shrapnel near the end of the story, leaving him with a smashed shin. Paul carries him back to camp on his back, only to discover upon their arrival that a stray splinter had hit Kat in the back of the head and killed him on the way. He is thus the last of Paul's close friends to die in battle. It is Kat's death that eventually makes Bäumer indifferent as to whether he survives the war or not, yet certain that he can face the rest of his life without fear. "Let the months and the years come, they can take nothing from me, they can take nothing more. I am so alone, and so without hope that I can confront them without fear." Tjaden One of Bäumer's non-schoolmate friends. Before the war, Tjaden was a locksmith. A big eater with a grudge against the former postman-turned-corporal Himmelstoß (thanks to his strict "disciplinary actions"), he manages to forgive Himmelstoß later in the book. Throughout the book, Paul frequently remarks on how much of an eater he is, yet somehow manages to stay as "thin as a rake". He appears in the sequel, The Road Back. Himmelstoß Sergeant der Reserve Himmelstoß was a village postman before being mobilised for the war and securing a position as a Sergeant in the Landwehr (Reserves of persons 28-39). Himmelstoß is a power-hungry martinet who compensated for his lack of social standing by abusing his position as the Training NCO for the men under his control, taking sadistic pleasure in punishing the minor infractions of his trainees during their basic training in preparation for their deployment. He had a special contempt for Paul and his friends, because they knew him as their local postman. Paul later figures that the training taught by Himmelstoß made them "hard, suspicious, pitiless, and tough" but most importantly it taught them comradeship. Bäumer and his comrades exact their revenge on Himmelstoß, mercilessly whipping him on the night before they depart for the front. Himmelstoß later joins them at the front, revealing himself as a coward by pretending to be wounded because of a scratch on his face. Paul Bäumer beats him because of it and when a lieutenant comes along looking for men for a trench charge, Himmelstoß joins and leads the charge. He carries Haie Westhus's body to Bäumer after he is fatally wounded. Matured and repentant through his experiences, Himmelstoß later asks for forgiveness from his previous charges. As he becomes the new staff cook, to prove his friendship he secures two pounds of sugar for Bäumer and half a pound of butter for Tjaden. Secondary characters Franz Kemmerich had enlisted with his best friend and classmate, Bäumer, at only 19 years. Kemmerich is shot in the leg early in the story; his injured leg has to be amputated, and he dies shortly after. In anticipation of Kemmerich's imminent death, Müller was eager to get his boots. Paul later visits Kemmerich's mother while on leave, and lies to her that Franz died instantly and painlessly. Behm was a youthful and overweight student and the only one in Paul's class that was not quickly influenced by Kantorek's patriotism to join the war, but is pressured into volunteering alongside his friends. He is the first of Paul's friends to die. He is blinded in no man's land and believed to be dead by his friends. The next day, when he is seen walking blindly around no man's land, it is discovered that he was only unconscious, but he is killed before he can be rescued. Kantorek is the schoolmaster of Paul and his friends, including Kropp, Leer, Müller, and Behm. Behaving "in a way that cost [him] nothing," Kantorek is a strong supporter of the war and encourages Bäumer and other students in his class to join the war effort. Kantorek is a hypocrite, urging the young men he teaches to fight in the name of patriotism, while not voluntarily enlisting himself. Mittelstädt is another of Paul's school friends who is promoted to training reservists behind the front, where in a twist of fate he ends up with Kantorek in his unit after the schoolmaster is drafted himself. Mittelstädt uses his power to torment and mock Kantorek as revenge for Behm's death. Leer is an intelligent soldier in Bäumer's company, and one of his classmates, and an "old hand" at womanizing and seduction. He later bleeds to death from a shrapnel wound, causing Paul to ask himself, "What use is it to him now that he was such a good mathematician in school?" Lieutenant Bertinck is the leader of Bäumer's company. His men have a great respect for him, and Bertinck has great respect for his men, ensuring they have full stomachs and expressing regret when they suffer heavy casualties. He is shot towards the end of the war while defending his men from a flamethrower team, losing his chin in the same explosion that wounds Leer. Detering is a farmer who constantly longs to return to his wife and farm. He is fond of horses and is angered when he sees them used in combat. He says, "It is of the vilest baseness to use horses in the war," when the group hears several wounded horses writhe and scream for a long time before dying during a bombardment. He is driven to desert when he sees a cherry tree in blossom, which reminds him of home. He is found by military police and court-martialed and is never heard from again. Hamacher is a patient at the Catholic hospital where Paul and Albert Kropp are temporarily stationed. He has an intimate knowledge of the workings of the hospital. He also has a "Special Permit", certifying him as sporadically not responsible for his actions due to a head wound, though he is clearly quite sane and exploiting his permit so he can stay in the hospital and away from the war as long as possible. Publication and reception From November 10 to December 9, 1928, All Quiet on the Western Front was published in serial form in Vossische Zeitung magazine. It was released in book form the following year to great success, selling one and a half million copies that same year. It was the best-selling work of fiction in America for the year 1929, according to Publishers Weekly. Although publishers had worried that interest in World War I had waned more than 10 years after the armistice, Remarque's realistic depiction of trench warfare from the perspective of young soldiers struck a chord with the war's survivors—soldiers and civilians alike—and provoked strong reactions, both positive and negative, around the world. With All Quiet on the Western Front, Remarque emerged as an eloquent spokesman for a generation that had been, in his own words, "destroyed by war, even though it might have escaped its shells." Remarque's harshest critics, in turn, were his countrymen, many of whom felt the book denigrated the German war effort, and that Remarque had exaggerated the horrors of war to further his pacifist agenda. The strongest voices against Remarque came from the emerging Nazi Party and its ideological allies. In 1933, when the Nazis rose to power, All Quiet on the Western Front became one of the first degenerate books to be publicly burnt; in 1930, screenings of the Academy Award-winning film based on the book were met with Nazi-organized protests and mob attacks on both movie theatres and audience members. Objections to Remarque's portrayal of the World War I German soldiers were not limited to those of the Nazis in 1933. Dr. was concerned about Remarque's depiction of the medical personnel as being inattentive, uncaring, or absent from frontline action. Kroner was specifically worried that the book would perpetuate German stereotypes abroad that had subsided since the First World War. He offered the following clarification: "People abroad will draw the following conclusions: if German doctors deal with their own fellow countrymen in this manner, what acts of inhumanity will they not perpetuate against helpless prisoners delivered up into their hands or against the populations of occupied territory?" A fellow patient of Remarque's in the military hospital in Duisburg objected to the negative depictions of the nuns and patients and to the general portrayal of soldiers: "There were soldiers to whom the protection of homeland, protection of house and homestead, protection of family were the highest objective, and to whom this will to protect their homeland gave the strength to endure any extremities." These criticisms suggest that experiences of the war and the personal reactions of individual soldiers to their experiences may be more diverse than Remarque portrays them; however, it is beyond question that Remarque gives voice to a side of the war and its experience that was overlooked or suppressed at the time. This perspective is crucial to understanding the true effects of World War I. The evidence can be seen in the lingering depression that Remarque and many of his friends and acquaintances were suffering a decade later. The book was also banned in other European countries on the grounds that it was considered anti-war propaganda; Austrian soldiers were forbidden from reading the book in 1929, and Czechoslovakia banned it from its military libraries. The Italian translation was also banned in 1933. When the Nazis were re-militarizing Germany, the book was banned as it was deemed counterproductive to German rearmament. In contrast, All Quiet on the Western Front was trumpeted by pacifists as an anti-war book. Remarque makes a point in the opening statement that the novel does not advocate any political position, but is merely an attempt to describe the experiences of the soldier. Much of the literary criticism came from Salomo Friedlaender, who wrote a book Hat Erich Maria Remarque wirklich gelebt? "Did Erich Maria Remarque really live?" (under the pen name Mynona), which was, in its turn, criticized in: Hat Mynona wirklich gelebt? "Did Mynona really live?" by Kurt Tucholsky. Friedlaender's criticism was mainly personal in nature—he attacked Remarque as being egocentric and greedy. Remarque publicly stated that he wrote All Quiet on the Western Front for personal reasons, not for profit, as Friedlaender had charged. All Quiet on the Western Front was followed in 1930 by The Road Back, which follows the surviving characters after the Treaty of Versailles, and the two are considered part of a trilogy alongside the narratively unrelated Three Comrades, released in 1936 and set well into the post-war era. Adaptations Films All Quiet on the Western Front, a 1930 American film directed by Lewis Milestone, starring Louis Wolheim, Lew Ayres, John Wray, Arnold Lucy, and Ben Alexander. Recipient of two Oscars, including Best Picture at the 3rd Academy Awards. All Quiet on the Western Front, a 1979 CBS television film by Delbert Mann, starring Richard Thomas and Ernest Borgnine. All Quiet on the Western Front, a 2022 German film directed by Edward Berger, starring Felix Kammerer and Albrecht Schuch. Nominated for nine Oscars, including Best Picture, at the 95th Academy Awards, and winning seven British Academy Film Awards and four Oscars. Comics "All Quiet on the Western Front", a 1952 comic book adaptation as part of the Classics Illustrated series. Music "All Quiet on the Western Front", a song from Elton John's 1982 album Jump Up!, written by Elton and Bernie Taupin. Audiobooks All Quiet on the Western Front, a 2000 Recorded Books audiobook of the text, read by Frank Muller. All Quiet on the Western Front, a 2010 Hachette Audio UK audiobook narrated by Tom Lawrence. All Quiet on the Western Front, a 2024 Electric City Entertainment audiobook narrated by Frank Cioppettini. Radio All Quiet on the Western Front, a 2008 radio adaptation broadcast on BBC Radio 3, starring Robert Lonsdale and Shannon Graney, written by Dave Sheasby, and directed by David Hunter. See also Bildungsroman List of books with anti-war themes References External links Full text of at Internet Archive Schneider, Thomas: All Quiet on the Western Front (novel) (2014) at 1914–1918-online: International Encyclopedia of the First World War. 1929 German-language novels 1929 German novels Anti-war novels Censored books German novels adapted into films Novels adapted into comics German novels adapted into television shows Novels adapted into radio programs Novels by Erich Maria Remarque Novels first published in serial form Works originally published in Vossische Zeitung Novels set during World War I Novels set in Europe Little, Brown and Company books

2161

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artistic%20License

Artistic License

The Artistic License is an open-source license used for certain free and open-source software packages, most notably the standard implementation of the Perl programming language and most CPAN modules, which are dual-licensed under the Artistic License and the GNU General Public License (GPL). History Artistic License 1.0 The original Artistic License was written by Larry Wall. The name of the license is a reference to the concept of artistic license. Whether or not the original Artistic License is a free software license is largely unsettled. The Free Software Foundation explicitly called the original Artistic License a non-free license, criticizing it as being "too vague; some passages are too clever for their own good, and their meaning is not clear". The FSF recommended that the license not be used on its own, but approved the common AL/GPL dual-licensing approach for Perl projects. In response to this, Bradley Kuhn, who later worked for the Free Software Foundation, made a minimal redraft to clarify the ambiguous passages. This was released as the Clarified Artistic License and was approved by the FSF. It is used by the Paros Proxy, the JavaFBP toolkit and NcFTP. The terms of the Artistic License 1.0 were at issue in Jacobsen v. Katzer in the initial 2009 ruling by the United States District Court for the Northern District of California declared that FOSS-like licenses could only be enforced through contract law rather than through copyright law, in contexts where contract damages would be difficult to establish. On appeal, a federal appellate court "determined that the terms of the Artistic License are enforceable copyright conditions". The case was remanded to the District Court, which did not apply the superior court's criteria on the grounds that, in the interim, the governing Supreme Court precedent applicable to the case had changed. However, this left undisturbed the finding that a free and open-source license nonetheless has economic value. Jacobsen ultimately prevailed in 2010, and the Case established a new standard making terms and conditions under Artistic License 1.0 enforceable through copyright statutes and relevant precedents. Artistic License 2.0 In response to the Request for Comments (RFC) process for improving the licensing position for Perl 6, Kuhn's draft was extensively rewritten by Roberta Cairney and Allison Randal for readability and legal clarity, with input from the Perl community. This resulted in the Artistic License 2.0, which has been approved as both a free software and open source license. The Artistic license 2.0 is also notable for its excellent license compatibility with other FOSS licenses due to a relicensing clause, a property other licenses like the GPL lack. It has been adopted by some of the Perl 6 implementations, the Mojolicious framework, NPM, and has been used by the Parrot virtual machine since version 0.4.13. It is also used by the SNEeSe emulator, which was formerly licensed under the Clarified Artistic License. The OSI recommends that all developers and projects licensing their products with the Artistic License adopt Artistic License 2.0. See also Software using the Artistic license (category) References External links Version 1.0 The Artistic LicenseThe original Artistic License 1.0, the one which is still used by Perl and CPAN; They use a disjunction of the Artistic License 1.0 and the GNU GPL for Perl 5 and above. The Clarified Artistic License Version 2.0 The Artistic License 2.0It's e.g. used by Parrot. 2.0 revision RFC process Prominent uses DuskThe first online Novel and Blog written under Artistic License 2.0. "R.E.M releases videos under Artistic License 2.0Is about R.E.M.'s choice of the Artistic License 2.0 for videos from one of their albums. Free and open-source software licenses

2163

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolus

Aeolus

In Greek mythology, Aeolus or Aiolos (; , ) is a name shared by three mythical characters. These three personages are often difficult to tell apart, and even the ancient mythographers appear to have been perplexed about which Aeolus was which. Diodorus Siculus made an attempt to define each of these three (although it is clear that he also became muddled), and his opinion is followed here. The first Aeolus was a son of Hellen and the eponymous founder of the Aeolian race. The second Aeolus was a son of Poseidon, who led a colony to islands in the Tyrrhenian Sea. The third Aeolus was a son of Hippotes who is mentioned in the Odyssey and the Aeneid as the ruler of the winds. All three men named Aeolus appear to be connected genealogically, although the precise relationship, especially regarding the second and third Aeolus, is often ambiguous as their identities seem to have been merged by many ancient writers. Aeolus was also the name of the following minor characters: Aeolus, a defender of Thebes in the war of the Seven against Thebes. He was killed by Parthenopaeus. Aeolus, a Trojan companion of Aeneas in Italy, where he was killed by Turnus, King of the Rutulians. Aeolus was the father of Clytius and Misenus. See also Aeolia (mythical island), island kingdom of Aeolus, ruler of the winds Notes References Apollodorus, Apollodorus, The Library, with an English Translation by Sir James George Frazer, F.B.A., F.R.S. in 2 Volumes. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1921. . Online version at the Perseus Digital Library. Hyginus, Gaius Julius, Fabulae, in The Myths of Hyginus, edited and translated by Mary A. Grant, Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1960. Online version at ToposText. Homer, The Odyssey with an English Translation by A.T. Murray, PH.D. in two volumes. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1919. Online version at the Perseus Digital Library. Kerényi, Karl, The Gods of the Greeks, Thames and Hudson, London, 1951. Internet Archive. Parada, Carlos, Genealogical Guide to Greek Mythology, Jonsered, Paul Åströms Förlag, 1993. . Rose, H. J., s.v. Aeolus (2) in the Oxford Classical Dictionary, second edition, Hammond, N.G.L. and Howard Hayes Scullard (editors), Oxford University Press, 1992. . Smith, William, Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, London (1873). Online version at the Perseus Digital Library. Statius, Statius with an English Translation by J. H. Mozley, Volume II, Thebaid, Books V–XII, Achilleid, Loeb Classical Library No. 207, London: William Heinemann, Ltd., New York: G. P. Putnamm's Sons, 1928. . Internet Archive. Thomas, Richard. F., "The Isolation of Turnus, Aeneid, book 12", in Vergil's Aeneid: Augustan Epic and Political Context, Hans-Peter Stahl (ed.), Classical Press of Wales, pp. 271–303. . Virgil, Aeneid, Theodore C. Williams. trans. Boston. Houghton Mifflin Co. 1910. Online version at the Perseus Digital Library. de Weever, Jaqueline, Chaucer Name Dictionary, Garland Publishing, Inc., New York and London, 1988, 1996. Trojans Characters in the Aeneid Characters in Seven against Thebes

2166

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC

ABC

ABC are the first three letters of the Latin script. ABC or abc may also refer to: Arts, entertainment and media Broadcasting American Broadcasting Company, a commercial U.S. TV broadcaster Disney–ABC Television Group, the former name of the parent organization of ABC Australian Broadcasting Corporation, one of the national publicly funded broadcasters of Australia ABC Television (Australian TV network), the national television network of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation ABC TV (Australian TV channel), the flagship TV station of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation ABC Canberra (TV station), Canberra, and other ABC TV local stations in state capitals ABC Australia (Southeast Asian TV channel), an international pay TV channel ABC Radio (disambiguation), several radio stations Associated Broadcasting Corporation, the former name of TV5 Network, Inc., a Philippine media company ABC-5, the former name of TV5, a Philippine free-to-air television network ABC (Swedish TV programme), a former Swedish regional news programme ABC Weekend TV, a former British television company Asahi Broadcasting Corporation, a Japanese commercial television and radio station Associated Broadcasting Company, a former name of Associated Television, a British television company Music Albums ABC (Jin album), a 2007 album by rapper MC Jin ABC (Kreidler album), a 2014 album by Kreidler ABC (The Jackson 5 album), a 1970 album by The Jackson 5 Groups A.B.C., the former name of Japanese boy band A.B.C-Z ABC (band), an English pop band Acid Black Cherry, a Japanese rock band Alien Beat Club, a Danish pop and R&B band Another Bad Creation, an American hip hop and new jack swing group Labels ABC Classics, an Australian record label ABC Records, an American record label Other music ABC song (disambiguation), several songs ABC notation, a musical notation language O2 ABC Glasgow, a music venue Periodicals ABC (magazine), an Italian magazine published between 1960 and 1977 ABC (newspaper), a Spanish daily newspaper founded in 1903 ABC (Monterrey newspaper), a Mexican newspaper founded in 1985 ABC Color, a Paraguayan newspaper founded in 1967 Other arts, entertainment and media ABC Cinemas, a UK cinema chain Alphabet book, a type of children's book depicting the alphabet America's Best Comics, an imprint of DC Comics Companies Financial Agricultural Bank of China, a bank in the People's Republic of China Arab Banking Corporation, an international bank headquartered in Bahrain Food and beverage ABC (food), an Indonesian-based food division of the H. J. Heinz Company Aerated Bread Company, a British bakery and tea-room chain Appalachian Brewing Company, an American brewery Transport ABC Motors, an English manufacturer of aircraft, aero engines and cars ABC Rail Guide, British railway guide published between 1853 and 2007 ABC motorcycles, a British motorcycle manufacturer Other companies ABC Learning, a former Australian childcare business ABC (Lebanon), a chain of department stores and shopping centers, and operator of fashion boutiques in Lebanon ABC Stores, a chain of convenience stores in Hawaii Aircraft Builders Council, a provider of aviation products liability insurance Anglo Belgian Corporation, a diesel engine manufacturer Audit Bureau of Circulations (disambiguation), publication circulation auditing companies Audit Bureau of Circulations (India), a non-profit circulation-auditing organisation Audit Bureau of Circulations, former name for the North American non-profit industry organization Alliance for Audited Media Audit Bureau of Circulations (UK), a non-profit organisation Economics and law ABC analysis, an inventory categorization technique Activity-based costing, an accounting method Assignment for the benefit of creditors, a concept in bankruptcy law Organizations Politics and unions ABC (Cuba), Cuban political organization 1931–1952, named after the system for labeling its clandestine cells ABC Vancouver, a municipal political party in Canada All Basotho Convention, a political party in Lesotho Alliance for Barangay Concerns, a political party in the Philippines American Bakery and Confectionery Workers' International Union, a predecessor of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers' International Union Americans Battling Communism, an anti-communist organization founded in 1947 Anarchist Black Cross, an anarchist support organization Anything But Conservative, a 2008 Canadian political campaign Armagh City, Banbridge and Craigavon Borough Council, a local government council in Northern Ireland Association of Barangay Captains or Association of Barangay Councils, former names of the Philippine organization League of Barangays Association of British Counties, a non-party-political society Religious American Baptist Convention, former name of American Baptist Churches USA Association of Baptist Churches in Ireland, in Ireland and the United Kingdom Sports ABC Futebol Clube, a football (soccer) club based in Natal, Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil American Bowling Congress, which merged in 2005 with other bowling organizations to form the United States Bowling Congress Association of Boxing Commissions, a North American not-for-profit professional boxing and mixed martial arts organization Indianapolis ABCs, a 1900s Negro league baseball team Other organizations Academia Británica Cuscatleca, a school in Santa Tecla, El Salvador Accessible Books Consortium, a subunit of the World Intellectual Property Organization Afrikan Black Coalition, a University of California student organization American Bird Conservancy, a non-profit membership organization Andres Bonifacio College, in Dipolog City, Philippines Association of Black Cardiologists, a North American non-profit Australian Bird Count, a project of the Royal Australasian Ornithologists Union Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control Authority, a public safety agency Places ABC countries, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile ABC Islands (Alaska), Admiralty Island, Baranof Island, and Chichagof Island ABC islands (Leeward Antilles), Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao ABC Region, an industrial area outside of São Paulo, Brazil Albacete Airport, a joint civilian/military airport serving Albacete, Spain (IATA: ABC) Altnabreac railway station, Scotland, by National Rail code Appa Balwant Chowk, area of Pune, India, noted for its bookshops Science and technology Biology and medicine Abacavir, an antiretroviral drug used to treat HIV/AIDS ABC (medicine), a mnemonic for "Airway, Breathing, Circulation" ABC model of flower development, a genetic model Abortion–breast cancer hypothesis, a posited connection between breast cancer and abortion Alien big cat, a large feline outside its indigenous range Aneurysmal bone cyst, a kind of lesion ATP-binding cassette transporter, a transmembrane protein Computing Hardware ABC, a line of computers by Dataindustrier AB Acorn Business Computer, a series of microcomputers announced at the end of 1983 by the British company Acorn Computers Atanasoff–Berry computer, an early electronic digital computer Software ABC (computer virus), a memory-resident, file-infecting computer virus ABC (programming language), a programming language and environment ABC (stream cipher), a stream cipher algorithm Abstract base class, a programming language concept Artificial bee colony algorithm, a search algorithm .abc, several file formats Mathematics ABC formula Approximate Bayesian computation, a family of statistical techniques abc conjecture, a concept in number theory Other science and technology ABC dry chemical, a fire extinguishing agent ABC weapon, a weapon of mass destruction (atomic, biological, and chemical); now Chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear Accelerated bridge construction, a technique for building bridges Aerial bundled cable, for power lines Airborne Cigar, a British military electronic countermeasure system used during World War II Atomic, biological, and chemical defense, now rendered as chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear defense Psychology ABC data collection, a descriptive functional behavior assessment method in applied behavior analysis Affective-behavioral-cognitive model, an attitude component model Transportation Active Body Control, a type of automobile suspension technology Advance Booking Charter, a type of air travel Automatic Buffer Couplers, a type of railway couplers Cars ABC (1906 automobile), an American car by Albert Bledsoe Cole ABC (1920 automobile), an English car by ABC Motors ABC (1922 automobile), a planned American car Other uses ABC strategy, for "abstinence, be faithful, use a condom", a sex-education strategy ABC trial of Crispin Aubrey, John Berry and Duncan Campbell in 1978 in the United Kingdom Abecedarium, an inscription consisting of the letters of an alphabet Air batu campur, also known as ais kacang, a Malaysian dessert American-born Chinese, people of Chinese ethnicity born in the United States Andrew Cunningham, 1st Viscount Cunningham of Hyndhope (1883–1963), nicknamed ABC, British WWII admiral Architectural, building and construction, an industry; for example, see Industry Foundation Classes Australian-born Chinese, people of Chinese ethnicity born in Australia See also Alcoholic Beverage Control (disambiguation)

2167

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alford%20plea

Alford plea

In United States law, an Alford plea, also called a Kennedy plea in West Virginia, an Alford guilty plea, and the Alford doctrine, is a guilty plea in criminal court, whereby a defendant in a criminal case does not admit to the criminal act and asserts innocence, but accepts imposition of a sentence. This plea is allowed even if the evidence to be presented by the prosecution would be likely to persuade a judge or jury to find the defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. This can be caused by circumstantial evidence and testimony favoring the prosecution, and difficulty finding evidence and witnesses that would aid the defense. Alford pleas are legally permissible in nearly all U.S. federal and state courts, except in the state courts of Indiana, Michigan, and New Jersey, or in the courts of the United States Armed Forces. Origin The Alford guilty plea is named after the United States Supreme Court case of North Carolina v. Alford (1970). Henry Alford had been indicted on a charge of first-degree murder in 1963. Evidence in the case included testimony from witnesses that Alford himself had said, after the victim's death, that he had killed the individual. Court testimony showed that Alford and the victim had argued at the victim's house. Alford left the house, and afterwards the victim received a fatal gunshot wound when he opened the door responding to a knock. Alford was faced with the possibility of capital punishment if convicted by a jury trial. The death penalty was the default sentence by North Carolina law at the time, if two requisites in the case were satisfied: the defendant had to have pleaded not guilty, and the jury did not instead recommend a life sentence. Had he pleaded guilty to first-degree murder, Alford would have had the possibility of a life sentence and would have avoided the death penalty, but he did not want to admit guilt. Nonetheless, Alford pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and said he was doing so to avoid a death sentence, were he to be convicted of first-degree murder, after attempting to contest that charge. Alford was sentenced to 30 years in prison after the trial judge accepted the plea bargain and ruled that the defendant had been adequately advised by his defense lawyer. Alford appealed and requested a new trial, arguing he was forced into a guilty plea because he was afraid of receiving a death sentence. The Supreme Court of North Carolina ruled that the defendant had voluntarily entered the guilty plea with knowledge of what that meant. Following this ruling, Alford petitioned for a writ of habeas corpus in the United States District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina, which upheld the initial ruling, and subsequently to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, which ruled that Alford's plea was not voluntary, because it was made under fear of the death penalty. "I just pleaded guilty because they said if I didn't, they would gas me for it," wrote Alford in one of his appeals. The case was then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Supreme Court Justice Byron White wrote the majority decision, which held that for the plea to be accepted, the defendant must have been advised by a competent lawyer who was able to inform the individual that his best decision in the case would be to enter a guilty plea. The Court ruled that the defendant can enter such a plea "when he concludes that his interests require a guilty plea and the record strongly indicates guilt." The Court allowed the guilty plea with a simultaneous protestation of innocence only because there was enough evidence to show that the prosecution had a strong case for a conviction and the defendant was entering such a plea to avoid this possible sentencing. The Court went on to note that even if the defendant could have shown that he would not have entered a guilty plea "but for" the rationale of receiving a lesser sentence, the plea itself would not have been ruled invalid. As evidence existed that could have supported Alford's conviction, the Supreme Court held that his guilty plea was allowable while the defendant himself still maintained that he was not guilty. Alford died in prison in 1975. Definition The Dictionary of Politics: Selected American and Foreign Political and Legal Terms defines the term "Alford plea" as: "A plea under which a defendant may choose to plead guilty, not because of an admission to the crime, but because the prosecutor has sufficient evidence to place a charge and to obtain conviction in court. The plea is commonly used in local and state courts in the United States." According to University of Richmond Law Review, "When offering an Alford plea, a defendant asserts his innocence but admits that sufficient evidence exists to convict him of the offense." A Guide to Military Criminal Law notes that under the Alford plea, "the defendant concedes that the prosecution has enough evidence to convict, but the defendant still refuses to admit guilt." The book Plea Bargaining's Triumph: A History of Plea Bargaining in America published by Stanford University Press defines the plea as one in "which the defendant adheres to his/her claim of innocence even while allowing that the government has enough evidence to prove his/her guilt beyond a reasonable doubt". According to the book Gender, Crime, and Punishment published by Yale University Press, "Under the Alford doctrine, a defendant does not admit guilt but admits that the state has sufficient evidence to find him or her guilty, should the case go to trial." Webster's New World Law Dictionary defines Alford plea as: "A guilty plea entered as part of a plea bargain by a criminal defendant who denies committing the crime or who does not actually admit his guilt. In federal courts, such plea may be accepted as long as there is evidence that the defendant is actually guilty." The Alford guilty plea is "a plea of guilty containing a protestation of innocence". The defendant pleads guilty, but does not have to specifically admit to the guilt itself. The defendant maintains a claim of innocence, but agrees to the entry of a conviction in the charged crime. Upon receiving an Alford guilty plea from a defendant, the court may immediately pronounce the defendant guilty and impose sentence as if the defendant had otherwise been convicted of the crime. Sources disagree, as may differing states' laws, as to what category of plea the Alford plea falls under: Some sources state that the Alford guilty plea is a form of nolo contendere, where the defendant in the case states "no contest" to the factual matter of the case as given in the charges outlined by the prosecution. Others hold that an Alford plea is simply one form of a guilty plea, and, as with other guilty pleas, the judge must see there is some factual basis for the plea. Defendants can take advantage of the ability to use the Alford guilty plea, by admitting there is enough evidence to convict them of a higher crime, while at the same time pleading guilty to a lesser charge. Defendants usually enter an Alford guilty plea if they want to avoid a possible worse sentence were they to lose the case against them at trial. It affords defendants the ability to accept a plea bargain, while maintaining innocence. Court and government use This form of guilty plea has been frequently used in local and state courts in the United States, though it constitutes a small percentage of all plea bargains in the U.S. This form of plea is not allowed in courts of the United States military. In 2000, the United States Department of Justice noted, "In an Alford plea the defendant agrees to plead guilty because he or she realizes that there is little chance to win acquittal because of the strong evidence of guilt. About 17% of State inmates and 5% of Federal inmates submitted either an Alford plea or a no contest plea, regardless of the type of attorney. This difference reflects the relative readiness of State courts, compared to Federal courts, to accept an alternative plea." In the 1995 case State of Idaho v. Howry before the Idaho Court of Appeals, the Court commented on the impact of the Alford guilty plea on later sentencing. The Court ruled, "Although an Alford plea allows a defendant to plead guilty amid assertions of innocence, it does not require a court to accept those assertions. The sentencing court may, of necessity, consider a broad range of information, including the evidence of the crime, the defendant's criminal history and the demeanor of the defendant, including the presence or absence of remorse." In the 1999 South Carolina Supreme Court case State v. Gaines, the Court held that Alford guilty pleas were to be held valid even in the absence of a specific on-the-record ruling that the pleas were voluntary – provided that the sentencing judge acted appropriately in accordance with the rules for acceptance of a plea made voluntarily by the defendant. The Court held that a ruling that the plea was entered into voluntarily is implied by the act of sentencing. In the 2006 case before the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, Ballard v. Burton, Judge Carl E. Stewart writing for the Court held that an Alford guilty plea is a "variation of an ordinary guilty plea". In October 2008, the United States Department of Justice defined an Alford plea as: "the defendant maintains his or her innocence with respect to the charge to which he or she offers to plead guilty". In March 2009, the Minnesota House of Representatives characterized the Alford plea as: "a form of a guilty plea in which the defendant asserts innocence but acknowledges on the record that the prosecutor could present enough evidence to prove guilt." The Minnesota Judicial Branch similarly states: "Alford Plea: A plea of guilty that may be accepted by a court even where the defendant does not admit guilt. In an Alford plea, defendant has to admit that he has reviewed the state's evidence, a reasonable jury could find him guilty, and he wants to take advantage of a plea offer that has been made. Court has discretion as to whether to accept this type of plea." The U.S. Attorneys' Manual states that in the federal system, Alford pleas "should be avoided except in the most unusual circumstances, even if no plea agreement is involved and the plea would cover all pending charges." U.S. Attorneys are required to obtain the approval of an Assistant Attorney General with supervisory responsibility over the subject matter before accepting such a plea. Use in post-conviction proceedings The Alford plea has received public attention for its use in resolving high-profile post-conviction proceedings for individuals who claim they were wrongfully convicted for crimes they did not commit. In 2011, the West Memphis Three—three men who had been convicted as teenagers of the 1993 murders of three children and sentenced to life in prison or, for one defendant, the death penalty—entered Alford pleas decades following their initial convictions. New evidence had come to light that might exonerate them, so the Arkansas Supreme Court ordered an evidentiary hearing to consider whether a new trial would be required. Instead of holding the hearing, the defendants and state prosecutors agreed that the court would vacate the prior convictions to permit the defendants to enter Alford pleas, be re-sentenced to "time served," and obtain immediate release from prison. As part of the plea deal, the men agreed not to sue the state seeking civil damages for their convictions and imprisonment. Similarly, novelist Michael Peterson, who had been convicted in 2003 of murdering his wife, entered an Alford plea in 2017 to resolve the case against him. Peterson's case had been the subject of the 2004 documentary series The Staircase and other media scrutiny, and Peterson continued to challenge his conviction based on alleged law enforcement misconduct and judicial errors. He was eventually granted a new trial, but then agreed to enter an Alford plea to the lesser offense of voluntary manslaughter instead. The judge then imposed a sentence that, after being reduced to account for time already served, resulted in Peterson serving no additional time in prison. A 2022 scripted drama miniseries, also called The Staircase, portrayed the events of the case, including the legal battle and Alford plea. Commentary In his book American Criminal Justice (1972), Jonathan D. Casper comments on the Supreme Court decision, noting, "The Alford decision recognizes the plea-bargaining system, acknowledging that a man may maintain his innocence but still plead guilty in order to minimize his potential loss." Casper comments on the impact of the Supreme Court's decision to require evidence of guilt in such a plea: "By requiring that there be some evidence of guilt in such a situation, the decision attempts to protect the 'really' innocent from the temptations to which plea-bargaining and defense attorneys may subject them." US Air Force attorney Steven E. Walburn argues in a 1998 article in The Air Force Law Review that this form of guilty plea should be adopted for usage by the United States military. "In fairness to an accused, if, after consultation with his defense counsel, he knowingly and intelligently determines that his best interest is served by an Alford-type guilty plea, he should be free to choose this path. The system should not force him to lie under oath, nor to go to trial with no promise of the ultimate outcome concerning guilt or punishment. We must trust the accused to make such an important decision for himself. The military provides an accused facing court-martial with a qualified defense attorney. Together, they are in the best position to properly weigh what the impact his decision, and the resulting conviction, will have upon himself and his family," writes Walburn. He emphasizes that when allowing these pleas, "trial counsel should establish as strong a factual basis as possible", in order to minimize the possible negative outcomes to "the public's perception of the administration of justice within the military". Stephanos Bibas writes in a 2003 analysis for Cornell Law Review that Judge Frank H. Easterbrook and a majority of scholars "praise these pleas as efficient, constitutional means of resolving cases". Bibas notes that prominent plea bargain critic Albert Alschuler supports the use of this form of plea, writing, "He views them as a lesser evil, a way to empower defendants within a flawed system. As long as we have plea bargaining, he maintains, innocent defendants should be free to use these pleas to enter advantageous plea bargains without lying. And guilty defendants who are in denial should be empowered to use these pleas instead of being forced to stand trial." Bibas instead asserts that this form of plea is "unwise and should be abolished". Bibas argues, "These procedures may be constitutional and efficient, but they undermine key values served by admissions of guilt in open court. They undermine the procedural values of accuracy and public confidence in accuracy and fairness, by convicting innocent defendants and creating the perception that innocent defendants are being pressured into pleading guilty. More basically, they allow guilty defendants to avoid accepting responsibility for their wrongs." Legal scholar Jim Drennan, an expert on the court system at the Institute of Government at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told the Winston-Salem Journal in a 2007 interview that the ability to use this form of guilty plea as an option in courts had a far-reaching effect throughout the United States. Drennan commented, "We have lots of laws, but human interaction creates unique circumstances and the law has to adapt." He said of the Supreme Court case, "They had to make a decision about what to do. One of the things the court has to do is figure out how to answer new questions, and that is what happened in this case." Common criticisms of Alford pleas include: harm to victims who are denied justice, harm to society from lack of respect for the criminal justice system, the incentive for coercion, violating the right against self-incrimination, hindering rehabilitation by avoiding treatment, and the arbitrary nature in which they are utilized, allowing a person to say one thing when they mean another. See also Alternative pleading Deferred adjudication Insanity defense List of people who entered an Alford plea List of U.S. states by Alford plea usage Malum in se Malum prohibitum Nolo contendere Peremptory plea Michael Peterson West Memphis Three References Further reading External links Alford Doctrine – State of Connecticut, Judicial Branch USAM 9-16.000 Pleas—Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 11, United States Department of Justice Issue: Effect of Alford Plea of Guilty, Issues In NY Criminal Law, Volume 4, Issue 11. Transcript Of Plea Form, North Carolina, with question about term Court cases North Carolina v. Alford, Supreme Court of the United States US v. Szucko, Definition of term by United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit US v. Bierd, Definition of term by United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit Pleas

2170

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABCD

ABCD

ABCD may refer to: Film ABCD (film), a 2005 Indian Tamil-language romance ABCD: American-Born Confused Desi (2013 film), an Indian Malayalam-language comedy ABCD: American Born Confused Desi (2019 film), an Indian Telugu-language drama ABCD: Any Body Can Dance, a 2013 Indian Hindi-language dance-drama ABCD 2, the 2015 sequel Science and technology Medicine ABCD, a variation of ABC (medicine), a medical mnemonic ABCD guideline, used in diagnosis of melanoma ABCD rating, a staging system for prostate cancer ABCD syndrome, a genetic disorder Other uses in science and technology ABCD Schema, a data exchange and access model in biology ABCD matrix analysis, or ray transfer matrix analysis ABCD-parameters, in a two-port network ABCd, an American TV streaming service ABCD (add, browse, change, delete) a variation of create, read, update and delete in computer programming Other uses ABCD line, embargoes placed against the Japanese Empire by the Americans, British, Chinese and Dutch ABCD Region, an industrial district outside of São Paulo, Brazil ABCD ships (Atlanta, Boston, Chicago and Dolphin) of Delaware River Iron Ship Building and Engine Works Action for Boston Community Development, an American organization American-born confused desi, informal term for South Asian Americans Asset-based community development, a methodology for the sustainable development of communities Association of Better Computer Dealers, now CompTIA "ABCD" companies that dominate world agricultural commodity trading: Archer-Daniels-Midland, Bunge, Cargill, Louis Dreyfus See also ABC (disambiguation) ABCD1, a protein ABCD2 score, a score for determining the risk of stroke after a transient ischemic attack English alphabet

2171

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-realism

Anti-realism

In analytic philosophy, anti-realism is a position which encompasses many varieties such as metaphysical, mathematical, semantic, scientific, moral and epistemic. The term was first articulated by British philosopher Michael Dummett in an argument against a form of realism Dummett saw as 'colorless reductionism'. In anti-realism, the truth of a statement rests on its demonstrability through internal logic mechanisms, such as the context principle or intuitionistic logic, in direct opposition to the realist notion that the truth of a statement rests on its correspondence to an external, independent reality. In anti-realism, this external reality is hypothetical and is not assumed. Anti-realism in its most general sense can be understood as being in contrast to a generic realism, which holds that distinctive objects of a subject-matter exist and have properties independent of one's beliefs and conceptual schemes. The ways in which anti-realism rejects these type of claims can vary dramatically. Because this encompasses statements containing abstract ideal objects (i.e. mathematical objects), anti-realism may apply to a wide range of philosophical topics, from material objects to the theoretical entities of science, mathematical statements, mental states, events and processes, the past and the future. Varieties Metaphysical anti-realism One kind of metaphysical anti-realism maintains a skepticism about the physical world, arguing either: 1) that nothing exists outside the mind, or 2) that we would have no access to a mind-independent reality, even if it exists. The latter case often takes the form of a denial of the idea that we can have 'unconceptualised' experiences (see Myth of the Given). Conversely, most realists (specifically, indirect realists) hold that perceptions or sense data are caused by mind-independent objects. But this introduces the possibility of another kind of skepticism: since our understanding of causality is that the same effect can be produced by multiple causes, there is a lack of determinacy about what one is really perceiving, as in the brain in a vat scenario. The main alternative to this sort of metaphysical anti-realism is metaphysical realism. On a more abstract level, model-theoretic anti-realist arguments hold that a given set of symbols in a theory can be mapped onto any number of sets of real-world objects—each set being a "model" of the theory—provided the relationship between the objects is the same (compare with symbol grounding.) In ancient Greek philosophy, nominalist (anti-realist) doctrines about universals were proposed by the Stoics, especially Chrysippus. In early modern philosophy, conceptualist anti-realist doctrines about universals were proposed by thinkers like René Descartes, John Locke, Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, George Berkeley, and David Hume. In late modern philosophy, anti-realist doctrines about knowledge were proposed by the German idealist Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel was a proponent of what is now called inferentialism: he believed that the ground for the axioms and the foundation for the validity of the inferences are the right consequences and that the axioms do not explain the consequence. Kant and Hegel held conceptualist views about universals. In contemporary philosophy, anti-realism was revived in the form of empirio-criticism, logical positivism, semantic anti-realism and scientific instrumentalism (see below). Mathematical anti-realism In the philosophy of mathematics, realism is the claim that mathematical entities such as 'number' have an observer-independent existence. Empiricism, which associates numbers with concrete physical objects, and Platonism, in which numbers are abstract, non-physical entities, are the preeminent forms of mathematical realism. The "epistemic argument" against Platonism has been made by Paul Benacerraf and Hartry Field. Platonism posits that mathematical objects are abstract entities. By general agreement, abstract entities cannot interact causally with physical entities ("the truth-values of our mathematical assertions depend on facts involving platonic entities that reside in a realm outside of space-time"). Whilst our knowledge of physical objects is based on our ability to perceive them, and therefore to causally interact with them, there is no parallel account of how mathematicians come to have knowledge of abstract objects. Field developed his views into fictionalism. Benacerraf also developed the philosophy of mathematical structuralism, according to which there are no mathematical objects. Nonetheless, some versions of structuralism are compatible with some versions of realism. Counterarguments Anti-realist arguments hinge on the idea that a satisfactory, naturalistic account of thought processes can be given for mathematical reasoning. One line of defense is to maintain that this is false, so that mathematical reasoning uses some special intuition that involves contact with the Platonic realm, as in the argument given by Sir Roger Penrose. Another line of defense is to maintain that abstract objects are relevant to mathematical reasoning in a way that is non causal, and not analogous to perception. This argument is developed by Jerrold Katz in his 2000 book Realistic Rationalism. In this book, he put forward a position called realistic rationalism, which combines metaphysical realism and rationalism. A more radical defense is to deny the separation of physical world and the platonic world, i.e. the mathematical universe hypothesis (a variety of mathematicism). In that case, a mathematician's knowledge of mathematics is one mathematical object making contact with another. Semantic anti-realism The term "anti-realism" was introduced by Michael Dummett in his 1982 paper "Realism" in order to re-examine a number of classical philosophical disputes, involving such doctrines as nominalism, Platonic realism, idealism and phenomenalism. The novelty of Dummett's approach consisted in portraying these disputes as analogous to the dispute between intuitionism and Platonism in the philosophy of mathematics. According to intuitionists (anti-realists with respect to mathematical objects), the truth of a mathematical statement consists in our ability to prove it. According to Platonic realists, the truth of a statement is proven in its correspondence to objective reality. Thus, intuitionists are ready to accept a statement of the form "P or Q" as true only if we can prove P or if we can prove Q. In particular, we cannot in general claim that "P or not P" is true (the law of excluded middle), since in some cases we may not be able to prove the statement "P" nor prove the statement "not P". Similarly, intuitionists object to the existence property for classical logic, where one can prove , without being able to produce any term of which holds. Dummett argues that this notion of truth lies at the bottom of various classical forms of anti-realism, and uses it to re-interpret phenomenalism, claiming that it need not take the form of reductionism. Dummett's writings on anti-realism draw heavily on the later writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, concerning meaning and rule following, and can be seen as an attempt to integrate central ideas from the Philosophical Investigations into the constructive tradition of analytic philosophy deriving from Gottlob Frege. Scientific anti-realism In philosophy of science, anti-realism applies chiefly to claims about the non-reality of "unobservable" entities such as electrons or genes, which are not detectable with human senses. One prominent variety of scientific anti-realism is instrumentalism, which takes a purely agnostic view towards the existence of unobservable entities, in which the unobservable entity X serves as an instrument to aid in the success of theory Y and does not require proof for the existence or non-existence of X. Moral anti-realism In the philosophy of ethics, moral anti-realism (or moral irrealism) is a meta-ethical doctrine that there are no objective moral values or normative facts. It is usually defined in opposition to moral realism, which holds that there are objective moral values, such that a moral claim may be either true or false. Specifically the moral anti-realist is committed to denying at least one of the following three statements: The Semantic Thesis: Moral statements have meaning, they express propositions, or are the kind of things that can be true or false. The Alethic Thesis: Some moral propositions are true. The Metaphysical Thesis: The metaphysical status of moral facts is robust and ordinary, not importantly different from other facts about the world. Different version of moral anti-realism deny different statements: specifically, non-cognitivism denies the first claim, arguing that moral statements have no meaning or truth content, error theory denies the second claim, arguing that all moral statements are false, and ethical subjectivism denies the third claim, arguing that the truth of moral statements is mind dependent. Examples of anti-realist moral theories might be: Ethical subjectivism Non-cognitivism Emotivism Prescriptivism Quasi-realism Projectivism Moral fictionalism Moral nihilism Moral skepticism There is a debate as to whether moral relativism is actually an anti-realist position. While many versions deny the metaphysical thesis, some do not, as one could imagine a system of morality which requires you to obey the written laws in your country. Such a system would be a version of moral relativism, as different individuals would be required to follow different laws, but the moral facts are physical facts about the world, not mental facts, so they are metaphysically ordinary. Thus, different versions of moral relativism might be considered anti-realist or realist. Epistemic anti-realism Just as moral anti-realism asserts the nonexistence of normative facts, epistemic anti-realism asserts the nonexistence of facts in the domain of epistemology. Thus, the two are now sometimes grouped together as "metanormative anti-realism". Prominent defenders of epistemic anti-realism include Hartry Field, Simon Blackburn, Matthew Chrisman, and Allan Gibbard, among others. See also Arend Heyting Constructivist epistemology Crispin Wright Critical realism (philosophy of perception) Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer Metaepistemology Münchhausen trilemma Neil Tennant (philosopher) Philosophical realism Quasi-realism References Bibliography . reprinted, pp. 1–24. . reprinted, pp. 145–165. . reprinted, pp. 202–214. Lee Braver (2007). A Thing of This World: a History of Continental Anti-Realism, Northwestern University Press: 2007. Ian Hacking (1999). The Social Construction of What?. Harvard University Press: 2001. Samir Okasha (2002). Philosophy of Science: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. External links Semantic challenges to realism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Philosophical realism Idealism Metaphysics of science Metatheory of science Epistemology of science

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmad%20Shah%20Massoud

Ahmad Shah Massoud

Ahmad Shah Massoud (Dari/Pashto: , ; September 2, 1953September 9, 2001) was an Afghan military leader and politician. He was a powerful guerrilla commander during the resistance against the Soviet occupation during the Soviet–Afghan War from 1979 to 1989. In the 1990s, he led the government's military wing against rival militias; after the Taliban takeover, he was the leading opposition commander against their regime until his assassination in 2001. Massoud came from an ethnic Tajik of Sunni Muslim background in the Panjshir Valley in Northern Afghanistan. He began studying engineering at Polytechnical University of Kabul in the 1970s, where he became involved with religious anti-communist movements around Burhanuddin Rabbani, a leading Islamist. He participated in a failed uprising against Mohammed Daoud Khan's government. He later joined Rabbani's Jamiat-e Islami party. During the Soviet–Afghan War, his role as a powerful insurgent leader of the Afghan mujahideen earned him the nickname "Lion of Panjshir" () among his followers. Supported by Britain's MI6 and to a lesser extent by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), he successfully resisted the Soviets from taking the Panjshir Valley. In 1992, he signed the Peshawar Accord, a peace and power-sharing agreement, in the post-communist Islamic State of Afghanistan. He was appointed the Minister of Defense as well as the government's main military commander. His militia fought to defend Kabul against militias led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and other warlords who were bombing the city, as well as later against the Taliban, who laid siege to the capital in January 1995 after the city had seen fierce fighting with at least 60,000 civilians killed. Following the rise of the Taliban in 1996, Massoud, who rejected the Taliban's fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, returned to armed opposition until he was forced to flee to Kulob, Tajikistan, strategically destroying the Salang Tunnel on his way north. He became the military and political leader of the United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan or Northern Alliance, which by 2000 controlled only between 5 and 10 percent of the country. In 2001 he visited Europe and urged European Parliament leaders to pressure Pakistan on its support for the Taliban. He also asked for humanitarian aid to combat the Afghan people's gruesome conditions under the Taliban. On September 9, 2001, Massoud was injured in a suicide bombing by two al-Qaeda assassins, ordered personally by the al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden himself; he lost his life while en route to a hospital across the border in Tajikistan. Two days later, the September 11 attacks occurred in the United States, which ultimately led to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization invading Afghanistan and allying with Massoud's forces. The Northern Alliance eventually won the two-month-long war in December 2001, removing the Taliban from power. Massoud has been described as one of the greatest guerrilla leaders of the 20th century and has been compared to Josip Broz Tito, Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara. Massoud was posthumously named "National Hero" by the order of President Hamid Karzai after the Taliban were ousted from power. The date of Massoud's death, September 9, was observed as a national holiday known as "Massoud Day" until the Taliban takeover in August 2021. His followers call him Amer Sāhib-e Shahīd (), which translates to "(our) martyred commander". He has been posthumously honored by a plaque in France in 2021, and in the same year was awarded with the highest honor of Tajikistan. Early life Ahmad Shah Massoud was born in 1953 in the small village of Jangalak, Bazarak in the Panjshir Valley (now administered as part of the Panjshir Province), to a well-to-do family native to the Panjshir Valley. Massoud's name at birth was 'Ahmad Shah' after King Ahamad Shah Durrani, founder of the modern, unified state of Afghanistan, later taking the name 'Massoud' as a nom de guerre in 1974 when he joined the resistance movement against the forces of Daoud Khan. Massoud's father, Dost Mohammad, was a colonel in the Royal Afghan Army; his mother, Bibi Khorshaid has been described as a "modern-minded" woman who taught herself to read and write determined to educate her daughters no less than her sons. Moving along with his father's postings, the adolescent Massoud attended primary school in Afghanistan's western city of Herat before his father was dispatched to Kabul. There, Massoud was sent to the renowned Franco-Afghan Lycée Esteqlal (lit. Independence High School) where he attained his proficiency in French. Massoud's experience at Lycée would be formative and, as he would later remark, was the happiest period of his life. At Lycée his classes were taught by French and Afghan tutors educated in France and the students donned Western jackets, neckties, trousers, skirts, scarves, and stockings. Although his knowledge of the French language would earn him greater affinity among French journalists and politicians, later conservative Islamist opponents such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and the Taliban would derogatorily dub him "The Frenchmen" or "The Parisian" suggestive of his sympathies to Western culture. While at the Lycée, Massoud was described as an intellectually-gifted student, hard-working, religiously devout, and mature for his age with a particular interest in ethics, politics, universal justice. Friends and family recall an instance where Massoud, returning from school, came to the defense of a younger boy leaving the three bullies knocked-out on the pavement. More formatively, Massoud followed closely reports of the 1967 Six-Day War and the defiant statements of Arab leaders like Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. He later told researcher Peter DeNeufville that, at fourteen, the war left him determined to be a soldier and gave him a new regard for Pan-Islamism after hearing the stories told by Jordanian, Egyptian, and Syrian soldiers defending their homelands. Massoud refused repeated suggestions to apply for a scholarship to study in France expressing his desire to remain in Afghanistan and apply to the nation's military academy in Kabul. By protest of his father and eldest brother, Massoud enrolled at Kabul Polytechnic Institute, then Kabul University's newest and most prestigious addition founded, financed, and operated by the Soviet Union. Massoud studied engineering and architecture but never attempted to learn Russian. There he found interest in politics, political Islam, and anti-Communism which often put him and his pious peers at odds with communist-inspired students. 1975 rebellion in Panjshir In 1973, former Prime Minister Mohammed Daoud Khan was brought to power in a coup d'état backed by the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan, and the Republic of Afghanistan was established. These developments gave rise to an Islamist movement opposed to the increasing communist and Soviet influence over Afghanistan. During that time, while studying at Kabul University, Massoud became involved with the Muslim Youth (Sazman-i Jawanan-i Musulman), the student branch of the Jamiat-e Islami (Islamic Society), whose chairman then was the professor Burhanuddin Rabbani. Kabul University was a center for political debate and activism during that time. Infuriated by the arrogance of his communist peers and Russian professors, a physical altercation between Massoud and his Russian professor led Massoud to walk out of the university, and shortly after, Kabul. Two days later, Massoud and a number of fellow militant students traveled to Pakistan where, goaded by another trainee of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Gulbaddin Hekmatyar, Massoud agreed to take part in a coup against Daoud with his forces rising up in the Panjshir and Hekmatyar's elsewhere. In July 1975, Massoud, with help from the Pakistani intelligence, led the first rebellion of Panjshir residents against the government of Daoud Khan. While the uprising in the Panjshir saw initial success, even taking the military garrison in Rokha, the promised support from Kabul never came and the rebellion was suppressed by Daoud Khan's forces sending Massoud back into Pakistan (after a day hiding in Jangalak) where he would attend a secret, paramilitary ISI training center in Cherat. Dissatisfied, Massoud left the center and returned to Peshawar where he committed himself to personal military studies. Massoud read Mao Tse-tung's writings on the Long March, of Che Guevara's career, the memoirs of General de Gualle, General Võ Nguyên Giáp, Sun Tzu's Art of War, and an unnamed handbook on counterterrorism by an American general which Massoud called "the most instructive of all". After this failure, a "profound and long-lasting schism" within the Islamist movement began to emerge. The Islamic Society split between supporters of the more moderate forces around Massoud and Rabbani, who led the Jamiat-i Islami, and more radical Islamist elements surrounding Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who founded the Hezb-i Islami. The conflict reached such a point that Hekmatyar reportedly tried to kill Massoud, then 22 years old. Resistance against communism Resistance against the PDPA (1978) The government of Mohammed Daoud Khan tried to scale back the communist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan's influence, dismissing PDPA members from their government posts, appointing conservatives to replace them, and finally dissolved the PDPA, with the arrests of senior party members. On April 27, 1978, the PDPA and military units loyal to it killed Daoud Khan, his immediate family, and bodyguards in a violent coup, and seized control of the capital Kabul declaring the new Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA). The new communist government, led by a revolutionary council, did not enjoy the support of the masses. It implemented a doctrine hostile to political dissent, whether inside or outside the party. The PDPA started reforms along Marxist–Leninist and Soviet lines. The reforms and the PDPA's affinity to the Soviet Union were met with strong resistance by the population, especially as the government attempted to enforce its Marxist policies by arresting or executing those who resisted. Between 50,000 and 100,000 people were estimated to have been arrested and killed by communist troops in the countryside alone. Due to the repression, large parts of the country, especially the rural areas, organized into open revolt against the PDPA government. By spring 1979, unrest had reached 24 out of 28 Afghan provinces, including major urban areas. Over half of the Afghan army either deserted or joined the insurrection. With religious elders declaring a jihad against the government, in May 1979 Massoud prepared in Peshawar to oppose the new communist government in Panjshir. Along with twenty-four of his friends, Massoud took a bus to Bajaur and, with arms-smuggling Pashtun tribesmen, marched on foot into the Panjshir Valley. Massoud's group seized control over a number of government outposts in the Valley, entered the Shomali Plain to capture Gulbahar, and cut off the Salang Highway, the main supply route between Kabul and the Soviet border raising alarm in both Kabul and Moscow which brought upon Massoud and his group a government counterattack. Believing that an uprising against the Soviet-backed communists would be supported by the people, Massoud, on July 6, 1979, started an insurrection in the Panjshir, which initially failed. Massoud decided to avoid conventional confrontation with the larger government forces and to wage a guerrilla war. He subsequently took full control of Panjshir, pushing out Afghan communist troops. Oliver Roy writes that in the following period, Massoud's "personal prestige and the efficiency of his military organization persuaded many local commanders to come and learn from him." Resistance against the Soviet Union (1979–1989) Following the 1979 Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, Massoud devised a strategic plan for expelling the invaders and overthrowing the communist regime. The first task was to establish a popularly based resistance force that had the loyalty of the people. The second phase was "active defense" of the Panjshir stronghold, while carrying out asymmetric warfare. In the third phase, the "strategic offensive", Massoud's forces would gain control of large parts of Northern Afghanistan. The fourth phase was the "general application" of Massoud's principles to the whole country, and the defeat of the Afghan communist government. Massoud's mujahideen attacked the occupying Soviet forces, ambushing Soviet and Afghan communist convoys travelling through the Salang Pass, and causing fuel shortages in Kabul. The Soviets mounted a series of offensives against the Panjshir. Between 1980 and 1985, these offensives were conducted twice a year. Despite engaging more men and hardware on each occasion, the Soviets were unable to defeat Massoud's forces. In 1982, the Soviets began deploying major combat units in the Panjshir, numbering up to 30,000 men. Massoud pulled his troops back into subsidiary valleys, where they occupied fortified positions. When the Soviet columns advanced onto these positions, they fell into ambushes. When the Soviets withdrew, Afghan army garrisons took over their positions. Massoud and his mujahideen forces attacked and recaptured them one by one. In 1983, the Soviets offered Massoud a temporary truce, which he accepted in order to rebuild his own forces and give the civilian population a break from Soviet attacks. He put the respite to good use. In this time he created the Shura-e Nazar (Supervisory Council), which subsequently united 130 commanders from 12 Afghan provinces in their fight against the Soviet army. This council existed outside the Peshawar parties, which were prone to internecine rivalry and bickering, and served to smooth out differences between resistance groups, due to political and ethnic divisions. It was the predecessor of what could have become a unified Islamic Afghan army. Relations with the party headquarters in Peshawar were often strained, as Rabbani insisted on giving Massoud no more weapons and supplies than to other Jamiat commanders, even those who did little fighting. To compensate for this deficiency, Massoud relied on revenues drawn from exports of emeralds and lapis lazuli, that are traditionally exploited in Northern Afghanistan. Regarding infighting among different mujahideen factions, following a Soviet truce, Massoud said in an interview: Britain's MI6 having activated long-established networks of contacts in Pakistan were able to support Massoud, and soon became their key ally. MI6 sent an annual mission of two of their officers as well as military instructors to Massoud and his fighters. They also gave supplies to Massoud which included sniper rifles with silencers and mortars. As well as training Massoud's junior commanders, MI6 team's most important contribution was help with organisation and communication via radio equipment which was highly useful for Massoud to coordinate his forces and be warned of any impending Soviet attacks. The United States however provided Massoud with comparatively less support than other factions. Part of the reason was that it permitted its funding and arms distribution to be administered by Pakistan, which favored the rival mujahideen leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. In an interview, Massoud said, "We thought the CIA knew everything. But they didn't. They supported some bad people [meaning Hekmatyar]." Primary advocates for supporting Massoud were the US State Department's Edmund McWilliams and Peter Tomsen, who were on the ground in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Others included two Heritage Foundation foreign policy analysts, Michael Johns and James A. Phillips, both of whom championed Massoud as the Afghan resistance leader most worthy of U.S. support under the Reagan Doctrine. Thousands of foreign Islamic volunteers entered Afghanistan to fight with the mujahideen against the Soviet troops. To organize support for the mujahideen, Massoud established an administrative system that enforced law and order (nazm) in areas under his control. The Panjshir was divided into 22 bases (qarargah) governed by a military commander and a civilian administrator, and each had a judge, a prosecutor and a public defender. Massoud's policies were implemented by different committees: an economic committee was charged with funding the war effort. The health committee provided health services, assisted by volunteers from foreign humanitarian non-governmental organizations, such as Aide médicale internationale. An education committee was charged with the training of the military and administrative cadre. A culture committee and a judiciary committee were also created. This expansion prompted Babrak Karmal to demand that the Red Army resume their offensives, in order to crush the Panjshir groups. However, Massoud had received warning of the attack through Britain's GCHQ intelligence and he evacuated all 130,000 inhabitants from the valley into the Hindukush mountains, leaving the Soviet bombings to fall on empty ground and the Soviet battalions to face the mountains. With the defeat of the Soviet-Afghan attacks, Massoud carried out the next phase of his strategic plan, expanding the resistance movement and liberating the northern provinces of Afghanistan. In August 1986, he captured Farkhar in Takhar Province. In November 1986, his forces overran the headquarters of the government's 20th division at Nahrin in Baghlan Province, scoring an important victory for the resistance. This expansion was also carried out through diplomatic means, as more mujahideen commanders were persuaded to adopt the Panjshir military system. Despite almost constant attacks by the Red Army and the Afghan army, Massoud increased his military strength. Starting in 1980 with a force of less than 1,000 ill-equipped guerrillas, the Panjshir valley mujahideen grew to a 5,000-strong force by 1984. After expanding his influence outside the valley, Massoud increased his resistance forces to 13,000 fighters by 1989. The junior commanders were trained by Britain's SAS as well as private military contractors, some being sent as far as Oman and even SAS training grounds in the Scottish Highlands. These forces were divided into different types of units: the locals (mahalli) were tasked with static defense of villages and fortified positions. The best of the mahalli were formed into units called grup-i zarbati (shock troops), semi-mobile groups that acted as reserve forces for the defense of several strongholds. A different type of unit was the mobile group (grup-i-mutaharek), a lightly equipped commando-like formation numbering 33 men, whose mission was to carry out hit-and-run attacks outside the Panjshir, sometimes as far as 100 km from their base. These men were professional soldiers, well-paid and trained, and, from 1983 on, they provided an effective strike force against government outposts. Uniquely among the mujahideen, these groups wore uniforms, and their use of the pakul made this headwear emblematic of the Afghan resistance. Massoud's military organization was an effective compromise between the traditional Afghan method of warfare and the modern principles of guerrilla warfare which he had learned from the works of Mao Zedong and Che Guevara. His forces were considered the most effective of all the various Afghan resistance movements. The Soviet army and the Afghan communist army were mainly defeated by Massoud and his mujahideen in numerous small engagements between 1984 and 1988. After describing the Soviet Union's military engagement in Afghanistan as "a bleeding wound" in 1986, Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev began a withdrawal of Soviet troops from the nation in May 1988. On February 15, 1989, in what was depicted as an improbable victory for the mujahideen, the last Soviet soldier left the nation. Fall of the Afghan communist regime (1992) After the departure of Soviet troops in 1989, the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan regime, then headed by Mohammad Najibullah, held its own against the mujahideen. Backed by a massive influx of weapons from the Soviet Union, the Afghan armed forces reached a level of performance they had never reached under direct Soviet tutelage. They maintained control over all of Afghanistan's major cities. During late 1990, helped by hundreds of mujahideen forces, Massoud targeted the Tajik Supreme Soviet, trying to oust communism from the neighboring Tajikistan to further destabilize the dying Soviet Union, which would also impact the Afghan government. At that time, as per Asad Durrani, the director-general of the ISI during this period, Massoud's base camp was in Garam Chashma, in Pakistan. By 1992, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Afghan regime eventually began to crumble. Food and fuel shortages undermined the capacities of the government's army, and a resurgence of factionalism split the regime between Khalq and Parcham supporters. A few days after Najibullah had lost control of the nation, his army commanders and governors arranged to turn over authority to resistance commanders and local warlords throughout the country. Joint councils (shuras) were immediately established for local government, in which civil and military officials of the former government were usually included. In many cases, prior arrangements for transferring regional and local authority had been made between foes. Collusions between military leaders quickly brought down the Kabul government. In mid-January 1992, within three weeks of the demise of the Soviet Union, Massoud was aware of conflict within the government's northern command. General Abdul Momim, in charge of the Hairatan border crossing at the northern end of Kabul's supply highway, and other non-Pashtun generals based in Mazar-i-Sharif, feared removal by Najibullah and replacement by Pashtun officers. When the generals rebelled, Abdul Rashid Dostum, who held general rank as head of the Jowzjani militia, also based in Mazar-i-Sharif, took over. He and Massoud reached a political agreement, together with another major militia leader, Sayyed Mansour, of the Ismaili community based in Baghlan Province. These northern allies consolidated their position in Mazar-i-Sharif on March 21. Their coalition covered nine provinces in the north and northeast. As turmoil developed within the government in Kabul, no government force stood between the northern allies and the major air force base at Bagram, some seventy kilometers north of Kabul. By mid-April 1992, the Afghan air force command at Bagram had capitulated to Massoud. On March 18, 1992, Najibullah decided to resign. On April 17, as his government fell, he tried to escape but was stopped at Kabul Airport by Dostum's forces. He took refuge at the United Nations mission, where he remained unharmed until 1996, while Massoud controlled the area surrounding the mission. Senior communist generals and officials of the Najibullah administration acted as a transitional authority to transfer power to Ahmad Shah Massoud's alliance. The Kabul interim authority invited Massoud to enter Kabul as the new Head of State, but he held back. Massoud ordered his forces, positioned to the north of Kabul, not to enter the capital until a political solution was in place. He called on all the senior Afghan party leaders, many then based in exile in Peshawar, to work out a political settlement acceptable to all sides and parties. War in Afghanistan (1992–2001) War in Kabul and other parts of the country (1992–1996) Peace and power-sharing agreement (1992) With United Nations support, most Afghan political parties decided to appoint a legitimate national government to succeed communist rule, through an elite settlement. While the external Afghan party leaders were residing in Peshawar, the military situation around Kabul involving the internal commanders was tense. A 1991 UN peace process brought about some negotiations, but the attempted elite settlement did not develop. In April 1992, resistance leaders in Peshawar tried to negotiate a settlement. Massoud supported the Peshawar process of establishing a broad coalition government inclusive of all resistance parties, but Hekmatyar sought to become the sole ruler of Afghanistan, stating, "In our country coalition government is impossible because, this way or another, it is going to be weak and incapable of stabilizing the situation in Afghanistan." Massoud wrote: All the parties had participated in the war, in jihad in Afghanistan, so they had to have their share in the government, and in the formation of the government. Afghanistan is made up of different nationalities. We were worried about a national conflict between different tribes and different nationalities. In order to give everybody their own rights and also to avoid bloodshed in Kabul, we left the word to the parties so they should decide about the country as a whole. We talked about it for a temporary stage and then after that the ground should be prepared for a general election. A recorded radio communication between the two leaders showed the divide as Massoud asked Hekmatyar: The Kabul regime is ready to surrender, so instead of the fighting we should gather. ... The leaders are meeting in Peshawar. ... The troops should not enter Kabul, they should enter later on as part of the government. Hekmatyar's response: We will march into Kabul with our naked sword. No one can stop us. ... Why should we meet the leaders?" Massoud answered: "It seems to me that you don't want to join the leaders in Peshawar nor stop your threat, and you are planning to enter Kabul ... in that case I must defend the people. At that point Osama bin Laden, trying to mediate, urged Hekmatyar to "go back with your brothers" and to accept a compromise. Bin Laden reportedly "hated Ahmad Shah Massoud". Bin Laden was involved in ideological and personal disputes with Massoud and had sided with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar against Massoud in the inner-Afghan conflict since the late 1980s. But Hekmatyar refused to accept a compromise, confident that he would be able to gain sole power in Afghanistan. On April 24, 1992, the leaders in Peshawar agreed on and signed the Peshawar Accord, establishing the post-communist Islamic State of Afghanistan – which was a stillborn 'state' with a paralyzed 'government' right from its inception, until its final succumbing in September 1996. The creation of the Islamic State was welcomed though by the General Assembly of the United Nations and the Islamic State of Afghanistan was recognized as the legitimate entity representing Afghanistan until June 2002, when its successor, the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, was established under the interim government of Hamid Karzai. Under the 1992 Peshawar Accord, the Defense Ministry was given to Massoud while the Prime Ministership was given to Hekmatyar. Hekmatyar refused to sign. With the exception of Hekmatyar's Hezb-e Islami, all of the other Peshawar resistance parties were unified under this peace and power-sharing accord in April 1992. Escalating war over Kabul (1992) Although repeatedly offered the position of prime minister, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar refused to recognize the peace and power-sharing agreement. His Hezb-e Islami militia initiated a massive bombardment campaign against the Islamic State and the capital city Kabul. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar received operational, financial and military support from neighboring Pakistan. The Director of the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies at the Australian National University, Amin Saikal, writes in Modern Afghanistan: A History of Struggle and Survival that without Pakistan's support, Hekmatyar "would not have been able to target and destroy half of Kabul." Saikal states that Pakistan wanted to install a favorable regime under Hekmatyar in Kabul so that it could use Afghan territory for access to Central Asia. Hekmatyar's rocket bombardments and the parallel escalation of violent conflict between two militias, Ittihad and Wahdat, which had entered some suburbs of Kabul, led to a breakdown in law and order. Shia Iran and Sunni Wahabbi Saudi Arabia, as competitors for regional hegemony, encouraged conflict between the Ittihad and Wahdat factions. On the one side was the Shia Hazara Hezb-i Wahdat of Abdul Ali Mazari and on the other side, the Sunni Pashtun Ittihad-i Islami of Abdul Rasul Sayyaf. According to Human Rights Watch, Iran was strongly supporting the Hezb-i Wahdat forces, with Iranian intelligence officials providing direct orders, while Saudi Arabia supported Sayyaf and his Ittihad-i Islami faction to maximize Wahhabi influence. Kabul descended into lawlessness and chaos, as described in reports by Human Rights Watch and the Afghanistan Justice Project. Massoud's Jamiat commanders, the interim government, and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) repeatedly tried to negotiate ceasefires, which broke down in only a few days. Another militia, the Junbish-i Milli of former communist general Abdul Rashid Dostum, was backed by Uzbekistan. Uzbek president Islam Karimov was keen to see Dostum controlling as much of Afghanistan as possible, especially in the north. Dostum repeatedly changed allegiances. The Afghanistan Justice Project (AJP) says, that "while [Hekmatyar's anti-government] Hizb-i Islami is frequently named as foremost among the factions responsible for the deaths and destruction in the bombardment of Kabul, it was not the only perpetrator of these violations." According to the AJP, "the scale of the bombardment and kinds of weapons used represented disproportionate use of force" in a capital city with primarily residential areas by all the factions involved – including the government forces. Crimes were committed by individuals within the different armed factions. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar released 10,000 dangerous criminals from the main prisons into the streets of Kabul to destabilize the city and cut off Kabul from water, food and energy supplies. The Iran-controlled Wahdat of Abdul Ali Mazari, as well as the Ittihad of Abdul Rasul Sayyaf supported by Saudi Arabia, targeted civilians of the 'opposite side' in systematic atrocities. Abdul Rashid Dostum allowed crimes as a perceived payment for his troops. Afshar operation (February 1993) "The major criticism of Massoud's human rights record" is the escalation of the Afshar military operation in 1993. A report by the Afghanistan Justice Project describes Massoud as failing to prevent atrocities carried out by his forces and those of their factional ally, Ittihad-i Islami, against civilians on taking the suburb of Afshar during a military operation against an anti-state militia allied to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. They shelled residential areas in the capital city in February 1993. Critics said that Massoud should have foreseen these problems. A meeting convened by Massoud on the next day ordered a halt to killing and looting, but it failed to stop abuses. Human Rights Watch, in a report based largely on the material collected by the Afghanistan Justice Project, concurs that Massoud's Jamiat forces bear a share of the responsibility for human rights abuses throughout the war, including the indiscriminate targeting of civilians in Afshar, and that Massoud was personally implicated in some of these abuses. Roy Gutman has argued that the witness reports about Afshar cited in the AJP report implicated only the Ittihad forces, and that these had not been under Massoud's direct command. Anthony Davis, who studied and observed Massoud's forces from 1981 to 2001, reported that during the observed period, there was "no pattern of repeated killings of enemy civilians or military prisoners" by Massoud's forces. Edward Girardet, who covered Afghanistan for over three decades, was also in Kabul during the war. He states that while Massoud was able to control most of his commanders well during the anti-Soviet and anti-Taliban resistance, he was not able to control every commander in Kabul. According to this and similar testimonies, this was due to a breakdown of law and order in Kabul and a war on multiple fronts, which they say, Massoud personally had done all in his power to prevent: Further war over Kabul (March–December 1993) In 1993, Massoud created the Cooperative Mohammad Ghazali Culture Foundation (Bonyad-e Farhangi wa Ta'wani Mohammad-e Ghazali) to further humanitarian assistance and politically independent Afghan culture. The Ghazali Foundation provided free medical services during some days of the week to residents of Kabul who were unable to pay for medical treatment. The Ghazali Foundation's department for distribution of auxiliary goods was the first partner of the Red Cross. The Ghazali Foundation's department of family consultation was a free advisory board, which was accessible seven days a week for the indigent. Although Massoud was responsible for the financing of the foundation, he did not interfere with its cultural work. A council led the foundation and a jury, consisting of impartial university lecturers, decided on the works of artists. The Ghazali foundation enabled Afghan artists to exhibit their works at different places in Kabul, and numerous artists and authors were honoured for their works; some of them neither proponents of Massoud nor the Islamic State government. In March 1993, Massoud resigned his government position in exchange for peace, as requested by Hekmatyar, who considered him as a personal rival. According to the Islamabad Accord, Burhanuddin Rabbani, belonging to the same party as Massoud, remained president, while Gulbuddin Hekmatyar took the long-offered position of prime minister. Two days after the Islamabad Accord was put into effect, however, Hekmatyar's allies of Hezb-e Wahdat renewed rocket attacks in Kabul. Both the Wahhabi Pashtun Ittehad-i Islami of Abdul Rasul Sayyaf backed by Saudi Arabia and the Shia Hazara Hezb-e Wahdat supported by Iran remained involved in heavy fighting against each other. Hekmatyar was afraid to enter Kabul proper, and chaired only one cabinet meeting. The author Roy Gutman of the United States Institute of Peace wrote in How We Missed the Story: Osama bin Laden, the Taliban, and the Hijacking of Afghanistan: Hekmatyar had become prime minister ... But after chairing one cabinet meeting, Hekmatyar never returned to the capital, fearing, perhaps, a lynching by Kabulis infuriated over his role in destroying their city. Even his close aides were embarrassed. Hekmatyar spokesman Qutbuddin Helal was still setting up shop in the prime minister's palace when the city came under Hezb[-i Islami] rocket fire late that month. "We are here in Kabul and he is rocketing us. Now we have to leave. We can't do anything," he told Massoud aides. Hekmatyar, who was generally opposed to coalition government and struggled for undisputed power, had conflicts with other parties over the selection of cabinet members. His forces started major attacks against Kabul for one month. The President, Burhanuddin Rabbani, was attacked when he attempted to meet Hekmatyar. Massoud resumed his responsibilities as minister of defense. In May 1993, a new effort was made to reinstate the Islamabad Accord. In August, Massoud reached out to Hekmatyar in an attempt to broaden the government. By the end of 1993, however, Hekmatyar and the former communist general and militia leader, Abdul Rashid Dostum, were involved in secret negotiations encouraged by Pakistan's secret Inter-Services Intelligence, Iran's intelligence service, and Uzbekistan's Karimov administration. They planned a coup to oust the Rabbani administration and to attack Massoud in his northern areas. War in Kabul, Taliban arise in the south (1994) In January 1994, Hekmatyar and Dostum mounted a bombardment campaign against the capital and attacked Massoud's core areas in the northeast. Amin Saikal writes, Hekmatyar had the following objectives in all his operations: The first was to make sure that Rabbani and Massoud were not allowed to consolidate power, build a credible administration, or expand their territorial control, so that the country would remain divided into small fiefdoms, run by various Muajhideen leaders and local warlords or a council of such elements, with only some of them allied to Kabul. The second was to ensure the Rabbani government acquired no capacity to dispense patronage, and to dissuade the Kabul population from giving more than limited support to the government. The third was to make Kabul an unsafe city for representatives of the international community and to prevent the Rabbani government from attracting the international support needed to begin the post-war reconstruction of Afghanistan and generate a level of economic activity which would enhance its credibility and popularity. By mid-1994, Hekmatyar and Dostum were on the defensive in Kabul against Islamic State forces led by Massoud. Southern Afghanistan had been neither under the control of foreign-backed militias nor of the government in Kabul, but was ruled by local Pashtun leaders, such as Gul Agha Sherzai, and their militias. In 1994, the Taliban (a movement originating from Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-run religious schools for Afghan refugees in Pakistan) also developed in Afghanistan as a politico-religious force, reportedly in opposition to the tyranny of the local governor. When the Taliban took control of Kandahar in 1994, they forced the surrender of dozens of local Pashtun leaders who had presided over a situation of complete lawlessness and atrocities. In 1994, the Taliban took power in several provinces in southern and central Afghanistan. Taliban siege of Kabul (1995–1996) Hizb-i Islami had bombarded Kabul from January 1994 until February 1995 when the Taliban expelled Hizb from its Charasiab headquarters, after which the Taliban relaunched the bombardment of Kabul and started to besiege the town. By early 1995, Massoud initiated a nationwide political process with the goal of national consolidation and democratic elections. He arranged a conference in three parts uniting political and cultural personalities, governors, commanders, clergymen and representatives, in order to reach a lasting agreement. Massoud's favourite for candidacy to the presidency was Dr. Mohammad Yusuf, the first democratic prime minister under Zahir Shah, the former king. In the first meeting representatives from 15 different Afghan provinces met, in the second meeting there were already 25 provinces participating. Massoud also invited the Taliban to join the peace process wanting them to be a partner in providing stability to Afghanistan during such a process. But the Taliban, which had emerged over the course of 1994 in southern Afghanistan, were already at the doors of the capital city. Against the advice of his security personnel, Massoud went to talk to some Taliban leaders in Maidan Shar, Taliban territory. The Taliban declined to join the peace process leading towards general elections. When Massoud returned to Kabul unharmed, the Taliban leader who had received him as his guest paid with his life: he was killed by other senior Taliban for failing to assassinate Massoud while the possibility had presented itself. The Taliban, placing Kabul under a two-year siege and bombardment campaign from early 1995 onwards, in later years committed massacres against civilians, compared by United Nations observers to those that happened during the War in Bosnia. Neighboring Pakistan exerted strong influence over the Taliban. A publication with the George Washington University describes: "Initially, the Pakistanis supported ... Gulbuddin Hekmatyar ... When Hekmatyar failed to deliver for Pakistan, the administration began to support a new movement of religious students known as the Taliban." Many analysts like Amin Saikal describe the Taliban as developing into a proxy force for Pakistan's regional interests. The Taliban started shelling Kabul in early 1995 but were defeated by forces of the Islamic State government under Ahmad Shah Massoud. Amnesty International, referring to the Taliban offensive, wrote in a 1995 report: The Taliban's early victories in 1994 were followed by a series of defeats that resulted in heavy losses. The Taliban's first major offensive against the important western city of Herat, under the rule of Islamic state ally Ismail Khan, in February 1995 was defeated when Massoud airlifted 2,000 of his own core forces from Kabul to help defend Herat. Ahmed Rashid writes: "The Taliban had now been decisively pushed back on two fronts by the government and their political and military leadership was in disarray. Their image as potential peacemakers was badly dented, for in the eyes of many Afghans they had become nothing more than just another warlord party." International observers already speculated that the Taliban as a country-wide organization might have "run its course". Mullah Omar, however, consolidated his control of the Taliban and with foreign help rebuilt and re-equipped his forces. Pakistan increased its support to the Taliban. Its military advisers oversaw the restructuring of Taliban forces. The country provided armored pick-up trucks and other military equipment. Saudi Arabia provided the funding. Furthermore, there was a massive influx of 25,000 new Taliban fighters, many of them recruited in Pakistan. This enabled the Taliban to capture Herat to the west of Kabul in a surprise attack against the forces of Ismail Khan in September 1995. A nearly one-year siege and bombardment campaign against Kabul, however, was again defeated by Massoud's forces. Massoud and Rabbani meanwhile kept working on an internal Afghan peace process – successfully. By February 1996, all of Afghanistan's armed factions – except for the Taliban – had agreed to take part in the peace process and to set up a peace council to elect a new interim president. Many Pashtun areas under Taliban control had representatives also advocating for a peace agreement with the Islamic State government. But Taliban leader Mullah Omar and the Kandaharis surrounding him wanted to expand the war. At that point the Taliban leadership and their foreign supporters decided they needed to act quickly before the government could consolidate the new understanding between the parties. The Taliban moved against Jalalabad, under the control of the Pashtun Jalalabad Shura, to the east of Kabul. Part of the Jalalabad Shura was bribed with millions of dollars by the Taliban's foreign sponsors, especially Saudi Arabia, to vacate their positions. The Taliban's battle for Jalalabad was directed by Pakistani military advisers. Hundreds of Taliban crossed the Afghan-Pakistani border moving on Jalalabad from Pakistan and thereby suddenly placed to the east of Kabul. This left the capital city Kabul "wide open" to many sides as Ismail Khan had been defeated to the west, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar had vacated his positions to the south and the fall and surrender of Jalalabad had suddenly opened a new front to the east. At that point Massoud decided to conduct a strategic retreat through a northern corridor, according to Ahmed Rashid, "knowing he could not defend [Kabul] from attacks coming from all four points of the compass. Nor did he want to lose the support of Kabul's population by fighting for the city and causing more bloodshed." On September 26, 1996, as the Taliban with military support by Pakistan and financial support by Saudi Arabia prepared for another major offensive, Massoud ordered a full retreat from Kabul. The Taliban marched into Kabul on September 27, 1996, and established the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Massoud and his troops retreated to the northeast of Afghanistan which became the base for the still internationally recognized Islamic State of Afghanistan. Resistance against the Taliban (1996–2001) United Front against the Taliban Ahmad Shah Massoud created the United Front (Northern Alliance) against the Taliban advance. The United Front included forces and leaders from different political backgrounds as well as from all ethnicities of Afghanistan. From the Taliban conquest in 1996 until November 2001, the United Front controlled territory in which roughly 30% of Afghanistan's population was living, in provinces such as Badakhshan, Kapisa, Takhar and parts of Parwan, Kunar, Nuristan, Laghman, Samangan, Kunduz, Ghōr and Bamyan. Meanwhile, the Taliban imposed their repressive regime in the parts of Afghanistan under their control. Hundreds of thousands of people fled to Northern Alliance territory, Pakistan and Iran. Massoud's soldiers held some 1,200 Taliban prisoners in the Panjshir Valley, 122 of them foreign Muslims who had come to Afghanistan to fight a jihad. In 1998, after the defeat of Abdul Rashid Dostum's faction in Mazar-i-Sharif, Ahmad Shah Massoud remained the only main leader of the United Front in Afghanistan and the only leader who was able to defend vast parts of his area against the Taliban. Most major leaders including the Islamic State's President Burhanuddin Rabbani, Abdul Rashid Dostum, and others, were living in exile. During this time, commentators remarked that "The only thing standing in the way of future Taliban massacres is Ahmad Shah Massoud." Massoud stated that the Taliban repeatedly offered him a position of power to make him stop his resistance. He declined, declaring the differences between their ideology and his own pro-democratic outlook on society to be insurmountable. Massoud wanted to convince the Taliban to join a political process leading towards democratic elections in a foreseeable future. He also predicted that without assistance from Pakistan and external extremist groups, the Taliban would lose their hold on power. In early 2001, the United Front employed a new strategy of local military pressure and global political appeals. Resentment was increasingly gathering against Taliban rule from the bottom of Afghan society including the Pashtun areas. At the same time, Massoud was very wary not to revive the failed Kabul government of the early 1990s. Already in 1999 the United Front leadership ordered the training of police forces specifically to keep order and protect the civilian population in case the United Front would be successful. Cross-factional negotiations From 1999 onwards, a renewed process was set into motion by the Tajik Ahmad Shah Massoud and the Pashtun Abdul Haq to unite all the ethnicities of Afghanistan. Massoud united the Tajiks, Hazara and Uzbeks as well as several Pashtun commanders under his United Front. Besides meeting with Pashtun tribal leaders and acting as a point of reference, Abdul Haq received increasing numbers of Pashtun Taliban themselves who were secretly approaching him. Some commanders who had worked for the Taliban military apparatus agreed to the plan to topple the Taliban regime as the Taliban lost support even among the Pashtuns. Senior diplomat and Afghanistan expert Peter Tomsen wrote that "[t]he 'Lion of Kabul' [Abdul Haq] and the 'Lion of Panjshir' [Ahmad Shah Massoud] would make a formidable anti-Taliban team if they combined forces. Haq, Massoud, and Karzai, Afghanistan's three leading moderates, could transcend the Pashtun – non-Pashtun, north-south divide." Steve Coll referred to this plan as a "grand Pashtun-Tajik alliance". The senior Hazara and Uzbek leaders took part in the process just like later Afghan president Hamid Karzai. They agreed to work under the banner of the exiled Afghan king Zahir Shah in Rome. In November 2000, leaders from all ethnic groups were brought together in Massoud's headquarters in northern Afghanistan, travelling from other parts of Afghanistan, Europe, the United States, Pakistan and India to discuss a Loya Jirga for a settlement of Afghanistan's problems and to discuss the establishment of a post-Taliban government. In September 2001, an international official who met with representatives of the alliance remarked, "It's crazy that you have this today ... Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazara ... They were all ready to buy in to the process". In early 2001, Ahmad Shah Massoud with leaders from all ethnicities of Afghanistan addressed the European Parliament in Brussels, asking the international community to provide humanitarian aid to the people of Afghanistan. He stated that the Taliban and al-Qaeda had introduced "a very wrong perception of Islam" and that without the support of Pakistan and Bin Laden the Taliban would not be able to sustain their military campaign for up to a year. On that visit to Europe, he also warned the U.S. about Bin Laden. The areas of Massoud Life in the areas under direct control of Massoud was different from the life in the areas under Taliban or Dostum's control. In contrast to the time of chaos in which all structures had collapsed in Kabul, Massoud was able to control most of the troops under his direct command well during the period starting in late 1996. Massoud always controlled the Panjshir, Takhar, parts of Parwan and Badakhshan during the war. Some other provinces (notably Kunduz, Baghlan, Nuristan and the north of Kabul) were captured by his forces from the Taliban and lost again from time to time as the frontlines varied. Massoud created democratic institutions which were structured into several committees: political, health, education and economic. Still, many people came to him personally when they had a dispute or problem and asked him to solve their problems. In September 2000, Massoud signed the Declaration of the Essential Rights of Afghan Women drafted by Afghan women. The declaration established gender equality in front of the law and the right of women to political participation, education, work, freedom of movement and speech. In the areas of Massoud, women and girls did not have to wear the Afghan burqa by law. They were allowed to work and to go to school. Although it was a time of war, girls' schools were operating in some districts. In at least two known instances, Massoud personally intervened against cases of forced marriage in favour of the women to make their own choice. While it was Massoud's stated personal conviction that men and women are equal and should enjoy the same rights, he also had to deal with Afghan traditions which he said would need a generation or more to overcome. In his opinion, that could only be achieved through education. Author Pepe Escobar wrote in Asia Times: Humayun Tandar, who took part as an Afghan diplomat in the 2001 International Conference on Afghanistan in Bonn, said that "strictures of language, ethnicity, region were [also] stifling for Massoud. That is why ... he wanted to create a unity which could surpass the situation in which we found ourselves and still find ourselves to this day." This applied also to strictures of religion. Jean-José Puig describes how Massoud often led prayers before a meal or at times asked his fellow Muslims to lead the prayer but also did not hesitate to ask the Jewish Princeton Professor Michael Barry or his Christian friend Jean-José Puig: "Jean-José, we believe in the same God. Please, tell us the prayer before lunch or dinner in your own language." International relations U.S. policy regarding Massoud, the Taliban and Afghanistan remained ambiguous and differed between the various U.S. government agencies. In 1997, U.S. State Department's Robin Raphel suggested to Massoud he should surrender to the Taliban. He soundly rejected the proposal. At one point in the war, in 1997, two top foreign policy officials in the Clinton administration flew to northern Afghanistan in an attempt to convince Massoud not to take advantage of a strategic opportunity to make crucial gains against the Taliban. In 1998, a U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency analyst, Julie Sirrs, visited Massoud's territories privately, having previously been denied official permission to do so by her agency. She reported that Massoud had conveyed warnings about strengthened ties between the Taliban and foreign Islamist terrorists. Returning home, she was sacked from her agency for insubordination, because at that time the U.S. administration had no trust in Massoud. In the meantime, the only collaboration between Massoud and another U.S. intelligence service, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), consisted of an effort to trace Osama bin Laden following the 1998 embassy bombings. The U.S. and the European Union provided no support to Massoud for the fight against the Taliban. A change of policy, lobbied for by CIA officers on the ground who had visited the area of Massoud, regarding support to Massoud, was underway in the course of 2001. According to Steve Coll's book Ghost Wars (who won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction): U.S. Congressman Dana Rohrabacher also recalled: [B]etween Bush's inauguration and 9/11, I met with the new national security staff on 3 occasions, including one meeting with Condoleezza Rice to discuss Afghanistan. There were, in fact, signs noted in an overview story in The Washington Post about a month ago that some steps were being made to break away from the previous administration's Afghan policy. CIA lawyers, working with officers in the Near East Division and Counterterrorist Center, began to draft a formal, legal presidential finding for Bush's signature authorizing a new covert action program in Afghanistan, the first in a decade that sought to influence the course of the Afghan war in favour of Massoud. This change in policy was finalized in August 2001 when it was too late. After Pakistan had funded, directed and supported the Taliban's rise to power in Afghanistan, Massoud and the United Front received some assistance from India. The assistance provided by India was extensive, including uniforms, ordnance, mortars, small armaments, refurbished Kalashnikovs, combat and winter clothes, as well as funds. India was particularly concerned about Pakistan's Taliban strategy and the Islamic militancy in its neighborhood; it provided U.S.$70 million in aid including two Mi-17 helicopters, three additional helicopters in 2000 and US$8 million worth of high-altitude equipment in 2001. Also In the 1990s, India had run a field hospital at Farkor on the Tajik-Afghan border to treat wounded fighters from the then Northern Alliance that was battling the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. It was at the very same hospital that the Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Masood was pronounced dead after being assassinated just two days before the 9/11 terror strikes in 2001. Furthermore, the alliance supposedly also received minor aid from Tajikistan, Russia and Iran because of their opposition to the Taliban and the Pakistani control over the Taliban's Emirate. Their support, however, remained limited to the most needed things. Meanwhile, Pakistan engaged up to 28,000 Pakistani nationals and regular Pakistani army troops to fight alongside the Taliban and Al Qaeda forces against Massoud. In April 2001, the president of the European Parliament, Nicole Fontaine (who called Massoud the "pole of liberty in Afghanistan"), invited Massoud with the support of French and Belgian politicians to address the European Parliament in Brussels, Belgium. In his speech, he asked for humanitarian aid for the people of Afghanistan. Massoud further went on to warn that his intelligence agents had gained limited knowledge about a large-scale terrorist attack on U.S. soil being imminent. Assassination Massoud, then aged 48, was the target of an assassination plot in Khwājah Bahā ud Dīn (Khvājeh Bahāuḏḏīn), Takhar Province in northeastern Afghanistan on September 9, 2001. The attackers' names were alternately given as Dahmane Abd al-Sattar, husband of Malika El Aroud, and Bouraoui el-Ouaer; or 34-year-old Karim Touzani and 26-year-old Kacem Bakkali. The attackers claimed to be Belgians originally from Morocco. According to Le Monde they transited through the municipality of Molenbeek. Their passports turned out to be stolen and their nationality was later determined to be Tunisian. Waiting for almost three weeks (during which they also interviewed Burhanuddin Rabbani and Abdul Rasul Sayyaf) for an interview opportunity, on September 8, 2001, an aide to Massoud recalls the would-be suicide attackers "were so worried" and threatened to leave if the interview did not happen in the next 24 hours (until September 10, 2001). They were finally granted an interview. During the interview, they set off a bomb composed of explosives hidden in the camera and in a battery-pack belt. Massoud died in a helicopter that was taking him to an Indian military field hospital at Farkhor in nearby Tajikistan. The explosion also killed Mohammed Asim Suhail, a United Front official, while Mohammad Fahim Dashty and Massoud Khalili were injured. One of the suicide attackers, Bouraoui, was killed by the explosion, while Dahmane Abd al-Sattar was captured and shot while trying to escape. Despite initial denials by the United Front, news of Massoud's death was reported almost immediately, appearing on the BBC, and in European and North American newspapers on September 10, 2001. On September 16, the United Front officially announced that Massoud had died of injuries in the suicide attack. Massoud was buried in his home village of Bazarak in the Panjshir Valley. The funeral, although in a remote rural area, was attended by hundreds of thousands of people. Massoud had survived assassination attempts over a period of 26 years, including attempts made by al-Qaeda, the Taliban, the Pakistani ISI and before them the Soviet KGB, the Afghan communist KHAD and Hekmatyar. The first attempt on Massoud's life was carried out by Hekmatyar and two Pakistani ISI agents in 1975 when Massoud was 22 years old. In early 2001, al-Qaeda would-be assassins were captured by Massoud's forces while trying to enter his territory. Connection to September 11, 2001 The assassination of Massoud is considered to have a strong connection to the September 11 attacks in 2001 on U.S. soil, which killed nearly 3,000 people. It appeared to have been the major terrorist attack which Massoud had warned against in his speech to the European Parliament several months earlier. Al-Qaeda's motive for the assassination is believed to have been to secure the Taliban's support of Osama bin Laden after the planned attacks. By eliminating Massoud, it was expected that the remaining anti-Taliban forces in Afghanistan would collapse, allowing the Taliban to solidify their control over the country. Bin Laden thought that this, in turn, would make the Taliban indebted to him, and he believed their support would be crucial for his planned war against the United States. In late 2001, a computer was seized that was stolen from an office used by al-Qaeda immediately after the fall of Kabul in November. This computer was mainly used by Aiman al-Zawahri and contained the letter with the interview request for Massoud. The two assassins had completed military training in training camps in Afghanistan at the end of 2000 and were selected for the suicide mission in the spring or early summer of the following year. The Afghan publicist Waheed Muzhda, who worked for the Taliban in the Foreign Ministry, confirmed the two assassins met with al-Qaeda officials in Kandahar and bin Laden and al-Zawahri saw them off when they left. Following the assassination, bin Laden had an emissary deliver Dahmane Abd al-Sattar's widow a letter with $500 in an envelope to settle a debt. An al-Qaeda magazine in Saudi Arabia later published a biography of Youssef al-Aayyiri, who headed al-Qaeda's operations in Saudi Arabia from 2002, which described al-Qaeda's involvement in Massoud's assassination. Osama bin Laden commissioned the assassination attempt to appease the Taliban because of the imminent terrorist attacks in the US, which would cause serious problems for the Taliban. The Taliban denied any involvement in Massoud's assassination, and it is very unlikely that they were privy to the assassination plans. There were a few minor attacks by the Taliban after the attack, but no major offensive. Investigative commission In April 2003, the Karzai administration created a commission to investigate the assassination of Massoud. In 2003, French investigators and the FBI were able to trace the provenance of the camera used in the assassination, which had been stolen in France some time earlier. Legacy National Hero of Afghanistan Massoud was the only chief Afghan leader who never left Afghanistan in the fight against the Soviet Union and later in the fight against the Taliban Emirate. In the areas under his direct control, such as Panjshir, some parts of Parwan and Takhar, Massoud established democratic institutions. One refugee who cramped his family of 27 into an old jeep to flee from the Taliban to the area of Massoud described Massoud's territory in 1997 as "the last tolerant corner of Afghanistan". In 2001, the Afghan interim government under president Hamid Karzai officially awarded Massoud the title of "Hero of the Afghan Nation". One analyst in 2004 said: One man holds a greater political punch than all 18 living [Afghan] presidential candidates combined. Though already dead for three years.... Since his death on September 9, 2001 at the hands of two al Qaeda-linked Islamic radicals, Massoud has been transformed from mujahedin to national heroif not saint. Pictures of Massoud, the Afghan mujahedin who battled the Soviets, other warlords, and the Taliban for more than 20 years, vastly outnumber those of any other Afghan including those of Karzai. Today Panjshir, the home of Massoud, is arguably the most peaceful place in the entire country. A small US military reconstruction team is based here, but there are none of the signs of foreign occupation that exist elsewhere. Even Afghan soldiers are few and far between. Instead, the people like to boast about how they keep their own security. A Massoud Foundation was established in 2003, to provide humanitarian assistance to Afghans, especially in the fields of health care and education. It also runs programs in the fields of culture, construction, agriculture and welfare. A major road in Kabul was named Great Massoud Road. A monument to Massoud was installed outside the US Embassy. A street in New Delhi, India, is named after Ahmad Shah Massoud. It is the first time that such an honour has been extended to a leader from that country as part of close ties between Afghanistan and India. Magpul Massoud was a 7.62 NATO rifle produced by Magpul which was named after himself. The road near the Afghanistan Embassy is a "symbol of ties" that binds the two nations that have always "enjoyed excellent relations". His friend Abdullah Abdullah said that Massoud was different from the other guerilla leaders. "He is a hero who led a clear struggle for the values of the people". In a 2001 mourning ceremony at Moscow to honour the memory of Ahmad Shah Massoud, one-time foe Colonel Abdul Qadir stated: "Though Massoud and I used to be enemies, I am sure he deserves great respect as an outstanding military leader and, first of all, as a patriot of his country". Lion of Panjshir Massoud's byname, "Lion of Panjshir" (, "Shir-e-Panjshir"), earned for his role during the Soviet occupation, is a rhyming play on words in Persian, as the name of the valley means "five lions". The Wall Street Journal referred to Massoud as "The Afghan Who Won the Cold War", referring to the global significance of the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan for the subsequent collapse of the Eastern Bloc. Honors outside Afghanistan In 2007, the government of India decided to name a road in New Delhi's Chanakyapuri district after Massoud. In February 2021, the Council of Paris in France honored Massoud by installing a plaque in the 8th arrondissement of Paris. The decision reflected Massoud's unique connections with France. In March 2021, the Mayor of Paris named a pathway in the Champs-Élysées gardens after Massoud. The ceremony was attended by Massoud's son and former president Hamid Karzai. Civilian orders Tajikistan: Order of Ismoili Somoni – posthumously awarded on September 2, 2021. Views on Pakistan and potential al-Qaeda attacks Although Pakistan were supporting the mujahideen groups during the Soviet-Afghan War, Ahmad Shah Massoud increasingly distrusted the Pakistanis and eventually kept his distance from them. In a 1999 interview, Massoud says "They [Pakistan] are trying to turn us into a colony. Without them there would be no war". In the spring 2001, Ahmad Shah Massoud addressed the European Parliament in Brussels, saying that Pakistan was behind the situation in Afghanistan. He also said that he believed that, without the support of Pakistan, Osama bin Laden, and Saudi Arabia, the Taliban would not be able to sustain their military campaign for up to a year. He said the Afghan population was ready to rise against them. Addressing the United States specifically, he warned that should the U.S. not work for peace in Afghanistan and put pressure on Pakistan to cease their support to the Taliban, the problems of Afghanistan would soon become the problems of the U.S. and the world. Declassified Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) documents from November 2001 show that Massoud had gained "limited knowledge... regarding the intentions of al-Qaeda to perform a terrorist act against the U.S. on a scale larger than the 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania." They noted that he warned about such attacks. Succession and resistance to Taliban by his son In September 2019, his son Ahmad Massoud was declared as his successor. Following the 2021 Taliban offensive and the Fall of Kabul, Massoud allied with self-proclaimed acting president Amrullah Saleh and established the National Resistance Front of Afghanistan to the Taliban in the Panjshir Valley. Massoud called for West's support to resist the Taliban. Personal life Massoud was married to Sediqa Massoud. They had one son, Ahmad Massoud (born in 1989) and five daughters (Fatima born in 1992, Mariam born in 1993, Ayesha born in 1995, Zohra born in 1996 and Nasrine born in 1998). In 2005 Sediqa Massoud published a personal account on her life with Massoud (co-authored by two women's rights activists and friends of Sediqa Massoud, Chékéba Hachemi and ) called "Pour l'amour de Massoud" (For the love of Massoud), in which she describes a decent and loving husband. Massoud liked reading and had a library of 3,000 books at his home in Panjshir. He used to read the works of revolutionaries Mao Zedong and Che Guevara, and was a great admirer of Charles de Gaulle, founder of the French Fifth Republic. Massoud said his favorite author was Victor Hugo and he was also a fan of classical Persian poetry, including the works of Bidel and Hafez. He was keen at playing football and chess. Massoud's reputation for fearlessness is illustrated by a story about him told in Afghanistan, which cannot be confirmed. Once, while inspecting the front lines with a deputy, Massoud's driver had become lost and driven into the middle of a Taliban encampment. In tremendous peril, since he was recognized immediately, Massoud demanded to see the Taliban commander, making polite conversation for just long enough to bluff that he had arrived intentionally and not accidentally. The confused Taliban allowed him to leave. Massoud's family since his death have had a great deal of prestige in the politics of Afghanistan. One of his six brothers, Ahmad Zia Massoud, was the Vice President of Afghanistan from 2004 until 2009 under the first democratically elected government of Afghanistan. Unsuccessful attempts have been made on the life of Ahmad Zia Massoud in 2004 and late 2009. The Associated Press reported that eight Afghans died in the attempt on Ahmad Zia Massoud's life. Ahmad Zia Massoud leads the National Front of Afghanistan (a United Front group). Another brother, Ahmad Wali Massoud, was Afghanistan's Ambassador to the United Kingdom from 2002 to 2006. He was a member of Abdullah Abdullah's National Coalition of Afghanistan (another United Front group). In literature Essay Sebastian Junger, one of the last Western journalists to interview Massoud in depth, featured him in an essay in his 2002 collection, Fire. Fiction Massoud is the subject of Ken Follett's 1986 novel Lie Down With Lions, about the Soviet-Afghan War. He also is featured as a historical figure in James McGee's 1989 thriller, Crow's War. Massoud is the subject of Olivier Weber's novel Massoud's Confession, about the Islam of Enlightenment and the need to reform religious practices. Massoud is played by Mido Hamada in the 2006 miniseries The Path to 9/11. Notes References Further reading Sandy Gall (2021): Afghan Napoleon: The Life of Ahmad Shah Massoud. London: Haus Publishing. ISBN 978-1-913368-22-7. Marcela Grad (2009): Massoud: An Intimate Portrait of the Legendary Afghan Leader; Webster University Press, 310pp Sediqa Massoud with Chékéba Hachemi and Marie-Francoise Colombani (2005): Pour l'amour de Massoud; Document XO Editions, 265pp (in French) Amin Saikal (2006): Modern Afghanistan: A History of Struggle and Survival; I. B. Tauris, 352pp ("One of the "Five Best" Books on Afghanistan" – The Wall Street Journal) Roy Gutman (2008): How We Missed the Story: Osama Bin Laden, the Taliban and the Hijacking of Afghanistan; United States Institute of Peace Press, 304pp Coll, Steve (2004): Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 9, 2001; Penguin Press, 695pp, . (won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction) Stephen Tanner: Afghanistan: A Military History from Alexander the Great to the Fall of the Taliban Christophe de Ponfilly (2001): Massoud l'Afghan; Gallimard, 437pp (in French) Gary W. Bowersox (2004): The Gem Hunter-True Adventures of an American in Afghanistan; Geovision, Inc. (January 22, 2004), . Olivier Weber (2001): Le Faucon afghan; Robert Laffont Olivier Weber (2001, with Reza): Afghan eternities; Le Chene/ UNESCO Gary C. Schroen (2005): 'First In' An Insiders Account of How The CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan; New York: Presidio Press/Ballantine Books, . Peter Bergen: Holy War, Inc. Ahmed Rashid: TALIBAN – The Story of the Afghan Warlords; . A. R. Rowan: On The Trail Of A Lion: Ahmed Shah Massoud, Oil Politics and Terror MaryAnn T. Beverly (2007): From That Flame; Kallisti Publishing Roger Plunk: The Wandering Peacemaker References to Massoud appear in the book "A Thousand Splendid Suns" by Khaled Hosseini. References to Massoud appear in the book "Sulla rotta dei ribelli" by Emilio Lonardo; . Kara Kush, London: William Collins Sons and Co., Ltd., 1986. The novel Kara Kush by Idries Shah is rumored to be loosely based on the exploits of Massoud during the Afghan-Soviet War Olivier Weber (2013): Massoud's Confession; Flammarion. External links Interviews The Last Interview with Ahmad Shah Massoud Piotr Balcerowicz, early August 2001 Obituaries and articles Remembering Massoud, a fighter for peace, The New York Times, September 10, 2002 60 Years of Asian Heroes: Ahmad Shah Massoud Time, 2006 Profile: Afghanistan's 'Lion Of Panjshir' Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, September 5, 2006 Afghan Commander Massoud, Killed on Eve of 9/11 Attacks, is a National Hero by The LA Times, September 22, 2010 Documentaries/Panegyrics An 18-minute video, 'Starving to Death', about Massoud defending Kabul against the Taliban siege in March 1996. With horrifying pictures of civilian war victims. By Journeyman Pictures/Journeyman.tv. Retrieved on YouTube, June 27, 2018. Reza and Olivier Weber on Massoud, National Geographic 'Afghanistan Revealed' (2000) | SnagFilms . A portrait of Massoud by National Geographic photographer Reza Deghati, cinematographer Stephen Cocklin, and writer Sebastian Junger [Dead link, on National Geographic:] A Film Screening and Panel Discussion Focusing on the Middle East and Afghanistan 1953 births 2001 deaths Afghan guerrillas Afghan guerrillas killed in action Afghan Sunni Muslims Afghan Tajik people Assassinated Afghan politicians Assassinated military personnel Deaths by suicide bomber Defence ministers of Afghanistan Guerrilla warfare theorists Military personnel killed in action Mujahideen members of the Soviet–Afghan War People killed by al-Qaeda People murdered in Afghanistan Asian politicians assassinated in the 2000s Afghan politicians assassinated in the 20th century 20th-century Afghan politicians Politicians assassinated in 2001 Deaths by explosive device

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autobiography

Autobiography

An autobiography, sometimes informally called an autobio, is a self-written biography of one's own life. Definition The word "autobiography" was first used deprecatingly by William Taylor in 1797 in the English periodical The Monthly Review, when he suggested the word as a hybrid, but condemned it as "pedantic". However, its next recorded use was in its present sense, by Robert Southey in 1809. Despite only being named early in the nineteenth century, first-person autobiographical writing originates in antiquity. Roy Pascal differentiates autobiography from the periodic self-reflective mode of journal or diary writing by noting that "[autobiography] is a review of a life from a particular moment in time, while the diary, however reflective it may be, moves through a series of moments in time". Autobiography thus takes stock of the autobiographer's life from the moment of composition. While biographers generally rely on a wide variety of documents and viewpoints, autobiography may be based entirely on the writer's memory. The memoir form is closely associated with autobiography but it tends, as Pascal claims, to focus less on the self and more on others during the autobiographer's review of their own life. Biography Life Autobiographical works are by nature subjective. The inability—or unwillingness—of the author to accurately recall memories has in certain cases resulted in misleading or incorrect information. Some sociologists and psychologists have noted that autobiography offers the author the ability to recreate history. Spiritual autobiography Spiritual autobiography is an account of an author's struggle or journey towards God, followed by conversion a religious conversion, often interrupted by moments of regression. The author re-frames their life as a demonstration of divine intention through encounters with the Divine. The earliest example of a spiritual autobiography is Augustine's Confessions though the tradition has expanded to include other religious traditions in works such as Mohandas Gandhi's An Autobiography and Black Elk Speaks. Deliverance from Error by Al-Ghazali is another example. The spiritual autobiography often serves as an endorsement of the writer's religion. Memoirs A memoir is slightly different in character from an autobiography. While an autobiography typically focuses on the "life and times" of the writer, a memoir has a narrower, more intimate focus on the author's memories, feelings and emotions. Memoirs have often been written by politicians or military leaders as a way to record and publish an account of their public exploits. One early example is that of Julius Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico, also known as Commentaries on the Gallic Wars. In the work, Caesar describes the battles that took place during the nine years that he spent fighting local armies in the Gallic Wars. His second memoir, Commentarii de Bello Civili (or Commentaries on the Civil War) is an account of the events that took place between 49 and 48 BC in the civil war against Gnaeus Pompeius and the Senate. Leonor López de Córdoba (1362–1420) wrote what is supposed to be the first autobiography in Spanish. The English Civil War (1642–1651) provoked a number of examples of this genre, including works by Sir Edmund Ludlow and Sir John Reresby. French examples from the same period include the memoirs of Cardinal de Retz (1614–1679) and the Duc de Saint-Simon. Fictional autobiography The term "fictional autobiography" signifies novels about a fictional character written as though the character were writing their own autobiography, meaning that the character is the first-person narrator and that the novel addresses both internal and external experiences of the character. Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders is an early example. Charles Dickens' David Copperfield is another such classic, and J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye is a well-known modern example of fictional autobiography. Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre is yet another example of fictional autobiography, as noted on the front page of the original version. The term may also apply to works of fiction purporting to be autobiographies of real characters, e.g., Robert Nye's Memoirs of Lord Byron. Autobiography through the ages The classical period: Apologia, oration, confession In antiquity such works were typically entitled apologia, purporting to be self-justification rather than self-documentation. The title of John Henry Newman's 1864 Christian confessional work Apologia Pro Vita Sua refers to this tradition. The historian Flavius Josephus introduces his autobiography Josephi Vita () with self-praise, which is followed by a justification of his actions as a Jewish rebel commander of Galilee. The rhetor Libanius (–394) framed his life memoir Oration I (begun in 374) as one of his orations, not of a public kind, but of a literary kind that would not be read aloud in privacy. Augustine of Hippo (354–430) applied the title Confessions to his autobiographical work, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau used the same title in the 18th century, initiating the chain of confessional and sometimes racy and highly self-critical autobiographies of the Romantic era and beyond. Augustine's was arguably the first Western autobiography ever written, and became an influential model for Christian writers throughout the Middle Ages. It tells of the hedonistic lifestyle Augustine lived for a time within his youth, associating with young men who boasted of their sexual exploits; his following and leaving of the anti-sex and anti-marriage Manichaeism in attempts to seek sexual morality; and his subsequent return to Christianity due to his embracement of Skepticism and the New Academy movement (developing the view that sex is good, and that virginity is better, comparing the former to silver and the latter to gold; Augustine's views subsequently strongly influenced Western theology). Confessions is considered one of the great masterpieces of western literature. Peter Abelard's 12th-century Historia Calamitatum is in the spirit of Augustine's Confessions, an outstanding autobiographical document of its period. Early autobiographies In the 15th century, Leonor López de Córdoba, a Spanish noblewoman, wrote her Memorias, which may be the first autobiography in Castillian. Zāhir ud-Dīn Mohammad Bābur, who founded the Mughal dynasty of South Asia kept a journal Bāburnāma (Chagatai/; literally: "Book of Babur" or "Letters of Babur") which was written between 1493 and 1529. One of the first great autobiographies of the Renaissance is that of the sculptor and goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini (1500–1571), written between 1556 and 1558, and entitled by him simply Vita (Italian: Life). He declares at the start: "No matter what sort he is, everyone who has to his credit what are or really seem great achievements, if he cares for truth and goodness, ought to write the story of his own life in his own hand; but no one should venture on such a splendid undertaking before he is over forty." These criteria for autobiography generally persisted until recent times, and most serious autobiographies of the next three hundred years conformed to them. Another autobiography of the period is De vita propria, by the Italian mathematician, physician and astrologer Gerolamo Cardano (1574). One of the first autobiographies written in an Indian language was Ardhakathānaka, written by Banarasidas, who was a Shrimal Jain businessman and poet of Mughal India. The poetic autobiography Ardhakathānaka (The Half Story), was composed in Braj Bhasa, an early dialect of Hindi linked with the region around Mathura.In his autobiography, he describes his transition from an unruly youth, to a religious realization by the time the work was composed. The work also is notable for many details of life in Mughal times. The earliest known autobiography written in English is the Book of Margery Kempe, written in 1438. Following in the earlier tradition of a life story told as an act of Christian witness, the book describes Margery Kempe's pilgrimages to the Holy Land and Rome, her attempts to negotiate a celibate marriage with her husband, and most of all her religious experiences as a Christian mystic. Extracts from the book were published in the early sixteenth century but the whole text was published for the first time only in 1936. Possibly the first publicly available autobiography written in English was Captain John Smith's autobiography published in 1630 which was regarded by many as not much more than a collection of tall tales told by someone of doubtful veracity. This changed with the publication of Philip Barbour's definitive biography in 1964 which, amongst other things, established independent factual bases for many of Smith's "tall tales", many of which could not have been known by Smith at the time of writing unless he was actually present at the events recounted. Other notable English autobiographies of the 17th century include those of Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1643, published 1764) and John Bunyan (Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, 1666). Jarena Lee (1783–1864) was the first African American woman to have a published biography in the United States. 18th and 19th centuries Following the trend of Romanticism, which greatly emphasized the role and the nature of the individual, and in the footsteps of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions, a more intimate form of autobiography, exploring the subject's emotions, came into fashion. Stendhal's autobiographical writings of the 1830s, The Life of Henry Brulard and Memoirs of an Egotist, are both avowedly influenced by Rousseau. An English example is William Hazlitt's Liber Amoris (1823), a painful examination of the writer's love-life. With the rise of education, cheap newspapers and cheap printing, modern concepts of fame and celebrity began to develop, and the beneficiaries of this were not slow to cash in on this by producing autobiographies. It became the expectation—rather than the exception—that those in the public eye should write about themselves—not only writers such as Charles Dickens (who also incorporated autobiographical elements in his novels) and Anthony Trollope, but also politicians (e.g. Henry Brooks Adams), philosophers (e.g. John Stuart Mill), churchmen such as Cardinal Newman, and entertainers such as P. T. Barnum. Increasingly, in accordance with romantic taste, these accounts also began to deal, amongst other topics, with aspects of childhood and upbringing—far removed from the principles of "Cellinian" autobiography. 20th and 21st centuries From the 17th century onwards, "scandalous memoirs" by supposed libertines, serving a public taste for titillation, have been frequently published. Typically pseudonymous, they were (and are) largely works of fiction written by ghostwriters. So-called "autobiographies" of modern professional athletes and media celebrities—and to a lesser extent about politicians—generally written by a ghostwriter, are routinely published. Some celebrities, such as Naomi Campbell, admit to not having read their "autobiographies". Some sensationalist autobiographies such as James Frey's A Million Little Pieces have been publicly exposed as having embellished or fictionalized significant details of the authors' lives. Autobiography has become an increasingly popular and widely accessible form. A Fortunate Life by Albert Facey (1979) has become an Australian literary classic. With the critical and commercial success in the United States of such memoirs as Angela’s Ashes and The Color of Water, more and more people have been encouraged to try their hand at this genre. Maggie Nelson's book The Argonauts is one of the recent autobiographies. Maggie Nelson calls it autotheory—a combination of autobiography and critical theory. A genre where the "claim for truth" overlaps with fictional elements though the work still purports to be autobiographical is autofiction. See also :Category:Autobiographies Alphabiography Autobiographical comics Autobiographical memory Autobiographical novel Autofiction I-novel Letter collection List of autobiographies Memoir Unreliable narrator Notes References Bibliography External links Biography (genre) Articles needing additional references from December 2012 Works about history 1790s neologisms

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Arcadius

Arcadius ( ; 377 – 1 May 408) was Roman emperor from 383 to his death in 408. He was the eldest son of the Augustus Theodosius I () and his first wife Aelia Flaccilla, and the brother of Honorius (). Arcadius ruled the eastern half of the empire from 395, when their father died, while Honorius ruled the west. A weak ruler, his reign was dominated by a series of powerful ministers and by his wife, Aelia Eudoxia. Early life Arcadius was born in 377 in Hispania, the eldest son of Theodosius I and Aelia Flaccilla, and brother of Honorius. On 19 January 383, his father declared the five-year-old Arcadius an Augustus and co-ruler for the eastern half of the Empire. Ten years later a corresponding declaration made Honorius Augustus of the western half. Arcadius passed his early years under the tutelage of the rhetorician Themistius and Arsenius Zonaras, a monk. Reign Early reign Both of Theodosius' sons were young and inexperienced, susceptible to being dominated by ambitious subordinates. In 394 Arcadius briefly exercised independent power with the help of his advisors in Constantinople, when his father Theodosius went west to fight Arbogastes and Eugenius. Theodosius died on 17 January 395, and Arcadius, still aged only 17, fell under the influence of the praetorian prefect of the East, Rufinus. Honorius, aged 10, was consigned to the guardianship of the magister militum Stilicho. Rufinus ambitiously sought to marry his daughter to Arcadius and thereby gain the prestige of being the emperor's father-in-law. However, when the prefect was called away to business in Antioch (where according to Zosimus, Rufinus had Lucianus, the comes orientis, flogged to death with whips loaded with lead), Arcadius was shown a painting of Aelia Eudoxia, the daughter of the deceased Frankish magister militum per orientem, Bauto. Seeing the young emperor's interest in Eudoxia, Eutropius, the eunuch praepositus sacri cubiculi, arranged for the two to meet. Arcadius fell in love and a marriage was quickly arranged, with the ceremony performed on 27 April 395. According to Zosimus, Rufinus assumed that his daughter was still to be the bride, only discovering otherwise when the nuptial procession went to Eudoxia's residence rather than his own. The rise of Eudoxia, facilitated by a general who was a rival of Rufinus, demonstrates the shifting of the centres of power in the eastern court. Such jostling for influence over the malleable emperor would be a recurring feature of Arcadius's reign. The first crisis facing the young Arcadius was the Gothic revolt in 395, under the command of Alaric I (), who sought to take advantage of the accession of two inexperienced Roman emperors. As Alaric marched towards Constantinople, plundering Macedonia and Thrace, the eastern court could offer no response, as the majority of its army had gone to Italy with Theodosius and was now in the hands of Stilicho. Perhaps sensing an opportunity to exercise power in the eastern half of the empire as well, Stilicho declared that Theodosius had made him guardian over both his sons. He traveled eastward, ostensibly to face Alaric, leading both his own forces and the Gothic mercenaries whom Theodosius had taken west in the civil war with Eugenius. Arcadius and Rufinus felt more threatened by Stilicho than by Alaric; upon landing in Thessaly Stilicho received an imperial order to send along the eastern regiments, but himself to proceed no further. Stilicho complied, falling back to Salona while Gainas led the mercenaries to Constantinople. Arcadius and his entourage received Gainas in the Campus Martius, a parade ground adjacent to the city, on 27 November 395. There Rufinus was suddenly assassinated by the Goths, on the orders of Stilicho and possibly with the support of Eutropius. The murder certainly created an opportunity for Eutropius and for Arcadius' wife, Eudoxia, who took Rufinus' place as advisors and guardians of the emperor. While Eutropius consolidated his hold on power in the capital, the distracted government still failed to react to the presence of Alaric in Greece. At first Eutropius may have coordinated with Stilicho around the defence of Illyricum; by 397, when Stilicho personally led a blockade that compelled Alaric to retreat into Epirus, the atmosphere of the eastern court had changed. As neither Arcadius nor Eutropius was keen to have Stilicho intervening in the affairs of the eastern empire, they provided no further military aid to Stilicho, who then abandoned the blockade of the Visigoths. At Eutropius's urging, Arcadius declared Stilicho to be a hostis publicus, and came to an arrangement with Alaric, making him magister militum per Illyricum. At around the same time, the eastern court persuaded Gildo, the magister utriusque militiae per Africam, to transfer his allegiance from Honorius to Arcadius, causing relations between the two imperial courts to deteriorate further. Eutropius' influence lasted four years, during which time he sought to marginalise the military and promote the civilian offices within the bureaucracy. He brought to trial two prominent military officers, Timasius and Abundantius. He also had Arcadius introduce two administrative innovations: the running of the cursus publicus (office of postmaster general) and the office in charge of manufacturing military equipment was transferred from the praetorian prefects to the magister officiorum (master of offices). Secondly, the role that Eutropius held, the praepositus sacri cubiculi (grand chamberlain) was given the rank of illustris, and therefore equal in rank to the praetorian prefects. In the autumn of 397 he issued a law in Arcadius's name, targeting the Roman military, where any conspiracy involving soldiers or the barbarian regiments against persons holding the rank of illustris was considered to be treason, with the conspirators to be sentenced to death, and their descendants to be deprived of citizenship. In 398, Eutropius led a successful campaign against the Huns in Roman Armenia. The following year he convinced Arcadius to grant him the consulship, triggering protests across the empire. For traditionalists, the granting of the consulship to a eunuch and former slave was an insult to the Roman system and other contemporary Romans, and the western court refused to recognize him as consul. The crisis escalated when the Ostrogoths who had been settled in Asia Minor by Theodosius I revolted, demanding the removal of Eutropius. The emperor sent two forces against Tribigild, the rebel leader; the first, under an officer named Leo, was defeated. The second force was commanded by Gainas, rival of Eutropius in the Eastern court. He returned to Arcadius and argued that the Ostrogoths could not be defeated, and that it would be sensible to accede to their demand. Arcadius viewed this proposal with displeasure, but was convinced to support it by Eudoxia, who wished to take Eutropius’ place as the main influence upon the emperor. Arcadius therefore dismissed Eutropius and sent him into exile (17 August 399), before recalling him to face trial and execution during the autumn of 399. The imperial edict issued by Arcadius detailing Eutropius's banishment survives: The Emperors Arcadius and Honorius, Augusti, to Aurelian, Praetorian Prefect. We have added to our treasury all the property of Eutropius, who was formerly the Praepositus sacri cubiculi, having stripped him of his splendour, and delivered the consulate from the foul stain of his tenure, and from the recollection of his name and the base filth thereof ; so that, all his acts having been repealed, all time may be dumb concerning him ; and that the blot of our age may not appear by the mention of him ; and that those who by their valour and wounds extend the Roman borders or guard the same by equity in the maintenance of law, may not groan over the fact that the divine reward of consulship has been befouled and defiled by a filthy monster. Let him learn that he has been deprived of the rank of the patriciate and all lower dignities that he stained with the perversity of his character. That all the statues, all the images —whether of bronze or marble, or painted in colours, or of any other material used in art—we command to be abolished in all cities, towns, private and public places, that they may not, as a brand of infamy on our age, pollute the gaze of beholders. Accordingly under the conduct of faithful guards let him be taken to the island of Cyprus, whither let your sublimity know that he has been banished ; so that therein guarded with most watchful diligence he may be unable to work confusion with his mad designs. Later reign With Eutropius' fall from power, Gainas sought to take advantage of Arcadius's current predicament. He joined the rebel Ostrogoths, and, in a face to face meeting with Arcadius, forced the emperor to make him magister militum praesentalis and Consul designate for 401. Arcadius also acquiesced when Gainas asked for the dismissal of further officials, such as the urban prefect Aurelianus, as well as a place for settlement for his troops in Thrace. However, Arcadius refused to agree to Gainas's demand for an Arian church in Constantinople for his Gothic mercenaries, following the advice of John Chrysostom, the Archbishop of Constantinople. By July 400, the actions of Gainas had irritated a significant portion of the population of Constantinople to the point that a general riot broke out in the capital. Although Gainas had stationed his troops outside of the capital walls, he was either unable or unwilling to bring them into the capital when many Goths in the city were hunted down and attacked. As many as 7,000 Goths were killed in the rioting; those who took refuge in a church were stoned and burned to death, after they received the emperor's permission, nor was it condemned by the Archbishop of Constantinople, John Chrysostom. Although initially staying his hand (probably through the intervention of the new Praetorian Prefect of the East Caesarius), Gainas eventually withdrew with his Gothic mercenaries into Thrace and rebelled against Arcadius. He attempted to take his forces across the Hellespont into Asia, but was intercepted and defeated by Fravitta, another Goth who held the position of magister militum praesentalis. Following his defeat, Gainas fled to the Danube with his remaining followers, but was ultimately defeated and killed by Uldin the Hun in Thrace. With the fall of Gainas, the next conflict emerged between Eudoxia and John Chrysostom. The Archbishop was a stern, ascetic individual, who was a vocal critic of all displays of extravagant wealth. But his ire tended to focus especially on wealthy women, and their use of clothing, jewellery and makeup as being vain and frivolous. Eudoxia assumed that Chrysostom's denunciations of extravagance in feminine dress were aimed at her. As the tensions between the two escalated, Chrysostom, who felt that Eudoxia had used her imperial connections to obtain the possessions of the wife of a condemned senator, preached a sermon in 401 in which Eudoxia was openly called Jezebel, the infamous wife of the Israelite king Ahab. Eudoxia retaliated by supporting Bishop Severian of Gabala in his conflict with Chrysostom. As Chrysostom was very popular in the capital, riots erupted in favour of the Archbishop, forcing Arcadius and Eudoxia to publicly back down and beg Chrysostom to revoke Severian's excommunication. Then in 403, Eudoxia saw another chance to strike against the Archbishop, when she threw her support behind Theophilus of Alexandria who presided over a synod in 403 (the Synod of the Oak) to charge Chrysostom with heresy. Although Arcadius originally supported Chrysostom, the Archbishop's decision not to participate caused Arcadius to change his mind and support Theophilus, resulting in Chrysostom's deposition and banishment. He was called back by Arcadius almost immediately, as the people started rioting over his departure, even threatening to burn the imperial palace. There was an earthquake the night of his arrest, which Eudoxia took for a sign of God's anger, prompting her to ask Arcadius for John's reinstatement. Peace was short-lived. In September 403 a silver statue of Eudoxia was erected in the Augustaion, near the Magna Ecclesia church. Chrysostom, who was conducting a mass at the time, denounced the noisy dedication ceremonies as pagan and spoke against the Empress in harsh terms: "Again Herodias raves; again she is troubled; she dances again; and again desires to receive John's head in a charger", an allusion to the events surrounding the death of John the Baptist. This time Arcadius was unwilling to overlook the insult to his wife; a new synod was called in early 404 where Chrysostom was condemned. Arcadius hesitated until Easter to enforce the sentence, but Chrysostom refused to go, even after Arcadius sent in a squad of soldiers to escort him into exile. Arcadius procrastinated, but by 20 June 404, the emperor finally managed to get the Archbishop to submit, and he was taken away to his place of banishment, this time to Abkhazia in the Caucasus. Eudoxia did not get to enjoy her victory for long, dying later that year. Death With the death of Eudoxia, Arcadius once again fell under the domination of a member of his court, this time the competent Anthemius, the Praetorian Prefect. He would rule in Arcadius's name for the final four years of his reign, seeking to repair the harm done by his predecessors. He attempted to heal the divisions of the past decade by trying to make peace with Stilicho in the West. Stilicho, however, had lost patience with the eastern court, and in 407 encouraged Alaric and the Visigoths to seize the Praetorian prefecture of Illyricum and hand it over to the western empire. Stilicho's plan failed, and soon after, on 1 May 408, Arcadius died. He was succeeded by his young son, Theodosius. Like Constantine the Great and several of his successors, he was buried in the Church of the Holy Apostles, in a porphyry sarcophagus that was described in the 10th century by Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus in the De Ceremoniis. Character and achievements In noting the character of Arcadius, the historian J. B. Bury described him and his abilities thus: He was of short stature, of dark complexion, thin and inactive, and the dullness of his wit was betrayed by his speech and by his sleepy, drooping eyes. His mental deficiency and the weakness of his character made it inevitable that he should be governed by the strong personalities of his court. Traditional interpretations of the reign of Arcadius have revolved around his weakness as an Emperor, and the formulation of policy by prominent individuals (and the court parties that formed and regrouped round them) towards curtailing the increasing influence of barbarians in the military, which in Constantinople at this period meant the Goths. Scholars such as the historian J. B. Bury spoke of a group in Arcadius's court with Germanic interests and, opposed to them, a Roman faction. So when interpreting the revolt of Gainas and the massacre of the Goths in Constantinople in 400, the episode has been traditionally interpreted by scholars such as Otto Seeck as a violent anti-barbarian reaction that functioned to stabilize the East and prevent the rise of all powerful Romanised barbarian military leaders such as Stilicho in the West - what has been termed the victory of anti-Germanism in the eastern empire. The main source of this interpretation has been the works Synesius of Cyrene, specifically Aegyptus sive de providentia and De regno. Both works have traditionally been interpreted to support the thesis that there were anti-barbarian and pro-barbarian groups, with the Praetorian Prefect Aurelianus being the leader of the anti-barbarian faction. Recent scholarly research has revised this interpretation, and has instead favoured the interaction of personal ambition and enmities among the principal participants as being the leading cause for the court intrigue throughout Arcadius's reign. The gradual decline of the use of Gothic mercenaries in the eastern empire's armies that began in the reign of Arcadius was driven by recruitment issues, as the regions beyond the Danube were made inaccessible by the Huns, forcing the empire to seek recruitment in Asia Minor. The current consensus can be summarised by the historian Thomas S. Burns: "Despite much civilian distrust and outright hatred of the army and the barbarians in it, there were no anti-barbarian or pro-barbarian parties at the court." With respect to Arcadius himself, as emperor was more concerned with appearing to be a pious Christian than he was with political or military matters. Not being a military leader, he began to promote a new type of imperial victory through images, not via the traditional military achievements, but focusing on his piety. Arcadius's reign saw the growing push towards the outright abolishment of paganism. On 13 July 399, Arcadius issued an edict ordering that all remaining non-Christian temples should be immediately demolished. In terms of buildings and monuments, a new forum was built in the name of Arcadius, on the seventh hill of Constantinople, the Xērolophos, in which a column was begun to commemorate his 'victory' over Gainas (although the column was only completed after Arcadius' death by Theodosius II). The Pentelic marble portrait head of Arcadius (now in the Istanbul Archaeology Museum) was discovered in Istanbul close to the Forum Tauri, in June 1949, in excavating foundations for new buildings of the university at Beyazit. The neck was designed to be inserted in a torso, but no statue, base or inscription was found. The diadem is a fillet with rows of pearls along its edges and a rectangular stone set about with pearls over the young Emperor's forehead. A more nuanced assessment of Arcadius's reign was provided by Warren Treadgold: By failing to reign, Arcadius had allowed a good deal of maladministration. But by continuing to reign—so harmlessly that nobody had taken the trouble to depose him—he had maintained legal continuity during a troubled time. Arcadius had four children with Eudoxia: three daughters, Pulcheria, Arcadia and Marina, and one son, Theodosius, the future Emperor Theodosius II. Notes Sources Primary sources Zosimus, "Historia Nova", Book 5 Secondary sources McEvoy, Meaghan, An imperial jellyfish? The emperor Arcadius and imperial leadership in the late fourth century A.D.', in Erika Manders, Daniëlle Slootjes (eds), Leadership, ideology and crowds in the Roman empire of the fourth century AD. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag (2020). Nicholson, O. ed. (2018). "Arcadius, Flavius". The Oxford Dictionary of Late Antiquity. Lee, A. D. (2013). From Rome to Byzantium AD 363 to 565, Edinburgh University Press. Liebeschuetz, J. H. W. G. (2011). Ambrose and John Chrysostom: Clerics Between Desert and Empire. Oxford University Press. Goldsworthy, Adrian (2010). The Fall of the West: The Death of the Roman Superpower. Phoenix. Long, Jacqueline (1996). Claudian's In Eutropium, Or, How, When, and why to Slander a Eunuch. University of North Carolina Press. Kazhdan, Alexander ed. (1991). Arkadios. The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, pp. 173–174. Bury, J. B. (1889). A History of the Later Roman Empire from Arcadius to Irene I. Gibbon, Edward (1932) [1789]. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. New York: The Modern Library. External links Laws of Arcadius, extracted from Justinian's Corpus Juris Civilis Watts, Edward, "the motifs of Imperial authority in the bust of Arcadius" This list of Roman laws of the fourth century shows laws passed by Arcadius relating to Christianity. 370s births 408 deaths 4th-century Roman consuls 5th-century Roman consuls 4th-century Roman emperors 5th-century Byzantine emperors 4th-century Christians 5th-century Christians Sons of Roman emperors Theodosian dynasty

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Armadillo

Armadillos () are New World placental mammals in the order Cingulata. They form part of the superorder Xenarthra, along with the anteaters and sloths. 21 extant species of armadillo have been described, some of which are distinguished by the number of bands on their armor. All species are native to the Americas, where they inhabit a variety of different environments. Living armadillos are characterized by a leathery armor shell and long, sharp claws for digging. They have short legs, but can move quite quickly. The average length of an armadillo is about , including its tail. The giant armadillo grows up to and weighs up to , while the pink fairy armadillo has a length of only . When threatened by a predator, Tolypeutes species frequently roll up into a ball; they are the only species of armadillo capable of this. Recent genetic research has shown that the megafaunal glyptodonts (up to tall with maximum body masses of around 2 tonnes), which became extinct around 12,000 years ago are true armadillos more closely related to all other living armadillos than to Dasypus (the long-nosed or naked-tailed armadillos). Armadillos are currently classified into two families, Dasypodidae, with Dasypus as the only living genus, and Chlamyphoridae, which contains all other living armadillos as well as the glyptodonts. Etymology The word armadillo means "little armored one" in Spanish; it is derived from "armadura" (armor), with the diminutive suffix "-illo" attached. While the phrase "little armored one" would translate to "armadito" normally, the suffix "-illo" can be used in place of "-ito" when the diminutive is used in an approximative tense. The Aztecs called them āyōtōchtli , Nahuatl for "turtle-rabbit": āyōtl (turtle) and tōchtli (rabbit). The Portuguese word for "armadillo" is tatu which is derived from the Tupi language ta "bark, armor" and tu "dense"; and used in Argentina, Bolivia, Brasil, Paraguay and Uruguay; similar names are also found in other, especially European, languages. Other various vernacular names given are: quirquincho (from ) in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia and Peru; cuzuco (from Nahuatl) in Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua; mulita in Argentina and Uruguay; peludo in Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Uruguay; piche in Argentina, Brasil, Chile, Colombia and Paraguay; cachicamo in Colombia and Venezuela gurre in Tolima, Caldas and Antioquia, Colombia; jerre-jerre in Caribbean Colombia; jueche in southeast Mexico; toche in the state of Veracruz, Mexico; carachupa in Perú. ClassificationFamily Dasypodidae Subfamily Dasypodinae Genus Dasypus Nine-banded armadillo or long-nosed armadillo, Dasypus novemcinctus Seven-banded armadillo, Dasypus septemcinctus Southern long-nosed armadillo, Dasypus hybridus Llanos long-nosed armadillo, Dasypus sabanicola Greater long-nosed armadillo, Dasypus kappleri Hairy long-nosed armadillo, Dasypus pilosus Yepes's mulita, Dasypus yepesi †Beautiful armadillo, Dasypus bellus †Dasypus neogaeus Genus †StegotheriumFamily Chlamyphoridae''' Subfamily Chlamyphorinae Genus Calyptophractus Greater fairy armadillo, Calyptophractus retusus Genus ChlamyphorusPink fairy armadillo, Chlamyphorus truncatus Subfamily Euphractinae Genus Chaetophractus Screaming hairy armadillo, Chaetophractus vellerosusBig hairy armadillo, Chaetophractus villosusAndean hairy armadillo, Chaetophractus nationiGenus †MacroeuphractusGenus †PaleuphractusGenus †ProeuphractusGenus †DoellotatusGenus †Peltephilus †Horned armadillo, Peltephilus ferox Genus EuphractusSix-banded armadillo, Euphractus sexcinctus Genus ZaedyusPichi, Zaedyus pichiy Subfamily Tolypeutinae Genus †Kuntinaru Genus Cabassous Northern naked-tailed armadillo, Cabassous centralisChacoan naked-tailed armadillo, Cabassous chacoensisSouthern naked-tailed armadillo, Cabassous unicinctusGreater naked-tailed armadillo, Cabassous tatouay Genus PriodontesGiant armadillo, Priodontes maximus Genus TolypeutesSouthern three-banded armadillo, Tolypeutes matacusBrazilian three-banded armadillo, Tolypeutes tricinctus† indicates extinct taxon Phylogeny Below is a recent simplified phylogeny of the xenarthran families, which includes armadillos. The dagger symbol, "†", denotes extinct groups. Evolution Recent genetic research suggests that an extinct group of giant armored mammals, the glyptodonts, should be included within the lineage of armadillos, having diverged some 35 million years ago, more recently than previously assumed. Distribution Like all of the Xenarthra lineages, armadillos originated in South America. Due to the continent's former isolation, they were confined there for most of the Cenozoic. The recent formation of the Isthmus of Panama allowed a few members of the family to migrate northward into southern North America by the early Pleistocene, as part of the Great American Interchange. (Some of their much larger cingulate relatives, the pampatheres and chlamyphorid glyptodonts, made the same journey.) Today, all extant armadillo species are still present in South America. They are particularly diverse in Paraguay (where 11 species exist) and surrounding areas. Many species are endangered. Some, including four species of Dasypus, are widely distributed over the Americas, whereas others, such as Yepes's mulita, are restricted to small ranges. Two species, the northern naked-tailed armadillo and nine-banded armadillo, are found in Central America; the latter has also reached the United States, primarily in the south-central states (notably Texas), but with a range that extends as far east as North Carolina and Florida, and as far north as southern Nebraska and southern Indiana. Their range has consistently expanded in North America over the last century due to a lack of natural predators. Armadillos are increasingly documented in southern Illinois and are tracking northwards due to climate change. Characteristics Size The smallest species of armadillo, the pink fairy armadillo, weighs around and is in total length. The largest species, the giant armadillo, can weigh up to , and can be long. Diet and predation The diets of different armadillo species vary, but consist mainly of insects, grubs, and other invertebrates. Some species, however, feed almost entirely on ants and termites. They are prolific diggers. Many species use their sharp claws to dig for food, such as grubs, and to dig dens. The nine-banded armadillo prefers to build burrows in moist soil near the creeks, streams, and arroyos around which it lives and feeds. Armadillos have very poor eyesight, and use their keen sense of smell to hunt for food. They use their claws not only for digging and finding food but also for digging burrows for their dwellings, each of which is a single corridor the width of the animal's body. They have five clawed toes on their hind feet, and three to five toes with heavy digging claws on their fore feet. Armadillos have numerous cheek teeth which are not divided into premolars and molars, but usually have no incisors or canines. The dentition of the nine-banded armadillo is P 7/7, M 1/1 = 32. Body temperature In common with other xenarthrans, armadillos, in general, have low body temperatures of and low basal metabolic rates (40–60% of that expected in placental mammals of their mass). This is particularly true of types that specialize in using termites as their primary food source (for example, Priodontes and Tolypeutes). Skin The armor is formed by plates of dermal bone covered in relatively small overlapping epidermal scales called "scutes" which are composed of keratin. The skin of an armadillo can glow under ultraviolet light. Most species have rigid shields over the shoulders and hips, with a number of bands separated by flexible skin covering the back and flanks. Additional armor covers the top of the head, the upper parts of the limbs, and the tail. The underside of the animal is never armored and is simply covered with soft skin and fur. This armor-like skin appears to be an important defense for many armadillos, although most escape predators by fleeing (often into thorny patches, from which their armor protects them) or digging to safety. Only the South American three-banded armadillos (Tolypeutes) rely heavily on their armor for protection. Defensive behavior When threatened by a predator, Tolypeutes species frequently roll up into a ball. Other armadillo species cannot roll up because they have too many plates. When surprised, the North American nine-banded armadillo tends to jump straight in the air, which can lead to a fatal collision with the undercarriage or fenders of passing vehicles. Movement Armadillos have short legs, but can move quite quickly. The nine-banded armadillo is noted for its movement through water, which is accomplished via two different methods: it can walk underwater for short distances, holding its breath for as long as six minutes; or, to cross larger bodies of water, it can increase its buoyancy by swallowing air to inflate its stomach and intestines. Reproduction Gestation lasts from 60 to 120 days, depending on species, although the nine-banded armadillo also exhibits delayed implantation, so the young are not typically born for eight months after mating. Most members of the genus Dasypus give birth to four monozygotic young (that is, identical quadruplets), but other species may have typical litter sizes that range from one to eight. The young are born with soft, leathery skin which hardens within a few weeks. They reach sexual maturity in three to twelve months, depending on the species. Armadillos are solitary animals that do not share their burrows with other adults. Armadillos and humans Science and education Armadillos are often used in the study of leprosy, since they, along with mangabey monkeys, rabbits, and mice (on their footpads), are among the few known species that can contract the disease systemically. They are particularly susceptible due to their unusually low body temperature, which is hospitable to the leprosy bacterium, Mycobacterium leprae. (The leprosy bacterium is difficult to culture and armadillos have a body temperature of , similar to human skin.) Humans can acquire a leprosy infection from armadillos by handling them or consuming armadillo meat. Armadillos are a presumed vector and natural reservoir for the disease in Texas, Louisiana and Florida. Prior to the arrival of Europeans in the late 15th century, leprosy was unknown in the New World. Given that armadillos are native to the New World, at some point they must have acquired the disease from old-world humans. The armadillo is also a natural reservoir for Chagas disease. The nine-banded armadillo also serves science through its unusual reproductive system, in which four genetically identical offspring are born, the result of one original egg. Because they are always genetically identical, the group of four young provides a good subject for scientific, behavioral, or medical tests that need consistent biological and genetic makeup in the test subjects. This is the only reliable manifestation of polyembryony in the class Mammalia, and exists only within the genus Dasypus and not in all armadillos, as is commonly believed. Other species that display this trait include parasitoid wasps, certain flatworms, and various aquatic invertebrates. Even though they have a leathery, tough shell, Armadillos, (mainly Dasypus) are common roadkill due to their habit of jumping 3–4 ft vertically when startled, which puts them into collision with the underside of vehicles. Wildlife enthusiasts are using the northward march of the armadillo as an opportunity to educate others about the animals, which can be a burrowing nuisance to property owners and managers. Culture Armadillo shells have traditionally been used to make the back of the charango, an Andean lute instrument. In certain parts of Central and South America, armadillo meat is eaten; it is a popular ingredient in Oaxaca, Mexico. During the Great Depression, Americans were known to eat armadillo, known begrudgingly as "Hoover hogs", a nod to the belief that President Herbert Hoover was responsible for the economic despair facing the nation at that time. A whimsical account of The Beginning of the Armadillos is one of the chapters of Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories 1902 children's book. The vocal and piano duo Flanders and Swann recorded a humorous song called "The Armadillo". Shel Silverstein wrote a two-line poem called "Instructions" on how to bathe an armadillo in his collection A Light in the Attic''. The reference was "use one bar of soap, a whole lot of hope, and 27 pads of Brillo." See also Armadillo shoe Echidnas, a type of monotreme with a defensive keratin body covering Hedgehogs, another mammal group with defensive keratin body coverings Pangolins, another mammal group with defensive keratin body coverings Porcupines, another mammal group with defensive keratin body coverings References Further reading External links "Armadillo online" website hosted by zoologist Dr. Joshua Nixon Photographs of armadillo rolling into a ball Armadillos Cingulates Extant Thanetian first appearances Mammal common names Rolling animals

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism%20in%20the%20Arab%20world

Antisemitism in the Arab world

Antisemitism (prejudice against and hatred of Jews) has increased greatly in the Arab world since the beginning of the 20th century, for several reasons: the dissolution and breakdown of the Ottoman Empire and traditional Islamic society; European influence, brought about by Western imperialism and Arab Christians; Nazi propaganda and relations between Nazi Germany and the Arab world; resentment over Jewish nationalism; the rise of Arab nationalism; and the widespread proliferation of anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist conspiracy theories. Traditionally, Jews in the Muslim world were considered to be People of the Book and were subjected to dhimmi status. They were afforded relative security against persecution, provided they did not contest the varying inferior social and legal status imposed on them under Islamic rule. While there were antisemitic incidents before the 20th century, during this time antisemitism in the Arab world increased greatly. During the 1930s and the 1940s several Jewish communities in the Arab world suffered from pogroms. The status of Jews in Arab countries deteriorated further at the onset of the Arab–Israeli conflict. After the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, the Palestinian exodus, the creation of the State of Israel and Israeli victories during the wars of 1956 and 1967 were a severe humiliation to Israel's opponents—primarily Egypt, Syria, and Iraq. However, by the mid-1970s the vast majority of Jews had left Arab and Muslim countries, moving primarily to Israel, France, and the United States. The reasons for the exodus are varied and disputed. By the 1980s, according to historian Bernard Lewis, the volume of antisemitic literature published in the Arab world, and the authority of its sponsors, seemed to suggest that classical antisemitism had become an essential part of Arab intellectual life, considerably more than in late 19th- and early 20th-century France and to a degree that has been compared to Nazi Germany. The rise of political Islam during the 1980s and afterwards provided a new mutation of Islamic antisemitism, giving the hatred of Jews a religious component. In their 2008 report on contemporary Arab-Muslim antisemitism, the Israeli Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center dates the beginning of this phenomenon to the spread of classic European Christian antisemitism into the Arab world starting in the late 19th century. In 2014, the Anti-Defamation League published a global survey of worldwide antisemitic attitudes, reporting that in the Middle East, 74% of adults agreed with a majority of the survey's eleven antisemitic propositions, including that "Jews have too much power in international financial markets" and that "Jews are responsible for most of the world's wars." Medieval times Jews, along with Christians, Sabians, and Zoroastrians living under early and medieval Muslim rule were known as "People of the Book" to Muslims and subjected to the status of dhimmi ("protected" minority) in the lands conquered by Muslim Arabs, a status generally applied to Non-Muslim minorities that was later also extended to other Non-Muslims like Sikhs, Hindus, Jains, and Buddhists. Jews were generally seen as a religious group (not a separate race), thus being a part of the "Arab family". Dhimmi were subjected to a number of restrictions, the application and severity of which varied with time and place. Restrictions included residency in segregated quarters, obligation to wear distinctive clothing such as the Yellow badge, public subservience to Muslims, prohibitions against proselytizing and against marrying Muslim women, and limited access to the legal system (the testimony of a Jew did not count if contradicted by that of a Muslim). Dhimmi had to pay a special poll tax (the jizya), which exempted them from military service, and also from payment of the zakat alms tax required of Muslims. In return, dhimmi were granted limited rights, including a degree of tolerance, community autonomy in personal matters, and protection from being killed outright. Jewish communities, like Christian ones, were typically constituted as semi-autonomous entities managed by their own laws and leadership, who carried the responsibility for the community towards the Muslim rulers. The situation of Jews was comparatively better than their European counterparts, though they still suffered persecution. Between the years of death of Idris I of Morocco in 793 and beginning of Almohad rule in 1130, Jews mostly led a peaceful existence in North Africa. The Almohads started forcing Jews and Christians to convert to Islam or be killed after conquering the region. There were also numerous massacres at other times in Morocco, Libya, and Algeria where they were eventually forced to live in ghettos. The situation where Jews both enjoyed cultural and economic prosperity at times, but were widely persecuted at other times, was summarised by G. E. Von Grunebaum: It would not be difficult to put together the names of a very sizable number of Jewish subjects or citizens of the Islamic area who have attained to high rank, to power, to great financial influence, to significant and recognized intellectual attainment; and the same could be done for Christians. But it would again not be difficult to compile a lengthy list of persecutions, arbitrary confiscations, attempted forced conversions, or pogroms. Views in modernity Some scholars hold that Arab antisemitism in the modern world arose in the nineteenth century, against the backdrop of conflicting Jewish and Arab nationalism, and was imported into the Arab world primarily by nationalistically minded Christian Arabs (and only subsequently was it "Islamized"), Mark Cohen states. According to Bernard Lewis: 19th century The Damascus affair was an accusation of ritual murder and a blood libel against Jews in Damascus in 1840. On February 5, 1840, Franciscan Capuchin friar Father Thomas and his Greek servant were reported missing, never to be seen again. The Turkish governor and the French consul Ratti-Menton believed accusations of ritual murder and blood libel, as the alleged murder occurred before the Jewish Passover. An investigation was staged, and Solomon Negrin, a Jewish barber, confessed under torture and accused other Jews. Two other Jews died under torture, and one (Moses Abulafia) converted to Islam to escape torture. More arrests and atrocities followed, culminating in 63 Jewish children being held hostage and mob attacks on Jewish communities throughout the Middle East. International outrage led to Ibrahim Pasha in Egypt ordering an investigation. Negotiations in Alexandria eventually secured the unconditional release and recognition of innocence of the nine prisoners still remaining alive (out of thirteen). Later in Constantinople, Moses Montefiore (leader of the British Jewish community) persuaded Sultan Abdülmecid I to issue a firman (edict) intended to halt the spread of blood libel accusations in the Ottoman Empire: ... and for the love we bear to our subjects, we cannot permit the Jewish nation, whose innocence for the crime alleged against them is evident, to be worried and tormented as a consequence of accusations which have not the least foundation in truth.... Nevertheless, the blood libel spread through the Middle East and North Africa: Aleppo (1810, 1850, 1875), Damascus (1840, 1848, 1890), Beirut (1862, 1874), Dayr al-Qamar (1847), Jerusalem (1847), Cairo (1844, 1890, 1901–02), Mansura (1877), Alexandria (1870, 1882, 1901–02), Port Said (1903, 1908), and Damanhur (1871, 1873, 1877, 1892). The Dreyfus affair of the late 19th century had consequences in the Arab world. Passionate outbursts of antisemitism in France were echoed in areas of French influence, especially Maronite Lebanon. The Muslim Arab press, however, was sympathetic to the falsely accused Captain Dreyfus, and criticized the persecution of Jews in France. 20th century Pre-state antisemitism While Arab antisemitism has increased in the wake of the Arab–Israeli conflict, there were pogroms against Jews prior to the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948, including Nazi-inspired pogroms in Algeria in the 1930s, and attacks on the Jews of Iraq and Libya in the 1940s. In 1941, 180 Jews were murdered and 700 were injured in the anti-Jewish riots known as "the Farhud". Four hundred Jews were injured in violent demonstrations in Egypt in 1945 and Jewish property was vandalized and looted. In Libya, 130 Jews were killed and 266 injured. In December 1947, 13 Jews were killed in Damascus, including 8 children, and 26 were injured. In Aleppo, rioting resulted in dozens of Jewish casualties, damage to 150 Jewish homes, and the torching of 5 schools and 10 synagogues. In Yemen, 97 Jews were murdered and 120 injured. Speculated causes Antisemitism in the Arab world increased in the 20th century, as resentment against Jewish immigration and Zionist activities in Palestine Mandate grew. Around this time, the fabricated antisemitic text The Protocols of the Elders of Zion started to become available in Palestine. A translation of the text in Arabic was done by an Arab Christian in Cairo in 1927 or 1928, this time as a published book. In March 1921, Musa Khazem El Husseini, Mayor of Jerusalem, told Winston Churchill "The Jews have been amongst the most active advocates of destruction in many lands. ... It is well known that the disintegration of Russia was wholly or in great part brought about by the Jews, and a large proportion of the defeat of Germany and Austria must also be put at their door." Matthias Küntzel has suggested that the decisive transfer of Jewish conspiracy theory took place between 1937 and 1945 under the impact of Nazi propaganda targeted at the Arab world. According to Kuntzel, the Nazi Arabic radio service had a staff of 80 and broadcast every day in Arabic, stressing the similarities between Islam and Nazism and supported by the activities of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini (who broadcast pro-Nazi propaganda from Berlin). Alongside al-Husseini's collaboration with the Nazis, cooperative political and military relationships between the Arab world and the Axis powers (Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy) were founded on shared antisemitic scorn and hostilities toward common enemies: the United Kingdom, France, and Zionism. The Nazi regime also provided funding to the Egyptian Moslem Brotherhood, which began calling for boycotts of Jewish businesses in 1936. Bernard Lewis also describes Nazi influence in the Arab world, including its impact on Michel Aflaq, the principal founder of Ba'athist thought (which later dominated Syria and Iraq). After the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws, Hitler received telegrams of congratulation from all over the Arab and Muslim world, especially from Morocco and Palestine, where the Nazi propaganda had been most active.... Before long political parties of the Nazi and Fascist type began to appear, complete with paramilitary youth organizations, colored shirts, strict discipline and more or less charismatic leaders. George Gruen attributes the increased animosity towards Jews in the Arab world to the defeat and breakdown of the Ottoman Empire and traditional Islamic society; domination by Western colonial powers under which Jews gained a disproportionately large role in the commercial, professional, and administrative life of the region; the rise of Arab nationalism, whose proponents sought the wealth and positions of local Jews through government channels; resentment over Jewish nationalism and the Zionist movement; and the readiness of unpopular Arab regimes to scapegoat local Jews for political purposes. After the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, the Palestinian exodus, the creation of the state of Israel, and the independence of Arab countries from European control, conditions for Jews in the Arab world deteriorated. Over the next few decades, almost all would flee the Arab world, some willingly, and some under threat (see Jewish exodus from Arab and Muslim countries). In 1945 there were between 758,000 and 866,000 Jews (see table below) living in communities throughout the Arab world. Today, there are fewer than 8,000. In some Arab states, such as Libya (which was once around 3% Jewish), the Jewish community no longer exists; in other Arab countries, only a few hundred Jews remain. Harvard University Professor Ruth R. Wisse claims that "anti-Semitism / Zionism has been the cornerstone of pan-Arab politics since the Second World War" and that it is the "strongest actual and potential source of unity" in the Arab world. This is because Jews and Israel function as substitutes for Western values that challenge the hegemony of religious and political power in the Middle East. Antisemitism is also malleable enough that it can unite right-wing and left-wing groups within the Arab world. Robert Bernstein, founder of Human Rights Watch, says that antisemitism is "deeply ingrained and institutionalized" in "Arab nations in modern times". Contemporary attitudes Israeli Arabs In 2003, Israeli-Arab Raed Salah, the leader of the northern branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel published the following poem in the Islamic Movement's periodical: You Jews are criminal bombers of mosques, Slaughterers of pregnant women and babies. Robbers and germs in all times, The Creator sentenced you to be loser monkeys, Victory belongs to Muslims, from the Nile to the Euphrates. During a speech in 2007, Salah accused Jews of using children's blood to bake bread. "We have never allowed ourselves to knead [the dough for] the bread that breaks the fast in the holy month of Ramadan with children's blood," he said. "Whoever wants a more thorough explanation, let him ask what used to happen to some children in Europe, whose blood was mixed in with the dough of the [Jewish] holy bread." Kamal Khatib, deputy leader of the northern branch of the Islamic movement, referred in one of his speeches to the Jews as "fleas". Of all groups surveyed, a 2010 Pew Research global poll found that Israeli Arabs have the lowest rate of anti-Jewish attitudes in the Middle East. Egypt Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohammed Mahdi Akef has denounced what he called "the myth of the Holocaust" in defending Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's denial of it. The Egyptian government-run newspaper, Al Akhbar, on April 29, 2002, published an editorial denying the Holocaust as a fraud. The next paragraph decries the failure of the Holocaust to eliminate all of the Jews: With regard to the fraud of the Holocaust. ... Many French studies have proven that this is no more than a fabrication, a lie, and a fraud!! That is, it is a 'scenario' the plot of which was carefully tailored, using several faked photos completely unconnected to the truth. Yes, it is a film, no more and no less. Hitler himself, whom they accuse of Nazism, is in my eyes no more than a modest 'pupil' in the world of murder and bloodshed. He is completely innocent of the charge of frying them in the hell of his false Holocaust!! The entire matter, as many French and British scientists and researchers have proven, is nothing more than a huge Israeli plot aimed at extorting the German government in particular and the European countries in general. But I, personally and in light of this imaginary tale, complain to Hitler, even saying to him from the bottom of my heart, 'If only you had done it, brother, if only it had really happened, so that the world could sigh in relief [without] their evil and sin.' In an article in October 2000 columnist Adel Hammoda alleged in the state-owned Egyptian newspaper al-Ahram that Jews made Matza from the blood of (non-Jewish) children. Mohammed Salmawy, editor of Al-Ahram Hebdo, "defended the use of old European myths like the blood libel" in his newspapers. In August 2010, Saudi columnist Iman Al-Quwaifli sharply criticized the "phenomenon of sympathy for Adolf Hitler and for Nazism in the Arab world", specifically citing the words of Hussam Fawzi Jabar, an Islamic cleric who justified Hitler's actions against the Jews in an Egyptian talk show one month earlier. In an October 2012 sermon broadcast on Egyptian Channel 1 (which was attended by Egyptian President Muhammad Morsi) Futouh Abd Al-Nabi Mansour, the Head of Religious Endowment of the Matrouh Governorate, prayed (as translated by MEMRI): Jordan Jordan does not allow entry to Jews with visible signs of Judaism or even with personal religious items in their possession. The Jordanian ambassador to Israel replied to a complaint by a religious Jew denied entry that security concerns required that travelers entering the Hashemite Kingdom not do so with prayer shawls (Tallit) and phylacteries (Tefillin). Jordanian authorities state that the policy is in order to ensure the Jewish tourists' safety. In July 2009, six Breslov Hasidim were deported after attempting entry into Jordan in order to visit the tomb of Aaron / Sheikh Harun on Mount Hor, near Petra, because of an alert from the Ministry of Tourism. The group had taken a ferry from Sinai, Egypt because they understood that Jordanian authorities were making it hard for visible Jews to enter from Israel. The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs is aware of the issue. Saudi Arabia Hostility toward Jews is common in Saudi Arabian media, religious sermons, school curriculum, and official government policy. Indoctrination against Jews is a part of school curriculum in Saudi Arabia. Children are advised not to befriend Jews, are given false information about them (such as the claim that Jews worship the Devil), and are encouraged to engage in jihad against Jews. Conspiracy theories about Jews are widely disseminated in Saudi Arabian state-controlled media. According to the U.S. State Department, religious freedom "does not exist" in Saudi Arabia, and therefore, Jews may not freely practice their religion. Syria On March 2, 1974, the bodies of four Syrian Jewish women were discovered by border police in a cave in the Zabdani Mountains northwest of Damascus. Fara Zeibak 24, her sisters Lulu Zeibak 23, Mazal Zeibak 22 and their cousin Eva Saad 18, had contracted with a band of smugglers to flee Syria to Lebanon and eventually to Israel. The girls' bodies were found raped, murdered and mutilated. The police also found the remains of two Jewish boys, Natan Shaya 18 and Kassem Abadi 20, victims of an earlier massacre. Syrian authorities deposited the bodies of all six in sacks before the homes of their parents in the Jewish ghetto in Damascus. In 1984 Syrian Defense Minister Mustafa Tlass published a book called The Matzah of Zion, which claimed that Jews had killed Christian children in Damascus to make Matzas (see Damascus affair). His book inspired the Egyptian TV series Horseman Without a Horse (see below) and a spinoff, The Diaspora, which led to Hezbollah's al-Manar being banned in Europe for broadcasting it. Former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke visited Syria in November 2005 and made a speech that was broadcast live on Syrian television. Tunisia For a personal account of the discrimination and physical attacks experienced by Jews in Tunisia the Jewish-Arab anti-colonialist writer Albert Memmi wrote: At each crisis, with every incident of the slightest importance, the mob would go wild, setting fire to Jewish shops. This even happened during the Yom Kippur War. Tunisia's President, Habib Bourguiba, has in all probability never been hostile to the Jews, but there was always that notorious "delay", which meant that the police arrived on the scene only after the shops had been pillaged and burnt. Is it any wonder that the exodus to France and Israel continued and even increased? On November 30, 2012, prominent Tunisian imam Sheikh Ahmad Al-Suhayli of Radès, told his followers during a live broadcast on Hannibal TV that "God wants to destroy this [Tunisian] sprinkling of Jews and is sterilizing the wombs of Jewish women." This was the fourth time incitement against Jews has been reported in the public sphere since the overthrow of Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in 2011, thus prompting Jewish community leaders to demand security protection from the Tunisian government. Al-Suhayli subsequently posted a video on the Internet in which he claimed that his statements had been misinterpreted. On January 18, 2021, Tunisian president Kais Saied was caught on video telling a crowd that "We know very well who the people are who are controlling the country today. It is the Jews who are doing the stealing, and we need to put an end to it." Saied's office responded that the president's words had been misheard and that he meant to say something else instead of Jews. Two days later, Saied publicly apologized for his statements, holding a phone call with Djerba's chief rabbi, Haim Bitan in which he expressed regret for his statements. The history of the Jews in Tunisia goes back to Roman times. Before 1948, the Jewish population of Tunisia reached a peak of 110,000. Today it has a Jewish community of less than 2,000 people. The El Ghriba Synagogue in Djerba has twice been the target of terrorist atrocities: in 2002 an al-Qaeda suicide bomber killed 20 and injured dozens more, while in 2023 a lone gunman killed two worshippers and two police and injured several others. Palestinian territories The Hamas, an offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, has a foundational statement of principles, or "covenant" that claims that the French revolution, the Russian revolution, colonialism and both world wars were created by the Zionists. It also claims the Freemasons and Rotary clubs are Zionist fronts and refers to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Claims that Jews and Freemasons were behind the French Revolution originated in Germany in the mid-19th century. Mahmoud Abbas, leader of the PLO, published a Ph.D. thesis (at Moscow University) in 1982, called The Secret Connection between the Nazis and the Leaders of the Zionist Movement. His doctoral thesis later became a book, The Other Side: the Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism, which, following his appointment as Palestinian Prime Minister in 2003, was heavily criticized as an example of Holocaust denial. In his book, Abbas wrote: It seems that the interest of the Zionist movement, however, is to inflate this figure [of Holocaust deaths] so that their gains will be greater. This led them to emphasize this figure [six million] in order to gain the solidarity of international public opinion with Zionism. Many scholars have debated the figure of six million and reached stunning conclusions—fixing the number of Jewish victims at only a few hundred thousand.Gross, Tom. Abu Mazen and the Holocaust Lebanon Hezbollah's Al-Manar TV channel has often been accused of airing antisemitic broadcasts, blaming the Jews for a Zionist conspiracy against the Arab world, and often airing excerpts from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Al-Manar recently aired a drama series, called The Diaspora, which is based on historical antisemitic allegations. BBC reporters who watched the series said that: Correspondents who have viewed The Diaspora note that it quotes extensively from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a notorious 19th-century publication used by the Nazis among others to fuel race hatred. In another incident, an Al-Manar commentator recently referred to "Zionist attempts to transmit AIDS to Arab countries". Al-Manar officials deny broadcasting antisemitic incitement and state that their position is anti-Israeli, not antisemitic. However, Hezbollah has directed strong rhetoric both against Israel and Jews, and it has cooperated in publishing and distributing outright antisemitic literature. The government of Lebanon has not criticized continued broadcast of antisemitic material on television. Due to protests by the CRIF umbrella group of French Jews regarding allegations of antisemitic content, French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin called for a ban on Al-Manar broadcasting in France on December 2, 2004, just two weeks after al-Manar was authorised to continue broadcasting in Europe by France's media watchdog agency. On December 13, 2004, France's highest administrative court banned Hizbullah's Al-Manar TV station on the grounds that it consistently incites racial hatred and antisemitism. Yemen The 1940s and the establishment of Israel saw rapid emigration of Jews out of Yemen, in the wake of anti-Jewish riots and massacres. By the late 1990s, only several hundred remained, mainly in a northwestern mountainous region named Sa'ada and town of Raida. Houthi members put up notes on the Jews' doors, accusing them of corrupting Muslim morals. Eventually, the Houthi leaders sent threatening messages to the Jewish community: "We warn you to leave the area immediately.... We give you a period of 10 days, or you will regret it." On 28 March 2021, 13 Jews were forced by the Houthis to leave Yemen, leaving four elderly Jews the only Jews still in Yemen. Horseman Without a Horse In 2001–2002, Arab Radio and Television produced a 30-part television miniseries entitled Horseman Without a Horse, starring prominent Egyptian actor Mohamed Sobhi, which contains dramatizations of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The United States and Israel criticized Egypt for airing the program, which includes racist falsehoods that have a history of being used "as a pretext for persecuting Jews". Opinion polling In 2008 a Pew Research Center survey found that negative views concerning Jews were most common in the three predominantly Arab nations polled, with 97% of Lebanese having unfavorable opinion of Jews, 95% in Egypt and 96% in Jordan. See also Contemporary imprints of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion Covenant of Umar I Dhimmi Islam and antisemitism Jewish exodus from Arab and Muslim lands Jizya Mellah Pact of Umar II Qutbism Racism in the Arab world Notes References Bibliography Bostom, Andrew G. The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred texts to Solemn History. Prometheus Books. 2008. Gerber, Jane S. (1986). "Anti-Semitism and the Muslim World". In History and Hate: The Dimensions of Anti-Semitism, ed. David Berger. Jewish Publications Society. Levy, Richard S., ed. Antisemitism: A historical encyclopedia of prejudice and persecution (Vol. 1. ABC-CLIO, 2005) pp 30–33. Lewis, Bernard (1984). The Jews of Islam. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lewis, Bernard (1999). Semites and anti-Semites. Laqueur, Walter. The Changing Face of Antisemitism: From Ancient Times To The Present Day. Oxford University Press. 2006. Poliakov, Leon (1997). "Anti-Semitism". Encyclopaedia Judaica (CD-ROM Edition Version 1.0). Ed. Cecil Roth. Keter Publishing House. Segev, Tom. One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate. Trans. Haim Watzman. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2001. Wistrich, Robert S. Hitler's Apocalypse: Jews and the Nazi Legacy. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. 1985. Wistrich, Robert S. A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad. Random House. 2010. External links Arab Anti-Semitism in 1998/99 – summary of Arab antisemitism, by the University of Tel Aviv S.RES.366 Urging the Government of Egypt and other Arab governments not to allow their government-controlled television stations to broadcast any program that lends legitimacy to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and for other purposes. (Passed/agreed to in Senate on November 20, 2002). MEMRI Organization that monitors Middle-Eastern media for antisemitism. See MEMRI. Arab world Racism in Africa Racism in the Middle East Arab world

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology

Arcology

Arcology, a portmanteau of "architecture" and "ecology", is a field of creating architectural design principles for very densely populated and ecologically low-impact human habitats. The term was coined in 1969 by architect Paolo Soleri, who believed that a completed arcology would provide space for a variety of residential, commercial, and agricultural facilities while minimizing individual human environmental impact. These structures have been largely hypothetical, as no large-scale arcology has yet been built. The concept has been popularized by various science fiction writers. Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle provided a detailed description of an arcology in their 1981 novel Oath of Fealty. William Gibson mainstreamed the term in his seminal 1984 cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, where each corporation has its own self-contained city known as an arcology. More recently, authors such as Peter Hamilton in Neutronium Alchemist and Paolo Bacigalupi in The Water Knife explicitly used arcologies as part of their scenarios. They are often portrayed as self-contained or economically self-sufficient. Development An arcology is distinguished from a merely large building in that it is designed to lessen the impact of human habitation on any given ecosystem. It could be self-sustainable, employing all or most of its own available resources for a comfortable life: power, climate control, food production, air and water conservation and purification, sewage treatment, etc. An arcology is designed to make it possible to supply those items for a large population. An arcology would supply and maintain its own municipal or urban infrastructures in order to operate and connect with other urban environments apart from its own. Arcologies were proposed in order to reduce human impact on natural resources. Arcology designs might apply conventional building and civil engineering techniques in very large, but practical projects in order to achieve pedestrian economies of scale that have proven, post-automobile, to be difficult to achieve in other ways. Frank Lloyd Wright proposed an early version called Broadacre City although, in contrast to an arcology, his idea is comparatively two-dimensional and depends on a road network. Wright's plan described transportation, agriculture, and commerce systems that would support an economy. Critics said that Wright's solution failed to account for population growth, and assumed a more rigid democracy than the US actually has. Buckminster Fuller proposed the Old Man River's City project, a domed city with a capacity of 125,000, as a solution to the housing problems in East St. Louis, Illinois. Paolo Soleri proposed later solutions, and coined the term "arcology". Soleri describes ways of compacting city structures in three dimensions to combat two-dimensional urban sprawl, to economize on transportation and other energy uses. Like Wright, Soleri proposed changes in transportation, agriculture, and commerce. Soleri explored reductions in resource consumption and duplication, land reclamation; he also proposed to eliminate most private transportation. He advocated for greater "frugality" and favored greater use of shared social resources, including public transit (and public libraries). Similar real-world projects Arcosanti is an experimental "arcology prototype", a demonstration project under construction in central Arizona since 1970. Designed by Paolo Soleri, its primary purpose is to demonstrate Soleri's personal designs, his application of principles of arcology to create a pedestrian-friendly urban form. Many cities in the world have proposed projects adhering to the design principles of the arcology concept, like Tokyo, and Dongtan near Shanghai. The Dongtan project may have collapsed, and it failed to open for the Shanghai World Expo in 2010. McMurdo Station of the United States Antarctic Program and other scientific research stations on Antarctica resemble the popular conception of an arcology as a technologically advanced, relatively self-sufficient human community. The Antarctic research base provides living and entertainment amenities for roughly 3,000 staff who visit each year. Its remoteness and the measures needed to protect its population from the harsh environment give it an insular character. The station is not self-sufficientthe U.S. military delivers 30,000 cubic metres (8,000,000 US gal) of fuel and of supplies and equipment yearly through its Operation Deep Freeze resupply effortbut it is isolated from conventional support networks. Under international treaty, it must avoid damage to the surrounding ecosystem. Begich Towers operates like a small-scale arcology encompassing nearly all of the population of Whittier, Alaska. The building contains residential housing as well as a police station, grocery, and municipal offices. Whittier once boasted a second structure known as the Buckner Building. The Buckner Building still stands but was deemed unfit for habitation after the 1969 earthquake. The Line was planned as a long and wide linear smart city in Saudi Arabia in Neom, Tabuk Province, designed to have no cars, streets or carbon emissions. The Line is planned to be the first development in Neom, a $500 billion project. The city's plans anticipated a population of 9 million. Excavation work had started along the entire length of the project by October 2022. However, the project was scaled down in 2024 to long, housing 300,000 people. In popular culture Most proposals to build real arcologies have failed due to financial, structural or conceptual shortcomings. Arcologies are therefore found primarily in fictional works. In Robert Silverberg's The World Inside, most of the global population of 75 billion live inside giant skyscrapers, called "urbmons", each of which contains hundreds of thousands of people. The urbmons are arranged in "constellations". Each urbmon is divided into "neighborhoods" of 40 or so floors. All the needs of the inhabitants are provided inside the building – food is grown outside and brought into the building – so the idea of going outside is heretical and can be a sign of madness. The book examines human life when the population density is extremely high. Another significant example is the 1981 novel Oath of Fealty by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, in which a segment of the population of Los Angeles has moved into an arcology. The plot examines the social changes that result, both inside and outside the arcology. Thus the arcology is not just a plot device but a subject of critique. In the city-building video game SimCity 2000, self-contained arcologies can be built, reducing the infrastructure needs of the city. The isometric, cyberpunk themed action roleplay game The Ascent takes place in a futuristic dystopian version of an arcology on the alien world Veles - and prominently uses the structure and it's levels to flesh out progression in the game, starting you in the bottom levels of the sewers with the ultimate goal of reaching the top of the structure to leave the city. See also References Notes Further reading Soleri, Paolo. Arcology: The City in the Image of Man. 1969: Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press. External links Arcology: The City in the Image of Man by Paolo Soleri (full text online) Arcology.com – useful links The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson (full text online) Victory City A discussion of arcology concepts What is an Arcology? Usage of "arcology" vs. "hyperstructure" Arcology.com ("An arcology in southern China" on front page) Arcology ("An arcology is a self-contained environment...") SculptorsWiki: Arcology ("The only arcology yet on Earth...") Review of Shadowrun: Renraku Arcology ("What's an arcology? A self-contained, largely self-sufficient living, working, recreational structure...") Megastructures Exploratory engineering Environmental design Human habitats Planned communities Urban studies and planning terminology Cyberpunk themes Architecture related to utopias

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April%2020

April 20

Events Pre-1600 1303 – The Sapienza University of Rome is instituted by a bull of Pope Boniface VIII. 1601–1900 1653 – Oliver Cromwell dissolves England's Rump Parliament. 1657 – English Admiral Robert Blake destroys a Spanish silver fleet, under heavy fire from the shore, at the Battle of Santa Cruz de Tenerife. 1657 – Freedom of religion is granted to the Jews of New Amsterdam (later New York City). 1752 – Start of Konbaung–Hanthawaddy War, a new phase in the Burmese Civil War (1740–57). 1770 – The Georgian king, Erekle II, abandoned by his Russian ally Count Totleben, wins a victory over Ottoman forces at Aspindza. 1775 – American Revolutionary War: The Siege of Boston begins, following the battles at Lexington and Concord. 1789 – George Washington arrives at Grays Ferry, Philadelphia, while en route to Manhattan for his inauguration. 1792 – France declares war against the "King of Hungary and Bohemia", the beginning of the French Revolutionary Wars. 1800 – The Septinsular Republic is established. 1809 – Two Austrian army corps in Bavaria are defeated by a First French Empire army led by Napoleon at the Battle of Abensberg on the second day of a four-day campaign that ended in a French victory. 1828 – René Caillié becomes the second non-Muslim to enter Timbuktu, following Major Gordon Laing. He would also be the first to return alive. 1836 – U.S. Congress passes an act creating the Wisconsin Territory. 1861 – American Civil War: Robert E. Lee resigns his commission in the United States Army in order to command the forces of the state of Virginia. 1861 – Thaddeus S. C. Lowe, attempting to display the value of balloons, makes record journey, flying 900 miles from Cincinnati to South Carolina. 1862 – Louis Pasteur and Claude Bernard complete the experiment disproving the theory of spontaneous generation. 1865 – Astronomer Angelo Secchi demonstrates the Secchi disk, which measures water clarity, aboard Pope Pius IX's yacht, the L'Immaculata Concezion. 1876 – The April Uprising begins. Its suppression shocks European opinion, and Bulgarian independence becomes a condition for ending the Russo-Turkish War. 1884 – Pope Leo XIII publishes the encyclical Humanum genus, condemning Freemasonry. 1898 – U.S. President William McKinley signs a joint resolution to Congress for declaration of war against Spain, beginning the Spanish–American War. 1901–present 1902 – Pierre and Marie Curie refine radium chloride. 1908 – Opening day of competition in the New South Wales Rugby League. 1914 – Nineteen men, women, and children participating in a strike are killed in the Ludlow Massacre during the Colorado Coalfield War. 1918 – Manfred von Richthofen, a.k.a. The Red Baron, shoots down his 79th and 80th victims, his final victories before his death the following day. 1922 – The Soviet government creates South Ossetian Autonomous Oblast within Georgian SSR. 1945 – World War II: U.S. troops capture Leipzig, Germany, only to later cede the city to the Soviet Union. 1945 – World War II: Führerbunker: On his 56th birthday Adolf Hitler makes his last trip to the surface to award Iron Crosses to boy soldiers of the Hitler Youth. 1945 – Twenty Jewish children used in medical experiments at Neuengamme are killed in the basement of the Bullenhuser Damm school. 1946 – The League of Nations officially dissolves, giving most of its power to the United Nations. 1961 – Cold War: Failure of the Bay of Pigs Invasion of US-backed Cuban exiles against Cuba. 1968 – English politician Enoch Powell makes his controversial "Rivers of Blood" speech. 1968 – South African Airways Flight 228 crashes near the Hosea Kutako International Airport in South West Africa (now Namibia), killing 123 people. 1972 – Apollo program: Apollo 16 Lunar Module, commanded by John Young and piloted by Charles Duke, lands on the Moon. 1998 – Air France Flight 422 crashes after taking off from El Dorado International Airport in Bogotá, Colombia, killing all 53 people on board. 1999 – Columbine High School massacre: Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold kill 13 people and injure 24 others before committing suicide at Columbine High School in Columbine, Colorado. 2004 - The Nicoll Highway in Singapore collapsed, killing four workers. 2007 – Johnson Space Center shooting: William Phillips barricades himself with a handgun in NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas before killing a male hostage and himself. 2008 – Danica Patrick wins the Indy Japan 300 becoming the first female driver in history to win an Indy car race. 2010 – The Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explodes in the Gulf of Mexico, killing eleven workers and beginning an oil spill that would last six months. 2012 – One hundred twenty-seven people are killed when a plane crashes in a residential area near the Benazir Bhutto International Airport near Islamabad, Pakistan. 2013 – A 6.6-magnitude earthquake strikes Lushan County, Ya'an, in China's Sichuan province, killing at least 193 people and injuring thousands. 2015 – Ten people are killed in a bomb attack on a convoy carrying food supplies to a United Nations compound in Garowe in the Somali region of Puntland. 2020 – For the first time in history, oil prices drop below zero, an effect of the 2020 Russia-Saudi Arabia oil price war. 2021 – State of Minnesota v. Derek Michael Chauvin: Derek Chauvin is found guilty of all charges in the murder of George Floyd by the Fourth Judicial District Court of Minnesota. 2023 – SpaceX's Starship rocket, the largest and most powerful rocket ever built, launches for the first time. It explodes 4 minutes into flight. Births Pre-1600 1494 – Johannes Agricola, German theologian and reformer (d. 1566) 1544 – Renata of Lorraine, Duchess consort of Bavaria (d. 1602) 1586 – Rose of Lima, Peruvian mystic and saint (d. 1617) 1601–1900 1633 – Emperor Go-Kōmyō of Japan (d. 1654) 1646 – Charles Plumier, French botanist and author (d. 1704) 1650 – William Bedloe, English spy (d. 1680) 1718 – David Brainerd, American missionary (d. 1747) 1723 – Cornelius Harnett, American merchant, farmer, and politician (d. 1781) 1727 – Florimond Claude, Comte de Mercy-Argenteau, Belgian-Austrian minister and diplomat (d. 1794) 1745 – Philippe Pinel, French physician and psychiatrist (d. 1826) 1748 – Georg Michael Telemann, German composer and theologian (d. 1831) 1808 – Napoleon III, French politician, 1st President of France, Emperor of French Second Empire (d. 1873) 1816 – Bogoslav Šulek, Croatian philologist, historian, and lexicographer (d. 1895) 1818 – Heinrich Göbel, German-American mechanic and engineer (d. 1893) 1826 – Dinah Craik, English author and poet (d. 1887) 1839 – Carol I of Romania, King of Romania (d. 1914) 1840 – Odilon Redon, French painter and illustrator (d. 1916) 1850 – Daniel Chester French, American sculptor, designed the Lincoln statue (d. 1931) 1851 – Alexander Dianin, Russian chemist (d. 1918) 1851 – Siegmund Lubin, Polish-American businessman, founded the Lubin Manufacturing Company (d. 1923) 1860 – Justinien de Clary, French target shooter (d. 1933) 1871 – Sydney Chapman, English economist and civil servant (d. 1951) 1873 – James Harcourt, English character actor (d. 1951) 1875 – Vladimir Vidrić, Croatian poet and lawyer (d. 1909) 1879 – Paul Poiret, French fashion designer (d. 1944) 1882 – Holland Smith, American general (d. 1967) 1884 – Princess Beatrice of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (d. 1966) 1884 – Oliver Kirk, American boxer (d. 1960) 1884 – Daniel Varoujan, Armenian poet and educator (d. 1915) 1889 – Albert Jean Amateau, Turkish rabbi, lawyer, and activist (d. 1996) 1889 – Prince Erik, Duke of Västmanland (d. 1918) 1889 – Marie-Antoinette de Geuser, French mystic (d. 1918) 1889 – Adolf Hitler, Austrian-born German politician, Führer of Nazi Germany (d. 1945) 1889 – Tonny Kessler, Dutch footballer (d. 1960) 1890 – Maurice Duplessis, Canadian lawyer and politician, 16th Premier of Quebec (d. 1959) 1890 – Adolf Schärf, Austrian soldier and politician, 6th President of Austria (d. 1965) 1891 – Dave Bancroft, American baseball player and manager (d. 1972) 1893 – Harold Lloyd, American actor, comedian, and producer (d. 1971) 1893 – Joan Miró, Spanish painter and sculptor (d. 1983) 1895 – Henry de Montherlant, French essayist, novelist, and dramatist (d. 1972) 1896 – Wop May, Canadian captain and pilot (d. 1952) 1899 – Alan Arnett McLeod, Canadian lieutenant, Victoria Cross recipient (d. 1918) 1901–present 1904 – Bruce Cabot, American actor (d. 1972) 1907 – Miran Bakhsh, Pakistani cricketer (d. 1991) 1907 – Augoustinos Kantiotes, Greek bishop (d. 2010) 1908 – Lionel Hampton, American vibraphone player, pianist, bandleader, and actor (d. 2002) 1910 – Fatin Rüştü Zorlu, Turkish diplomat and politician (d. 1961) 1913 – Mimis Fotopoulos, Greek actor and poet (d. 1986) 1913 – Willi Hennig, German biologist and entomologist (d. 1976) 1914 – Betty Lou Gerson, American actress (d. 1999) 1915 – Joseph Wolpe, South African psychotherapist and physician (d. 1997) 1916 – Nasiba Zeynalova, Azerbaijani actress (d. 2004) 1918 – Kai Siegbahn, Swedish physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2007) 1919 – Richard Hillary, Australian lieutenant and pilot (d. 1943) 1920 – Frances Ames, South African neurologist, psychiatrist, and human rights activist (d. 2002) 1920 – Clement Isong, Nigerian banker and politician, Governor of Cross River State (d. 2000) 1920 – John Paul Stevens, American lawyer and jurist, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (d. 2019) 1921 – Katarína Kolníková, Slovak actress (d. 2006) 1923 – Mother Angelica, American nun and broadcaster, founded Eternal Word Television Network (d. 2016) 1923 – Irene Lieblich, Polish-American painter and illustrator (d. 2008) 1923 – Tito Puente, American drummer and producer (d. 2000) 1924 – Nina Foch, Dutch-American actress (d. 2008) 1924 – Leslie Phillips, English actor and producer (d. 2022) 1924 – Guy Rocher, Canadian sociologist and academic 1925 – Ernie Stautner, German-American football player and coach (d. 2006) 1925 – Elena Verdugo, American actress (d. 2017) 1927 – Bud Cullen, Canadian judge and politician, 1st Canadian Minister of Employment and Immigration (d. 2005) 1927 – Phil Hill, American race car driver (d. 2008) 1927 – K. Alex Müller, Swiss physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2023) 1928 – Robert Byrne, American chess player and author (d. 2013) 1928 – Johnny Gavin, Irish international footballer (d. 2007) 1930 – Dwight Gustafson, American composer and conductor (d. 2014) 1930 – Antony Jay, English director and screenwriter (d. 2016) 1931 – Michael Allenby, 3rd Viscount Allenby, English lieutenant and politician (d. 2014) 1931 – John Eccles, 2nd Viscount Eccles, English businessman and politician 1932 – Myriam Bru, French actress 1936 – Lisa Davis, English-American actress 1936 – Pauli Ellefsen, Faroese technician, surveyor, and politician, 6th Prime Minister of the Faroe Islands (d. 2012) 1936 – Pat Roberts, American captain, journalist, and politician 1937 – Jiří Dienstbier, Czech journalist and politician, Czech Minister of Foreign Affairs (d. 2011) 1937 – Harvey Quaytman, American painter and educator (d. 2002) 1937 – George Takei, American actor 1938 – Betty Cuthbert, Australian sprinter (d. 2017) 1938 – Manfred Kinder, German runner 1938 – Eszter Tamási, Hungarian actress (d. 1991) 1939 – Peter S. Beagle, American author and screenwriter 1939 – Gro Harlem Brundtland, Norwegian physician and politician, 22nd Prime Minister of Norway 1939 – Johnny Tillotson, American singer-songwriter 1940 – James Gammon, American actor (d. 2010) 1941 – Ryan O'Neal, American actor (d. 2023) 1943 – Alan Beith, English academic and politician 1943 – John Eliot Gardiner, English conductor and director 1944 – Toivo Aare, Estonian journalist and author (d. 1999) 1945 – Michael Brandon, American actor and director 1945 – Olga Karlatos, Greek actress and Bermudian lawyer 1945 – Thein Sein, Burmese general and politician, 8th President of Burma 1945 – Naftali Temu, Kenyan runner (d. 2003) 1945 – Steve Spurrier, American football player and coach 1946 – Sandro Chia, Italian painter and sculptor 1947 – Rita Dionne-Marsolais, Canadian economist and politician 1947 – Viktor Suvorov, Russian intelligence officer, historian, and author 1948 – Matthias Kuhle, German geographer and academic (d. 2015) 1949 – Veronica Cartwright, English-American actress 1949 – Toller Cranston, Canadian-Mexican figure skater and painter (d. 2015) 1949 – Massimo D'Alema, Italian journalist and politician, 76th Prime Minister of Italy 1949 – Jessica Lange, American actress 1950 – Alexander Lebed, Russian general and politician (d. 2002) 1950 – N. Chandrababu Naidu, Indian politician, 13th Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh 1951 – Luther Vandross, American singer-songwriter and producer (d. 2005) 1952 – Louka Katseli, Greek economist and politician 1953 – Sebastian Faulks, English journalist and author 1955 – Donald Pettit, American engineer and astronaut 1955 – Svante Pääbo, Swedish geneticist and Nobel Laureate 1956 – Beatrice Ask, Swedish politician, Swedish Minister for Justice 1956 – Peter Chelsom, English film director, writer, and actor 1956 – Kakha Bendukidze, Georgian economist and politician (d. 2014) 1958 – Viacheslav Fetisov, Russian ice hockey player and coach 1960 – Debbie Flintoff-King, Australian hurdler and coach 1961 – Don Mattingly, American baseball player, coach, and manager 1961 – Konstantin Lavronenko, Russian actor 1963 – Rachel Whiteread, English sculptor 1964 – John Carney, American football player 1964 – Crispin Glover, American actor and filmmaker 1964 – Andy Serkis, English actor and director 1964 – Rosalynn Sumners, American figure skater 1965 – Kostis Chatzidakis, Greek politician, Ministry of Economy, Infrastructure, Shipping and Tourism 1965 – Léa Fazer, Swiss film director, screenwriter and actress 1966 – David Chalmers, Australian philosopher and academic 1966 – David Filo, American businessman, co-founded Yahoo! 1967 – Mike Portnoy, American drummer and songwriter 1968 – Julia Morris, Australian entertainer 1969 – Felix Baumgartner, Austrian daredevil 1969 – Will Hodgman, Australian politician, 45th Premier of Tasmania 1970 – Shemar Moore, American actor 1971 – Allan Houston, American basketball player 1972 – Carmen Electra, American model and actress 1972 – Stephen Marley, Jamaican-American musician 1973 – Julie Powell, American food writer and memoirist (d. 2022) 1975 – Killer Mike, American rapper 1978 – Carl Greenidge, English cricketer 1980 – Emma Husar, Australian politician 1983 – Miranda Kerr, Australian model 1987 – Jorge Pinto, Portuguese politician 1988 – Brandon Belt, American baseball player 1989 – Vannesa Rosales, Venezuelan activist and teacher 1990 – Jason Behrendorff, Australian cricketer 1991 – Luke Kuechly, American football player 1997 – Alexander Zverev, German tennis player Deaths Pre-1600 689 – Cædwalla, king of Wessex (b. 659) 888 – Xi Zong, Chinese emperor (b. 862) 1099 – Peter Bartholomew (b. 1061) 1164 – Antipope Victor IV 1176 – Richard de Clare, 2nd Earl of Pembroke, English-Irish politician, Lord Chief Justice of Ireland (b. 1130) 1248 – Güyük Khan, Mongol ruler, 3rd Great Khan of the Mongol Empire (b. 1206) 1284 – Hōjō Tokimune, regent of Japan (b. 1251) 1314 – Pope Clement V (b. 1264) 1322 – Simon Rinalducci, Italian Augustinian friar 1502 – Mary of Looz-Heinsberg, Dutch noble (b. 1424) 1521 – Zhengde, Chinese emperor (b. 1491) 1534 – Elizabeth Barton, English nun and martyr (b. 1506) 1558 – Johannes Bugenhagen, German priest and theologian (b. 1485) 1601–1900 1643 – Christoph Demantius, German composer and poet (b. 1567) 1703 – Lancelot Addison, English clergyman and educator (b. 1632) 1769 – Chief Pontiac, American tribal leader (b. 1720) 1831 – John Abernethy, English surgeon and anatomist (b. 1764) 1873 – William Tite, English architect, designed the Royal Exchange (b. 1798) 1874 – Alexander H. Bailey, American lawyer, judge, and politician (b. 1817) 1881 – William Burges, English architect and designer (b. 1827) 1886 – Charles-François-Frédéric, marquis de Montholon-Sémonville, French general and diplomat, French ambassador to the United States (b. 1814) 1887 – Muhammad Sharif Pasha, Greek-Egyptian politician, 2nd Prime Minister of Egypt (b. 1826) 1899 – Joseph Wolf, German ornithologist and illustrator (b. 1820) 1901–present 1902 – Joaquim de Sousa Andrade, Brazilian poet and educator (b. 1833) 1912 – Bram Stoker, Anglo-Irish novelist and critic, created Count Dracula (b. 1847) 1918 – Jussi Merinen, Finnish politician (b. 1873) 1918 – Karl Ferdinand Braun, German-American physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1850) 1927 – Enrique Simonet, Spanish painter and educator (b. 1866) 1929 – Prince Henry of Prussia (b. 1862) 1931 – Sir Cosmo Duff-Gordon, 5th Baronet, Scottish-English fencer and businessman (b. 1862) 1932 – Giuseppe Peano, Italian mathematician and philosopher (b. 1858) 1935 – John Cameron, Scottish footballer and manager (b. 1872) 1935 – Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon, English fashion designer (b. 1863) 1942 – Jüri Jaakson, Estonian businessman and politician, 6th State Elder of Estonia (b. 1870) 1944 – Elmer Gedeon, American baseball player and pilot (b. 1917) 1945 – Erwin Bumke, Polish-German jurist and politician (b. 1874) 1946 – Mae Busch, Australian actress (b. 1891) 1947 – Christian X of Denmark (b. 1870) 1951 – Ivanoe Bonomi, Italian politician, 25th Prime Minister of Italy (b. 1873) 1967 – Léo-Paul Desrosiers, Canadian journalist and author (b. 1896) 1968 – Rudolph Dirks, German-American illustrator (b. 1877) 1969 – Vjekoslav Luburić, Croatian Ustaše official and concentration camp administrator (b. 1914) 1980 – M. Canagaratnam, Sri Lankan politician (b. 1924) 1982 – Archibald MacLeish, American poet, playwright, and lawyer (b. 1892) 1986 – Sibte Hassan, Pakistani journalist, scholar, and activist (b. 1916) 1991 – Steve Marriott, English singer-songwriter and producer (b. 1947) 1991 – Don Siegel, American director and producer (b. 1912) 1992 – Marjorie Gestring, American springboard diver (b. 1922) 1992 – Benny Hill, English comedian, actor, and screenwriter (b. 1924) 1993 – Cantinflas, Mexican actor, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1911) 1995 – Milovan Đilas, Yugoslav communist, politician, theorist and author (b. 1911) 1996 – Trần Văn Trà, Vietnamese general and politician (b. 1918) 1999 – Rick Rude, American professional wrestler (b. 1958) 1999 – Rachel Scott, American victim of Columbine High School massacre (b. 1981) 1999 – Cassie Bernall, American victim of Columbine High School massacre (b. 1981) 2001 – Giuseppe Sinopoli, Italian conductor and composer (b. 1946) 2002 – Alan Dale, American singer (b. 1925) 2003 – Bernard Katz, German-English biophysicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1911) 2004 – Lizzy Mercier Descloux, French musician, singer-songwriter, composer, actress, writer and painter (b. 1956) 2005 – Fumio Niwa, Japanese journalist and author (b. 1904) 2007 – Andrew Hill, American pianist, composer, and bandleader (b. 1931) 2007 – Michael Fu Tieshan, Chinese bishop (b. 1931) 2008 – Monica Lovinescu, Romanian journalist and author (b. 1923) 2010 – Dorothy Height, American educator and activist (b. 1912) 2011 – Tim Hetherington, English photographer and journalist (b. 1970) 2012 – Bert Weedon, English guitarist and songwriter (b. 1920) 2014 – Neville Wran, Australian politician, 35th Premier of New South Wales (b. 1926) 2016 – Victoria Wood, British comedian, actress and writer (b. 1953) 2018 – Avicii, Swedish DJ and musician (b. 1989) 2021 – Idriss Déby, Chadian politician and military officer (b. 1952) 2021 – Monte Hellman, American film director (b. 1929) 2021 – Les McKeown, Scottish pop singer (b. 1955) 2022 – Gavin Millar, Scottish film director (b. 1938) 2024 – Antonio Cantafora, Italian film and television actor (b. 1944) 2024 – Andrew Davis, English conductor (b. 1944) 2024 – Roman Gabriel, Filipino-American NBA American footballer 2024 – Lourdes Portillo, Mexican film director, producer, and writer (b. 1943) Holidays and observances Christian feast day: Agnes of Montepulciano Beuno Johannes Bugenhagen (Lutheran) Theotimos April 20 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics) 420 (cannabis culture) UN Chinese Language Day (United Nations) References External links BBC: On This Day Historical Events on April 20 Days of the year April

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdulaziz%20al-Omari

Abdulaziz al-Omari

Abdulaziz al-Omari (, , also transliterated as Alomari or al-Umari; 28 May 1979 – 11 September 2001) was a Saudi terrorist who was one of five hijackers of American Airlines Flight 11 as part of the September 11 attacks in 2001. Prior to the attacks, al-Omari was an imam at his mosque in Saudi Arabia's al-Qassim province. He arrived in the United States in June 2001 on a tourist visa, obtained through the Visa Express program. On September 11, 2001, al-Omari boarded American Airlines Flight 11 and assisted in the hijacking of the plane, which was crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, as part of the coordinated attacks. Early life and career Abdulaziz al-Omari was from the poor Saudi Arabian province of Asir, along with his fellow hijackers in the September 11 attacks, brothers Wail and Waleed al-Shehri. It is alleged he graduated with honors from high school. He attained a degree from Imam Muhammad ibn Saud Islamic University, got married, and had a daughter briefly before the attacks. He taught as an imam at his mosque in al-Qassim province, which was the "heartland" of Wahhabism, a strict form of Islam. At the mosque, which experts refer to as a "terrorist factory", he was possibly taught by the radical cleric Sulayman al Alwan. According to Walid bin Attash, al-Omari was one of a group of future hijackers who provided security at Kandahar airport after their basic training at an al-Qaeda camp. During the 2000 Al Qaeda Summit in Kuala Lumpur, American authorities state that immigration records show that a person named Abdulaziz al-Omari was visiting the country, although they say they are not sure that this was the same person. September 11 attacks Planning Early 2001 al-Omari eventually became involved in the planning for the September 11 attacks on the United States, an idea formulated by Osama bin Laden. The attacks involved hijacking commercial airplanes and crashing them into buildings; al-Omari would hijack American Airlines Flight 11, which would crash into the World Trade Center in New York City. At the time of the hijacking, al-Omari was 22. In the autumn of 2001, after the attacks, al Jazeera television broadcast a tape they claim was made by him. The speaker made a farewell suicide video. In it he read, "I am writing this with my full conscience and I am writing this in expectation of the end, which is near... God praise everybody who trained and helped me, namely the leader Sheikh Osama bin Laden." al-Omari and hijacker Salem al-Hazmi entered the United States through a Dubai flight on June 29, 2001, landing in New York City. He had used the controversial Visa Express program to gain entry. He likely stayed with several other hijackers in Paterson, New Jersey (where he rented a mailbox), before moving to his own place in Vero Beach, Florida. On his rental agreement form for that house, al-Omari gave two license-plates authorized to park in his space, one of which was registered to Mohamed Atta, the attacks' mastermind. al-Omari obtained a fake United States ID card from All Services Plus in Passaic County, New Jersey, which was in the business of selling fake documents; another was given to Khalid al-Mihdhar. The employee who gave them the IDs claimed he had no idea they were "anything more [than ordinary] customers". September 10 On September 10, 2001, Atta picked up al-Omari from the Park Inn Hotel in Boston, Massachusetts, and the two drove to South Portland, Maine, in a rented car. There is no evidence as to why they went to Portland, but it could have been to cover up their tracks. Multiple people have claimed to see Atta and other hijackers in Portland that summer, but the FBI has found no evidence of this. On the 10th, Atta and al-Omari purchased a room (233) at the town's Comfort Inn. They did not ask for a wake-up call. Their luggage included "a videocassette [about] a Boeing 757 flight simulator, pepper spray, Atta’s will, [and Atta's] handwritten instructions to his 18 fellow hijackers"; American Airlines Flight 11 was a Boeing 757. They stayed in their hotel room for two hours, until 8 p.m., when al-Omari made a four-minute phone call from a nearby Pizza Hut's pay phone to a phone belonging to Marwan al-Shehhi, who would hijack United Airlines Flight 175. Five minutes later, at a restaurant named Pizzeria Uno, the two withdrew $80 from an ATM. They then drove back to the Pizza Hut, where a second pay phone call was placed at 8:50. They decided to go to Walmart, but got lost and went to a gas station to ask for directions. In a video recorded at the gas station, Atta has a piece of paper in his hand and shows it to al-Omari, and then they leave. At the Walmart, the two purchased a six-volt battery converter for an unknown reason. Staff of the Walmart said that weeks earlier, Atta had bought a box cutter there, but this is uncorroborated. The two then returned to the Comfort Inn, where they stayed for hours. Day of the attacks At 5:33 a.m. on September 11, al-Omari and Atta checked out of the hotel. al-Omari made another cash withdrawal at the Pizzeria Uno ATM, and the two went to Portland International Jetport to fly to Boston (where eight other hijackers were waiting) and connect to Flight 11, which was supposed to fly to Los Angeles. At around 5:40, the two spoke with a ticket agent, and no suspicions were raised about them. Both men boarded their flight, which landed in Boston at 6:45. Atta and al-Omari then boarded Flight 11 with fellow hijackers Satam al-Suqami, Wail al-Shehri, and Waleed al-Shehri. The other hijackers at the airport went on United Airlines Flight 175. al-Omari's passport, which would identify him as a hijacker, was in his luggage which was left at the airport. Atta and al-Omari had seats next to each other in first class, row 8, on Flight 11. The flight left the Logan runway at 7:59. The hijackers took over the plane starting at 8:14, when multiple passengers were maced and stabbed. Atta then commanded the plane's controls, and at 8:37, the plane began a rapid descent. At 8:46, it was crashed into the World Trade Center's North Tower, and everyone onboard was killed. Floors 93 to 99 were impacted, and many inside died. Mistaken identity allegations Controversy over the identity of al-Omari erupted shortly after the attacks. At first, the FBI had named Abdul Rahman al-Omari, a pilot for Saudi Arabian Airlines, as the pilot of Flight 11. It was quickly shown that this person was still alive, and the FBI issued an apology. It was also quickly determined that Mohamed Atta was the pilot among the hijackers. The FBI then named Abdulaziz al-Omari as a hijacker. A man with the same name as those given by the FBI turned up alive in Saudi Arabia, saying that he had studied at the University of Denver and his passport was stolen there in 1995. The name, origin, birth date, and occupation were released by the FBI, but the picture was not of him. "I couldn't believe it when the FBI put me on their list", he said. "They gave my name and my date of birth, but I am not a suicide bomber. I am here. I am alive. I have no idea how to fly a plane. I had nothing to do with this." See also PENTTBOM Hijackers in the 11 September attacks References External links The Final 9/11 Commission Report portal.telegraph.co.uk (Article which reports that the Saudi Arabian Airlines pilot named Omari was not involved with the terrorist attacks) 1979 births 2001 deaths American Airlines Flight 11 Participants in the September 11 attacks People from Al-Bahah Province Saudi Arabian al-Qaeda members Saudi Arabian mass murderers

2201

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aage%20Bohr

Aage Bohr

Aage Niels Bohr (; 19 June 1922 – 8 September 2009) was a Danish nuclear physicist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1975 with Ben Roy Mottelson and James Rainwater "for the discovery of the connection between collective motion and particle motion in atomic nuclei and the development of the theory of the structure of the atomic nucleus based on this connection". His father was Niels Bohr. Starting from Rainwater's concept of an irregular-shaped liquid drop model of the nucleus, Bohr and Mottelson developed a detailed theory that was in close agreement with experiments. Since his father, Niels Bohr, had won the prize in 1922, he and his father are one of the six pairs of fathers and sons who have both won the Nobel Prize and one of the four pairs who have both won the Nobel Prize in Physics. Early life and education Bohr was born in Copenhagen on 19 June 1922, the fourth of six sons of the physicist Niels Bohr and his wife Margrethe Bohr (née Nørlund). His oldest brother, Christian, died in a boating accident in 1934, and his youngest, Harald, was severely disabled and placed away from the home in Copenhagen at the age of four. He would later die from childhood meningitis. Of the others, Hans became a physician; Erik, a chemical engineer; and Ernest, a lawyer and Olympic athlete who played field hockey for Denmark at the 1948 Summer Olympics in London. The family lived at the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Copenhagen, now known as the Niels Bohr Institute, where he grew up surrounded by physicists who were working with his father, such as Hans Kramers, Oskar Klein, Yoshio Nishina, Wolfgang Pauli and Werner Heisenberg. In 1932, the family moved to the Carlsberg Æresbolig, a mansion donated by Carl Jacobsen, the heir to Carlsberg breweries, to be used as an honorary residence by the Dane who had made the most prominent contribution to science, literature, or the arts. Bohr went to high school at Sortedam Gymnasium in Copenhagen. In 1940, shortly after the German occupation of Denmark in April, he entered the University of Copenhagen, where he studied physics. He assisted his father, helping draft correspondence and articles related to epistemology and physics. In September 1943, word reached his family that the Nazis considered them to be Jewish, because Bohr's grandmother, Ellen Adler Bohr, had been Jewish, and that they therefore were in danger of being arrested. The Danish resistance helped the family escape by sea to Sweden. Bohr arrived there in October 1943, and then flew to Britain on a de Havilland Mosquito operated by British Overseas Airways Corporation. The Mosquitoes were unarmed high-speed bomber aircraft that had been converted to carry small, valuable cargoes or important passengers. By flying at high speed and high altitude, they could cross German-occupied Norway, and yet avoid German fighters. Bohr, equipped with parachute, flying suit and oxygen mask, spent the three-hour flight lying on a mattress in the aircraft's bomb bay. On arrival in London, Bohr rejoined his father, who had flown to Britain the week before. He officially became a junior researcher at the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, but actually served as personal assistant and secretary to his father. The two worked on Tube Alloys, the British atomic bomb project. On 30 December 1943, they made the first of a number of visits to the United States, where his father was a consultant to the Manhattan Project. Due to his father's fame, they were given false names; Bohr became James Baker, and his father, Nicholas Baker. In 1945, the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, J. Robert Oppenheimer, asked them to review the design of the modulated neutron initiator. They reported that it would work. That they had reached this conclusion put Enrico Fermi's concerns about the viability of the design to rest. The initiators performed flawlessly in the bombs used in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Career In August 1945, with the war ended, Bohr returned to Denmark, where he resumed his university education, graduating with a master's degree in 1946, with a thesis concerned with some aspects of atomic stopping power problems. In early 1948, Bohr became a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. While paying a visit to Columbia University, he met Isidor Isaac Rabi, who sparked in him an interest in recent discoveries related to the hyperfine structure of deuterium. This led to Bohr becoming a visiting fellow at Columbia from January 1949 to August 1950. While in the United States, Bohr married Marietta Soffer on 11 March 1950. They had three children: Vilhelm, Tomas and Margrethe. By the late 1940s it was known that the properties of atomic nuclei could not be explained by then-current models such as the liquid drop model developed by Niels Bohr amongst others. The shell model, developed in 1949 by Maria Goeppert Mayer and others, allowed some additional features to be explained, in particular the so-called magic numbers. However, there were also properties that could not be explained, including the non-spherical distribution of charge in certain nuclei. In a 1950 paper, James Rainwater of Columbia University suggested a variant of the drop model of the nucleus that could explain a non-spherical charge distribution. Rainwater's model postulated a nucleus like a balloon with balls inside that distort the surface as they move about. He discussed the idea with Bohr, who was visiting Columbia at the time, and had independently conceived the same idea, and had, about a month after Rainwater's submission, submitted for publication a paper that discussed the same problem, but along more general lines. Bohr imagined a rotating, irregular-shaped nucleus with a form of surface tension. Bohr developed the idea further, in 1951 publishing a paper that comprehensively treated the relationship between oscillations of the surface of the nucleus and the movement of the individual nucleons. Upon his return to Copenhagen in 1950, Bohr began working with Ben Roy Mottelson to compare the theoretical work with experimental data. In three papers, that were published in 1952 and 1953, Bohr and Mottelson demonstrated close agreement between theory and experiment; for example, showing that the energy levels of certain nuclei could be described by a rotation spectrum. They were thereby able to reconcile the shell model with Rainwater's concept. This work stimulated many new theoretical and experimental studies. Bohr, Mottelson and Rainwater were jointly awarded the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery of the connection between collective motion and particle motion in atomic nuclei and the development of the theory of the structure of the atomic nucleus based on this connection". Because his father had been awarded the prize in 1922, Bohr became one of only four pairs of fathers and sons to win the Nobel Prize in Physics. Only after doing his Nobel Prize-winning research did Bohr receive his doctorate from the University of Copenhagen, in 1954, writing his thesis on "Rotational States of Atomic Nuclei". Bohr became a professor at the University of Copenhagen in 1956, and, following his father's death in 1962, succeeded him as director of the Niels Bohr Institute, a position he held until 1970. He remained active there until he retired in 1992. He was also a member of the board of the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics from its inception in 1957, and was its director from 1975 to 1981. In addition to the Nobel Prize, he won the Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics in 1960, the Atoms for Peace Award in 1969, H. C. Ørsted Medal in 1970, Rutherford Medal and Prize in 1972, John Price Wetherill Medal in 1974, and the Ole Rømer medal in 1976. Bohr and Mottelson continued to work together, publishing a two-volume monograph, Nuclear Structure. The first volume, Single-Particle Motion, appeared in 1969; the second, Nuclear Deformations, in 1975. In 1972 Bohr was awarded an honorary degree, doctor philos. honoris causa, at the Norwegian Institute of Technology, later part of Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He was a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters from 1980. Bohr was also an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the United States National Academy of Sciences. In 1981, Bohr became a founding member of the World Cultural Council. Bohr's wife Marietta died on 2 October 1978. In 1981, he married Bente Scharff Meyer (1926–2011). His son, Tomas Bohr, is a professor of physics at the Technical University of Denmark, working in the area of fluid dynamics. Aage Bohr died in Copenhagen on 9 September 2009. He was survived by his second wife and children. Bohr's Nobel Prize medal was sold at auction in November 2011. It was subsequently sold at auction in April 2019 for $90,000. Notes References External links including the Nobel Lecture, 11 December 1975 Rotational Motion in Nuclei Oral History interview transcript with Aage Bohr 23 & 30 January 1963, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library and Archives 1922 births 2009 deaths Atoms for Peace Award recipients Danish Nobel laureates Danish nuclear physicists Danish people of Jewish descent 20th-century Danish physicists Founding members of the World Cultural Council Members of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences Members of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Members of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters Foreign associates of the National Academy of Sciences Institute for Advanced Study visiting scholars Columbia University faculty Aage Nobel laureates in Physics Scientists from Copenhagen University of Copenhagen alumni Manhattan Project people Aage Danish expatriates in the United States Burials at Mariebjerg Cemetery Members of the American Philosophical Society

2202

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic%20geometry

Analytic geometry

In mathematics, analytic geometry, also known as coordinate geometry or Cartesian geometry, is the study of geometry using a coordinate system. This contrasts with synthetic geometry. Analytic geometry is used in physics and engineering, and also in aviation, rocketry, space science, and spaceflight. It is the foundation of most modern fields of geometry, including algebraic, differential, discrete and computational geometry. Usually the Cartesian coordinate system is applied to manipulate equations for planes, straight lines, and circles, often in two and sometimes three dimensions. Geometrically, one studies the Euclidean plane (two dimensions) and Euclidean space. As taught in school books, analytic geometry can be explained more simply: it is concerned with defining and representing geometric shapes in a numerical way and extracting numerical information from shapes' numerical definitions and representations. That the algebra of the real numbers can be employed to yield results about the linear continuum of geometry relies on the Cantor–Dedekind axiom. History Ancient Greece The Greek mathematician Menaechmus solved problems and proved theorems by using a method that had a strong resemblance to the use of coordinates and it has sometimes been maintained that he had introduced analytic geometry. Apollonius of Perga, in On Determinate Section, dealt with problems in a manner that may be called an analytic geometry of one dimension; with the question of finding points on a line that were in a ratio to the others. Apollonius in the Conics further developed a method that is so similar to analytic geometry that his work is sometimes thought to have anticipated the work of Descartes by some 1800 years. His application of reference lines, a diameter and a tangent is essentially no different from our modern use of a coordinate frame, where the distances measured along the diameter from the point of tangency are the abscissas, and the segments parallel to the tangent and intercepted between the axis and the curve are the ordinates. He further developed relations between the abscissas and the corresponding ordinates that are equivalent to rhetorical equations (expressed in words) of curves. However, although Apollonius came close to developing analytic geometry, he did not manage to do so since he did not take into account negative magnitudes and in every case the coordinate system was superimposed upon a given curve a posteriori instead of a priori. That is, equations were determined by curves, but curves were not determined by equations. Coordinates, variables, and equations were subsidiary notions applied to a specific geometric situation. Persia The 11th-century Persian mathematician Omar Khayyam saw a strong relationship between geometry and algebra and was moving in the right direction when he helped close the gap between numerical and geometric algebra with his geometric solution of the general cubic equations, but the decisive step came later with Descartes. Omar Khayyam is credited with identifying the foundations of algebraic geometry, and his book Treatise on Demonstrations of Problems of Algebra (1070), which laid down the principles of analytic geometry, is part of the body of Persian mathematics that was eventually transmitted to Europe. Because of his thoroughgoing geometrical approach to algebraic equations, Khayyam can be considered a precursor to Descartes in the invention of analytic geometry. Western Europe Analytic geometry was independently invented by René Descartes and Pierre de Fermat, although Descartes is sometimes given sole credit. Cartesian geometry, the alternative term used for analytic geometry, is named after Descartes. Descartes made significant progress with the methods in an essay titled La Géométrie (Geometry), one of the three accompanying essays (appendices) published in 1637 together with his Discourse on the Method for Rightly Directing One's Reason and Searching for Truth in the Sciences, commonly referred to as Discourse on Method. La Geometrie, written in his native French tongue, and its philosophical principles, provided a foundation for calculus in Europe. Initially the work was not well received, due, in part, to the many gaps in arguments and complicated equations. Only after the translation into Latin and the addition of commentary by van Schooten in 1649 (and further work thereafter) did Descartes's masterpiece receive due recognition. Pierre de Fermat also pioneered the development of analytic geometry. Although not published in his lifetime, a manuscript form of Ad locos planos et solidos isagoge (Introduction to Plane and Solid Loci) was circulating in Paris in 1637, just prior to the publication of Descartes' Discourse. Clearly written and well received, the Introduction also laid the groundwork for analytical geometry. The key difference between Fermat's and Descartes' treatments is a matter of viewpoint: Fermat always started with an algebraic equation and then described the geometric curve that satisfied it, whereas Descartes started with geometric curves and produced their equations as one of several properties of the curves. As a consequence of this approach, Descartes had to deal with more complicated equations and he had to develop the methods to work with polynomial equations of higher degree. It was Leonhard Euler who first applied the coordinate method in a systematic study of space curves and surfaces. Coordinates In analytic geometry, the plane is given a coordinate system, by which every point has a pair of real number coordinates. Similarly, Euclidean space is given coordinates where every point has three coordinates. The value of the coordinates depends on the choice of the initial point of origin. There are a variety of coordinate systems used, but the most common are the following: Cartesian coordinates (in a plane or space) The most common coordinate system to use is the Cartesian coordinate system, where each point has an x-coordinate representing its horizontal position, and a y-coordinate representing its vertical position. These are typically written as an ordered pair (x, y). This system can also be used for three-dimensional geometry, where every point in Euclidean space is represented by an ordered triple of coordinates (x, y, z). Polar coordinates (in a plane) In polar coordinates, every point of the plane is represented by its distance r from the origin and its angle θ, with θ normally measured counterclockwise from the positive x-axis. Using this notation, points are typically written as an ordered pair (r, θ). One may transform back and forth between two-dimensional Cartesian and polar coordinates by using these formulae: This system may be generalized to three-dimensional space through the use of cylindrical or spherical coordinates. Cylindrical coordinates (in a space) In cylindrical coordinates, every point of space is represented by its height z, its radius r from the z-axis and the angle θ its projection on the xy-plane makes with respect to the horizontal axis. Spherical coordinates (in a space) In spherical coordinates, every point in space is represented by its distance ρ from the origin, the angle θ its projection on the xy-plane makes with respect to the horizontal axis, and the angle φ that it makes with respect to the z-axis. The names of the angles are often reversed in physics. Equations and curves In analytic geometry, any equation involving the coordinates specifies a subset of the plane, namely the solution set for the equation, or locus. For example, the equation y = x corresponds to the set of all the points on the plane whose x-coordinate and y-coordinate are equal. These points form a line, and y = x is said to be the equation for this line. In general, linear equations involving x and y specify lines, quadratic equations specify conic sections, and more complicated equations describe more complicated figures. Usually, a single equation corresponds to a curve on the plane. This is not always the case: the trivial equation x = x specifies the entire plane, and the equation x2 + y2 = 0 specifies only the single point (0, 0). In three dimensions, a single equation usually gives a surface, and a curve must be specified as the intersection of two surfaces (see below), or as a system of parametric equations. The equation x2 + y2 = r2 is the equation for any circle centered at the origin (0, 0) with a radius of r. Lines and planes Lines in a Cartesian plane, or more generally, in affine coordinates, can be described algebraically by linear equations. In two dimensions, the equation for non-vertical lines is often given in the slope-intercept form: where: m is the slope or gradient of the line. b is the y-intercept of the line. x is the independent variable of the function y = f(x). In a manner analogous to the way lines in a two-dimensional space are described using a point-slope form for their equations, planes in a three dimensional space have a natural description using a point in the plane and a vector orthogonal to it (the normal vector) to indicate its "inclination". Specifically, let be the position vector of some point , and let be a nonzero vector. The plane determined by this point and vector consists of those points , with position vector , such that the vector drawn from to is perpendicular to . Recalling that two vectors are perpendicular if and only if their dot product is zero, it follows that the desired plane can be described as the set of all points such that (The dot here means a dot product, not scalar multiplication.) Expanded this becomes This is just a linear equation: Conversely, it is easily shown that if a, b, c and d are constants and a, b, and c are not all zero, then the graph of the equation This familiar equation for a plane is called the general form of the equation of the plane. In three dimensions, lines can not be described by a single linear equation, so they are frequently described by parametric equations: where: x, y, and z are all functions of the independent variable t which ranges over the real numbers. (x0, y0, z0) is any point on the line. a, b, and c are related to the slope of the line, such that the vector (a, b, c) is parallel to the line. Conic sections In the Cartesian coordinate system, the graph of a quadratic equation in two variables is always a conic section – though it may be degenerate, and all conic sections arise in this way. The equation will be of the form As scaling all six constants yields the same locus of zeros, one can consider conics as points in the five-dimensional projective space The conic sections described by this equation can be classified using the discriminant If the conic is non-degenerate, then: if , the equation represents an ellipse; if and , the equation represents a circle, which is a special case of an ellipse; if , the equation represents a parabola; if , the equation represents a hyperbola; if we also have , the equation represents a rectangular hyperbola. Quadric surfaces A quadric, or quadric surface, is a 2-dimensional surface in 3-dimensional space defined as the locus of zeros of a quadratic polynomial. In coordinates , the general quadric is defined by the algebraic equation Quadric surfaces include ellipsoids (including the sphere), paraboloids, hyperboloids, cylinders, cones, and planes. Distance and angle In analytic geometry, geometric notions such as distance and angle measure are defined using formulas. These definitions are designed to be consistent with the underlying Euclidean geometry. For example, using Cartesian coordinates on the plane, the distance between two points (x1, y1) and (x2, y2) is defined by the formula which can be viewed as a version of the Pythagorean theorem. Similarly, the angle that a line makes with the horizontal can be defined by the formula where m is the slope of the line. In three dimensions, distance is given by the generalization of the Pythagorean theorem: while the angle between two vectors is given by the dot product. The dot product of two Euclidean vectors A and B is defined by where θ is the angle between A and B. Transformations Transformations are applied to a parent function to turn it into a new function with similar characteristics. The graph of is changed by standard transformations as follows: Changing to moves the graph to the right units. Changing to moves the graph up units. Changing to stretches the graph horizontally by a factor of . (think of the as being dilated) Changing to stretches the graph vertically. Changing to and changing to rotates the graph by an angle . There are other standard transformation not typically studied in elementary analytic geometry because the transformations change the shape of objects in ways not usually considered. Skewing is an example of a transformation not usually considered. For more information, consult the Wikipedia article on affine transformations. For example, the parent function has a horizontal and a vertical asymptote, and occupies the first and third quadrant, and all of its transformed forms have one horizontal and vertical asymptote, and occupies either the 1st and 3rd or 2nd and 4th quadrant. In general, if , then it can be transformed into . In the new transformed function, is the factor that vertically stretches the function if it is greater than 1 or vertically compresses the function if it is less than 1, and for negative values, the function is reflected in the -axis. The value compresses the graph of the function horizontally if greater than 1 and stretches the function horizontally if less than 1, and like , reflects the function in the -axis when it is negative. The and values introduce translations, , vertical, and horizontal. Positive and values mean the function is translated to the positive end of its axis and negative meaning translation towards the negative end. Transformations can be applied to any geometric equation whether or not the equation represents a function. Transformations can be considered as individual transactions or in combinations. Suppose that is a relation in the plane. For example, is the relation that describes the unit circle. Finding intersections of geometric objects For two geometric objects P and Q represented by the relations and the intersection is the collection of all points which are in both relations. For example, might be the circle with radius 1 and center : and might be the circle with radius 1 and center . The intersection of these two circles is the collection of points which make both equations true. Does the point make both equations true? Using for , the equation for becomes or which is true, so is in the relation . On the other hand, still using for the equation for becomes or which is false. is not in so it is not in the intersection. The intersection of and can be found by solving the simultaneous equations: Traditional methods for finding intersections include substitution and elimination. Substitution: Solve the first equation for in terms of and then substitute the expression for into the second equation: We then substitute this value for into the other equation and proceed to solve for : Next, we place this value of in either of the original equations and solve for : So our intersection has two points: Elimination: Add (or subtract) a multiple of one equation to the other equation so that one of the variables is eliminated. For our current example, if we subtract the first equation from the second we get . The in the first equation is subtracted from the in the second equation leaving no term. The variable has been eliminated. We then solve the remaining equation for , in the same way as in the substitution method: We then place this value of in either of the original equations and solve for : So our intersection has two points: For conic sections, as many as 4 points might be in the intersection. Finding intercepts One type of intersection which is widely studied is the intersection of a geometric object with the and coordinate axes. The intersection of a geometric object and the -axis is called the -intercept of the object. The intersection of a geometric object and the -axis is called the -intercept of the object. For the line , the parameter specifies the point where the line crosses the axis. Depending on the context, either or the point is called the -intercept. Geometric axis Axis in geometry is the perpendicular line to any line, object or a surface. Also for this may be used the common language use as a: normal (perpendicular) line, otherwise in engineering as axial line. In geometry, a normal is an object such as a line or vector that is perpendicular to a given object. For example, in the two-dimensional case, the normal line to a curve at a given point is the line perpendicular to the tangent line to the curve at the point. In the three-dimensional case a surface normal, or simply normal, to a surface at a point P is a vector that is perpendicular to the tangent plane to that surface at P. The word "normal" is also used as an adjective: a line normal to a plane, the normal component of a force, the normal vector, etc. The concept of normality generalizes to orthogonality. Spherical and nonlinear planes and their tangents Tangent is the linear approximation of a spherical or other curved or twisted line of a function. Tangent lines and planes In geometry, the tangent line (or simply tangent) to a plane curve at a given point is the straight line that "just touches" the curve at that point. Informally, it is a line through a pair of infinitely close points on the curve. More precisely, a straight line is said to be a tangent of a curve at a point on the curve if the line passes through the point on the curve and has slope where f is the derivative of f. A similar definition applies to space curves and curves in n-dimensional Euclidean space. As it passes through the point where the tangent line and the curve meet, called the point of tangency, the tangent line is "going in the same direction" as the curve, and is thus the best straight-line approximation to the curve at that point. Similarly, the tangent plane to a surface at a given point is the plane that "just touches" the surface at that point. The concept of a tangent is one of the most fundamental notions in differential geometry and has been extensively generalized; see Tangent space. See also Applied geometry Cross product Rotation of axes Translation of axes Vector space Notes References Books John Casey (1885) Analytic Geometry of the Point, Line, Circle, and Conic Sections, link from Internet Archive. Mikhail Postnikov (1982) Lectures in Geometry Semester I Analytic Geometry via Internet Archive Articles External links Coordinate Geometry topics with interactive animations

2204

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic%20alphabet

Arabic alphabet

The Arabic alphabet (, or , ), or Arabic abjad, is the Arabic script as specifically codified for writing the Arabic language. It is written from right-to-left in a cursive style, and includes 28 letters, of which most have contextual letterforms. The Arabic alphabet is considered an abjad, with only consonants required to be written; due to its optional use of diacritics to notate vowels, it is considered an impure abjad. Letters The basic Arabic alphabet contains 28 letters. Forms using the Arabic script to write other languages added and removed letters: for example Persian, Ottoman Turkish, Kurdish, Urdu, Sindhi, Azerbaijani, Malay, Acehnese, Banjarese, Javanese, Pashto, Punjabi, Uyghur, Arwi and Arabi Malayalam all have additional letters in their alphabets. Unlike Greek-derived alphabets, Arabic has no distinct upper and lower case letterforms. Many letters look similar but are distinguished from one another by dots () above or below their central part (). These dots are an integral part of a letter, since they distinguish between letters that represent different sounds. For example, the Arabic letters , , and have the same basic shape, but with one dot added below, two dots added above, and three dots added above respectively. The letter also has the same form in initial and medial forms, with one dot added above, though it is somewhat different in its isolated and final forms. Both printed and written Arabic are cursive, with most letters within a word directly joined to adjacent letters. Alphabetical order There are two main collating sequences ('alphabetical orderings') for the Arabic alphabet: , and . The original order derives from that used by the Phoenician alphabet, and is therefore reminiscent of the orderings of other alphabets, such as those in Hebrew and Greek. With this ordering, letters are also used as numbers known as abjad numerals, possessing the same numerological codes as in Hebrew gematria and Greek isopsephy. The or order is used when sorting lists of words and names, such as in phonebooks, classroom lists, and dictionaries. The ordering groups letters by the graphical similarity of the glyphs' shapes. Abjadi The order is not a simple correspondence with the earlier north Semitic alphabetic order, as it has a position corresponding to the Aramaic letter samek , which has no cognate letter in the Arabic alphabet historically. The loss of was compensated for by: In the Mashriqi abjad sequence, the letter shin was split into two Arabic letters, and , the latter of which took the place of . In the Maghrebi abjad sequence, the letter was split into two independent Arabic letters, and , with the latter taking the place of . The six other letters that do not correspond to any north Semitic letter are placed at the end. This is commonly vocalized as follows: . Another vocalization is: This can be vocalized as: Modern dictionaries and other reference books do not use the order to sort alphabetically; instead, the newer order is used wherein letters are partially grouped together by similarity of shape. The order is never used as numerals. In the order replaced recently by the Mashriqi order, though still used in many Quranic schools in Algeria, the sequence is: In Abu Muhammad al-Hasan al-Hamdani's encyclopedia , the letter sequence is: Letter forms The Arabic alphabet is always cursive and letters vary in shape depending on their position within a word. Letters can exhibit up to four distinct forms corresponding to an initial, medial (middle), final, or isolated position (IMFI). While some letters show considerable variations, others remain almost identical across all four positions. Generally, letters in the same word are linked together on both sides by short horizontal lines, but six letters () can only be linked to their preceding letter. For example, (Ararat) has only isolated forms because each letter cannot be connected to its following one. In addition, some letter combinations are written as ligatures (special shapes), notably , which is the only mandatory ligature (the unligated combination is considered difficult to read). Table of basic letters Notes See the article Romanization of Arabic for details on various transliteration schemes. Arabic language speakers may usually not follow a standardized scheme when transcribing words or names. Some Arabic letters which do not have an equivalent in English (such as ق) are often spelled as numbers when Romanized. Also names are regularly transcribed as pronounced locally, not as pronounced in Literary Arabic (if they were of Arabic origin). Regarding pronunciation, the phonemic values given are those of Modern Standard Arabic, which is taught in schools and universities. In practice, pronunciation may vary considerably from region to region. For more details concerning the pronunciation of Arabic, consult the articles Arabic phonology and varieties of Arabic. The names of the Arabic letters can be thought of as abstractions of an older version where they were meaningful words in the Proto-Semitic language. Names of Arabic letters may have quite different names popularly. Six letters () do not have a distinct medial form and have to be written with their final form without being connected to the next letter. Their initial form matches the isolated form. The following letter is written in its initial form, or isolated form if it is the final letter in the word. The letter originated in the Phoenician alphabet as a consonant-sign indicating a glottal stop. Today it has lost its function as a consonant, and, together with and , is a mater lectionis, a consonant sign standing in for a long vowel (see below), or as support for certain diacritics ( and ). Arabic currently uses a punctuation mark called the () to denote the glottal stop , written alone or with a carrier: alone: with a carrier: (above or under an ), (above a ), (above a dotless or ). In academic work, the hamzah is transliterated with the modifier letter right half ring (ʾ), while the modifier letter left half ring (ʿ) transliterates the letter (), which represents a different sound, not found in English. The hamzah has a single form, since it is never linked to a preceding or following letter. However, it is sometimes combined with a , , or , and in that case the carrier behaves like an ordinary , , or , check the table below: Hamzah forms For the writing rule of each form, check Hamza. Modified letters The following are not individual letters, but rather different contextual variants of some of the Arabic letters. Gemination Gemination is the doubling of a consonant. Instead of writing the letter twice, Arabic places a W-shaped sign called , above it. Note that if a vowel occurs between the two consonants the letter will simply be written twice. The diacritic only appears where the consonant at the end of one syllable is identical to the initial consonant of the following syllable. (The generic term for such diacritical signs is ), e. g., (with full diacritics: ) is a Form I verb meaning to study, whereas (with full diacritics: ) is the corresponding Form II verb, with the middle consonant doubled, meaning to teach. Nunation Nunation ( ) is the addition of a final   to a noun or adjective. The vowel before it indicates grammatical case. In written Arabic nunation is indicated by doubling the vowel diacritic at the end of the word. Ligatures The use of ligature in Arabic is common. There is one compulsory ligature, that for ل + ا, which exists in two forms. All other ligatures, of which there are many, are optional. A more complex ligature that combines as many as seven distinct components is commonly used to represent the word . The only ligature within the primary range of Arabic script in Unicode (U+06xx) is + . This is the only one compulsory for fonts and word-processing. Other ranges are for compatibility to older standards and contain other ligatures, which are optional. + Note: Unicode also has in its Presentation Form B FExx range a code for this ligature. If your browser and font are configured correctly for Arabic, the ligature displayed above should be identical to this one, U+FEFB ARABIC LIGATURE LAM WITH ALEF ISOLATED FORM: U+0640 ARABIC TATWEEL + + Note: Unicode also has in its Presentation Form B U+FExx range a code for this ligature. If your browser and font are configured correctly for Arabic, the ligature displayed above should be identical to this one: U+FEFC ARABIC LIGATURE LAM WITH ALEF FINAL FORM Another ligature in the Unicode Presentation Form A range U+FB50 to U+FDxx is the special code for glyph for the ligature ("God"), U+FDF2 ARABIC LIGATURE ALLAH ISOLATED FORM: This is a work-around for the shortcomings of most text processors, which are incapable of displaying the correct vowel marks for the word in the Quran. Because Arabic script is used to write other texts rather than Quran only, rendering + + as the previous ligature is considered faulty. If one of a number of the fonts (Noto Naskh Arabic, mry_KacstQurn, KacstOne, Nadeem, DejaVu Sans, Harmattan, Scheherazade, Lateef, Iranian Sans, Baghdad, DecoType Naskh) is installed on a computer (Iranian Sans is supported by Wikimedia web-fonts), the word will appear without diacritics. + + = LILLĀH (meaning "to Allāh [only to God]")   or   لله + + + = ALLĀH (the Arabic word for "god")   or   الله + + + U+0651 ARABIC SHADDA + U+0670 ARABIC LETTER SUPERSCRIPT ALEF + اللّٰه   (DejaVu Sans and KacstOne don't show the added superscript Alef) An attempt to show them on the faulty fonts without automatically adding the gemination mark and the superscript alif, although may not display as desired on all browsers, is by adding the U+200d (Zero width joiner) after the first or second ( +) + + U+200d ZERO WIDTH JOINER +   ‎ Vowels Users of Arabic usually write long vowels but omit short ones, so readers must utilize their knowledge of the language in order to supply the missing vowels. However, in the education system and particularly in classes on Arabic grammar these vowels are used since they are crucial to the grammar. An Arabic sentence can have a completely different meaning by a subtle change of the vowels. This is why in an important text such as the the three basic vowel signs are mandated, like the Arabic diacritics and other types of marks, like the cantillation signs. Short vowels In the Arabic handwriting of everyday use, in general publications, and on street signs, short vowels are typically not written. On the other hand, copies of the cannot be endorsed by the religious institutes that review them unless the diacritics are included. Children's books, elementary school texts, and Arabic-language grammars in general will include diacritics to some degree. These are known as "vocalized" texts. Short vowels may be written with diacritics placed above or below the consonant that precedes them in the syllable, called . All Arabic vowels, long and short, follow a consonant; in Arabic, words like "Ali" or "alif", for example, start with a consonant: , . Long vowels In the fully vocalized Arabic text found in texts such as the Quran, a long following a consonant other than a is written with a short sign () on the consonant plus an after it; long is written as a sign for short () plus a ; and long as a sign for short () plus a . Briefly, = ; = ; and = . Long following a may be represented by an or by a free followed by an (two consecutive s are never allowed in Arabic). The table below shows vowels placed above or below a dotted circle replacing a primary consonant letter or a sign. For clarity in the table, the primary letters on the left used to mark these long vowels are shown only in their isolated form. Most consonants do connect to the left with , and written then with their medial or final form. Additionally, the letter in the last row may connect to the letter on its left, and then will use a medial or initial form. Use the table of primary letters to look at their actual glyph and joining types. In unvocalized text (one in which the short vowels are not marked), the long vowels are represented by the vowel in question: , , or . Long vowels written in the middle of a word of unvocalized text are treated like consonants with a (see below) in a text that has full diacritics. Here also, the table shows long vowel letters only in isolated form for clarity. Combinations and are always pronounced and respectively. The exception is the suffix in verb endings where is silent, resulting in or . In addition, when transliterating names and loanwords, Arabic language speakers write out most or all the vowels as long ( with , and with , and and with ), meaning it approaches a true alphabet. Diphthongs The diphthongs and are represented in vocalized text as follows: Vowel omission An Arabic syllable can be open (ending with a vowel) or closed (ending with a consonant): open: CV [consonant-vowel] (long or short vowel) closed: CVC (short vowel only) A normal text is composed only of a series of consonants plus vowel-lengthening letters; thus, the word qalb, "heart", is written qlb, and the word qalaba "he turned around", is also written qlb. To write qalaba without this ambiguity, we could indicate that the l is followed by a short a by writing a fatḥah above it. To write qalb, we would instead indicate that the l is followed by no vowel by marking it with a diacritic called sukūn (), like this: . This is one step down from full vocalization, where the vowel after the q would also be indicated by a fatḥah: . The Qurʾān is traditionally written in full vocalization. The long i sound in some editions of the Qur’ān is written with a kasrah followed by a diacritic-less y, and long u by a ḍammah followed by a bare w. In others, these y and w carry a sukūn. Outside of the Qur’ān, the latter convention is extremely rare, to the point that y with sukūn will be unambiguously read as the diphthong , and w with sukūn will be read . For example, the letters can be read like English meel or mail, or (theoretically) also like mayyal or mayil. But if a sukūn is added on the y then the m cannot have a sukūn (because two letters in a row cannot be sukūnated), cannot have a ḍammah (because there is never an uy sound in Arabic unless there is another vowel after the y), and cannot have a kasrah (because kasrah before sukūnated y is never found outside the Qur’ān), so it must have a fatḥah and the only possible pronunciation is (meaning mile, or even e-mail). By the same token, m-y-t with a sukūn over the y can be mayt but not mayyit or meet, and m-w-t with a sukūn on the w can only be mawt, not moot (iw is impossible when the w closes the syllable). Vowel marks are always written as if the i‘rāb vowels were in fact pronounced, even when they must be skipped in actual pronunciation. So, when writing the name Aḥmad, it is optional to place a sukūn on the ḥ, but a sukūn is forbidden on the d, because it would carry a ḍammah if any other word followed, as in Aḥmadu zawjī "Ahmad is my husband". Another example: the sentence that in correct literary Arabic must be pronounced Aḥmadu zawjun shirrīr "Ahmad is a wicked husband", is usually pronounced (due to influence from vernacular Arabic varieties) as Aḥmad zawj shirrīr. Yet, for the purposes of Arabic grammar and orthography, is treated as if it were not mispronounced and as if yet another word followed it, i.e., if adding any vowel marks, they must be added as if the pronunciation were Aḥmadu zawjun sharrīrun with a tanwīn 'un' at the end. So, it is correct to add an un tanwīn sign on the final r, but actually pronouncing it would be a hypercorrection. Also, it is never correct to write a sukūn on that r, even though in actual pronunciation it is (and in correct Arabic MUST be) sukūned. Of course, if the correct i‘rāb is a sukūn, it may be optionally written. ٰٰ The sukūn is also used for transliterating words into the Arabic script. The Persian word (mâsk, from the English word "mask"), for example, might be written with a sukūn above the to signify that there is no vowel sound between that letter and the . Additional letters Regional variations Some letters take a traditionally different form in specific regions: The phoneme is considered native in most Arabic dialects, below are the different representations of the phoneme in native and loanwords: Non-native letters to Standard Arabic Some modified letters are used to represent non-native sounds of Modern Standard Arabic. These letters are used in transliterated names, loanwords and dialectal words. is considered a native phoneme/allophone in some dialects, e.g. Kuwaiti and Iraqi dialects. is considered a native phoneme (instead of ) in a number of Levantine and North African dialects and as an allophone in others. The phoneme is considered native in most Arabic dialects, but not always part of Modern Standard Arabic. E.g. in Egypt, spells in all cases, the same applies to Oman, and coastal Yemen. Regionally, in MSA or dialects, is differently spelled in loanwords; most commonly , , , and . For example, "golf" can be written , , , or . Used in languages other than Arabic Numerals There are two main kinds of numerals used along with Arabic text; Western Arabic numerals and Eastern Arabic numerals. In most of present-day North Africa, the usual Western Arabic numerals are used. Like Western Arabic numerals, in Eastern Arabic numerals, the units are always right-most, and the highest value left-most. Eastern Arabic numbers are written from left to right. Letters as numerals In addition, the Arabic alphabet can be used to represent numbers (Abjad numerals). This usage is based on the order of the alphabet. is 1, is 2, is 3, and so on until = 10, = 20, = 30, ..., = 200, ..., = 1000. This is sometimes used to produce chronograms. History The Arabic alphabet can be traced back to the Nabataean script used to write Nabataean Aramaic. The first known text in the Arabic alphabet is a late fourth-century inscription from 50 km east of in Jordan, but the first dated one is a trilingual inscription at Zebed in Syria from 512. However, the epigraphic record is extremely sparse, with only five certainly pre-Islamic Arabic inscriptions surviving, though some others may be pre-Islamic. Later, dots were added above and below the letters to differentiate them. (The Aramaic language had fewer phonemes than the Arabic, and some originally distinct Aramaic letters had become indistinguishable in shape, so that in the early writings 14 distinct letter-shapes had to do duty for 28 sounds; cf. the similarly ambiguous Book Pahlavi.) The first surviving document that definitely uses these dots is also the first surviving Arabic papyrus (PERF 558), dated April 643, although they did not become obligatory until much later. Important texts were and still are frequently memorized, especially in Qurʾan memorization. Later still, vowel marks and the hamzah were introduced, beginning some time in the latter half of the 7th century, preceding the first invention of Syriac and Tiberian vocalizations. Initially, this was done by a system of red dots, said to have been commissioned in the Umayyad era by Abu al-Aswad al-Du'ali, a dot above = , a dot below = , a dot on the line = , and doubled dots indicated nunation. However, this was cumbersome and easily confusable with the letter-distinguishing dots, so about 100 years later, the modern system was adopted. The system was finalized around 786 by al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi. Other tributes and alphabets written in Arabic dialects Arabic dialects were written in different alphabets before the spread of the Arabic alphabet currently in use. The most important of these alphabets and inscriptions are the Safaitic inscriptions, amounting to 30,000 inscriptions discovered in the Levant desert. There are about 3,700 inscriptions in Hismaic in central Jordan and northwest of the Arabian Peninsula, and Nabataean inscriptions, the most important of which are the Umm al-Jimal I inscription and the Numara inscription. Arabic printing Medieval Arabic blockprinting flourished from the 10th century until the 14th. It was devoted only to very small texts, usually for use in amulets. In 1514, following Johannes Gutenberg's invention of the printing press in 1450, Gregorio de Gregorii, a Venetian, published an entire prayer-book in Arabic script; it was entitled Kitab Salat al-Sawa'i and was intended for eastern Christian communities. Between 1580 and 1586, type designer Robert Granjon designed Arabic typefaces for Cardinal Ferdinando de' Medici, and the Medici Oriental Press published many Christian prayer and scholarly Arabic texts in the late 16th century. Maronite monks at Maar Quzhay Monastery on Mount Lebanon published the first Arabic books to use movable type in the Middle East. The monks transliterated the Arabic language using Syriac script. Although Napoleon generally receives credit for introducing the printing press to Egypt during his invasion of the country in 1798, and though he did indeed bring printing presses and Arabic presses to print the French occupation's official newspaper Al-Tanbiyyah "The Courier", printing in the Arabic language had started several centuries earlier. A goldsmith (like Gutenberg) designed and implemented an Arabic-script movable-type printing-press in the Middle East. The Lebanese Melkite monk Abdallah Zakher set up an Arabic printing press using movable type at the monastery of Saint John at the town of Dhour El Shuwayr in Mount Lebanon, the first homemade press in Lebanon using Arabic script. He personally cut the type molds and did the founding of the typeface. The first book came off his press in 1734; this press continued in use until 1899. Computers The Arabic alphabet can be encoded using several character sets, including ISO-8859-6, Windows-1256 and Unicode, latter thanks to the "Arabic segment", entries U+0600 to U+06FF. However, none of the sets indicates the form that each character should take in context. It is left to the rendering engine to select the proper glyph to display for each character. Each letter has a position-independent encoding in Unicode, and the rendering software can infer the correct glyph form (initial, medial, final or isolated) from its joining context. That is the current recommendation. However, for compatibility with previous standards, the initial, medial, final and isolated forms can also be encoded separately. Unicode As of Unicode , the Arabic script is contained in the following blocks: Arabic (0600–06FF, 256 characters) Arabic Supplement (0750–077F, 48 characters) Arabic Extended-A (08A0–08FF, 96 characters) Arabic Extended-B (0870–089F, 41 characters) Arabic Extended-C (10EC0–10EFF, 3 characters) Arabic Presentation Forms-A (FB50–FDFF, 631 characters) Arabic Presentation Forms-B (FE70–FEFF, 141 characters) Rumi Numeral Symbols (10E60–10E7F, 31 characters) Indic Siyaq Numbers (1EC70–1ECBF, 68 characters) Ottoman Siyaq Numbers (1ED00–1ED4F, 61 characters) Arabic Mathematical Alphabetic Symbols (1EE00—1EEFF, 143 characters) The basic Arabic range encodes the standard letters and diacritics but does not encode contextual forms (U+0621-U+0652 being directly based on ISO 8859-6). It also includes the most common diacritics and Arabic-Indic digits. U+06D6 to U+06ED encode Qur'anic annotation signs such as "end of ayah" ۝ۖ and "start of rub el hizb" ۞. The Arabic supplement range encodes letter variants mostly used for writing African (non-Arabic) languages. The Arabic Extended-A range encodes additional Qur'anic annotations and letter variants used for various non-Arabic languages. The Arabic Presentation Forms-A range encodes contextual forms and ligatures of letter variants needed for Persian, Urdu, Sindhi and Central Asian languages. The Arabic Presentation Forms-B range encodes spacing forms of Arabic diacritics, and more contextual letter forms. The Arabic Mathematical Alphabetical Symbols block encodes characters used in Arabic mathematical expressions. See also the notes of the section on modified letters. Keyboards Keyboards designed for different nations have different layouts, so proficiency in one style of keyboard, such as Iraq's, does not transfer to proficiency in another, such as Saudi Arabia's. Differences can include the location of non-alphabetic characters. All Arabic keyboards allow typing Roman characters, e.g., for the URL in a web browser. Thus, each Arabic keyboard has both Arabic and Roman characters marked on the keys. Usually, the Roman characters of an Arabic keyboard conform to the QWERTY layout, but in North Africa, where French is the most common language typed using the Roman characters, the Arabic keyboards are AZERTY. To encode a particular written form of a character, there are extra code points provided in Unicode which can be used to express the exact written form desired. The range Arabic presentation forms A (U+FB50 to U+FDFF) contain ligatures while the range Arabic presentation forms B (U+FE70 to U+FEFF) contains the positional variants. These effects are better achieved in Unicode by using the zero-width joiner and zero-width non-joiner, as these presentation forms are deprecated in Unicode and should generally only be used within the internals of text-rendering software; when using Unicode as an intermediate form for conversion between character encodings; or for backwards compatibility with implementations that rely on the hard-coding of glyph forms. Finally, the Unicode encoding of Arabic is in logical order, that is, the characters are entered, and stored in computer memory, in the order that they are written and pronounced without worrying about the direction in which they will be displayed on paper or on the screen. Again, it is left to the rendering engine to present the characters in the correct direction, using Unicode's bi-directional text features. In this regard, if the Arabic words on this page are written left to right, it is an indication that the Unicode rendering engine used to display them is out of date. There are competing online tools, e.g. Yamli editor, which allow entry of Arabic letters without having Arabic support installed on a PC, and without knowledge of the layout of the Arabic keyboard. Handwriting recognition The first software program of its kind in the world that identifies Arabic handwriting in real time was developed by researchers at Ben-Gurion University (BGU). The prototype enables the user to write Arabic words by hand on an electronic screen, which then analyzes the text and translates it into printed Arabic letters in a thousandth of a second. The error rate is less than three percent, according to Dr. Jihad El-Sana, from BGU's department of computer sciences, who developed the system along with master's degree student Fadi Biadsy. Variations See also Ancient South Arabian script Algerian braille Arabic braille Arabic calligraphy Arabic chat alphabet Arabic letter frequency Arabic numerals ArabTeX – provides Arabic support for TeX and LaTeX History of the Arabic alphabet Modern Arabic mathematical notation Romanization of Arabic Notes References Sources External links Arabic orthography

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic%20fox

Arctic fox

The Arctic fox (Vulpes lagopus), also known as the white fox, polar fox, or snow fox, is a small species of fox native to the Arctic regions of the Northern Hemisphere and common throughout the Arctic tundra biome. It is well adapted to living in cold environments, and is best known for its thick, warm fur that is also used as camouflage. It has a large and very fluffy tail. In the wild, most individuals do not live past their first year but some exceptional ones survive up to 11 years. Its body length ranges from , with a generally rounded body shape to minimize the escape of body heat. The Arctic fox preys on many small creatures such as lemmings, voles, ringed seal pups, fish, waterfowl, and seabirds. It also eats carrion, berries, seaweed, and insects and other small invertebrates. Arctic foxes form monogamous pairs during the breeding season and they stay together to raise their young in complex underground dens. Occasionally, other family members may assist in raising their young. Natural predators of the Arctic fox are golden eagles, Arctic wolves, polar bears, wolverines, red foxes, and grizzly bears. Behavior Arctic foxes must endure a temperature difference of up to between the external environment and their internal core temperature. To prevent heat loss, the Arctic fox curls up tightly tucking its legs and head under its body and behind its furry tail. This position gives the fox the smallest surface area to volume ratio and protects the least insulated areas. Arctic foxes also stay warm by getting out of the wind and residing in their dens. Although the Arctic foxes are active year-round and do not hibernate, they attempt to preserve fat by reducing their locomotor activity. They build up their fat reserves in the autumn, sometimes increasing their body weight by more than 50%. This provides greater insulation during the winter and a source of energy when food is scarce. Reproduction In the spring, the Arctic fox's attention switches to reproduction and a home for their potential offspring. They live in large dens in frost-free, slightly raised ground. These are complex systems of tunnels covering as much as and are often in eskers, long ridges of sedimentary material deposited in formerly glaciated regions. These dens may be in existence for many decades and are used by many generations of foxes. Arctic foxes tend to select dens that are easily accessible with many entrances, and that are clear from snow and ice making it easier to burrow in. The Arctic fox builds and chooses dens that face southward towards the sun, which makes the den warmer. Arctic foxes prefer large, maze-like dens for predator evasion and a quick escape especially when red foxes are in the area. Natal dens are typically found in rugged terrain, which may provide more protection for the pups. But, the parents will also relocate litters to nearby dens to avoid predators. When red foxes are not in the region, Arctic foxes will use dens that the red fox previously occupied. Shelter quality is more important to the Arctic fox than the proximity of spring prey to a den. The main prey of the Arctic fox in the tundra are lemmings, which is why the white fox is often called the "lemming fox". The white fox's reproduction rates reflect the lemming population density, which cyclically fluctuates every 3–5 years. When lemmings are abundant, the white fox can give birth to 18 pups, but they often do not reproduce when food is scarce. The "coastal fox" or blue fox lives in an environment where food availability is relatively consistent, and they will have up to 5 pups every year. Breeding usually takes place in April and May, and the gestation period is about 52 days. Litters may contain as many as 25 (the largest litter size in the order Carnivora). The young emerge from the den when 3 to 4 weeks old and are weaned by 9 weeks of age. Arctic foxes are primarily monogamous and both parents will care for the offspring. When predators and prey are abundant, Arctic foxes are more likely to be promiscuous (exhibited in both males and females) and display more complex social structures. Larger packs of foxes consisting of breeding or non-breeding males or females can guard a single territory more proficiently to increase pup survival. When resources are scarce, competition increases and the number of foxes in a territory decreases. On the coasts of Svalbard, the frequency of complex social structures is larger than inland foxes that remain monogamous due to food availability. In Scandinavia, there are more complex social structures compared to other populations due to the presence of the red fox. Also, conservationists are supplying the declining population with supplemental food. One unique case, however, is Iceland where monogamy is the most prevalent. The older offspring (1-year-olds) often remain within their parent's territory even though predators are absent and there are fewer resources, which may indicate kin selection in the fox. Diet Arctic foxes generally eat any small animal they can find, including lemmings, voles, other rodents, hares, birds, eggs, fish, and carrion. They scavenge on carcasses left by larger predators such as wolves and polar bears, and in times of scarcity also eat their feces. In areas where they are present, lemmings are their most common prey, and a family of foxes can eat dozens of lemmings each day. In some locations in northern Canada, a high seasonal abundance of migrating birds that breed in the area may provide an important food source. On the coast of Iceland and other islands, their diet consists predominantly of birds. During April and May, the Arctic fox also preys on ringed seal pups when the young animals are confined to a snow den and are relatively helpless. They also consume berries and seaweed, so they may be considered omnivores. This fox is a significant bird-egg predator, consuming eggs of all except the largest tundra bird species. Arctic foxes survive harsh winters and food scarcity by either hoarding food or storing body fat subcutaneously and viscerally. At the beginning of winter, one Arctic fox has approximately 14740 kJ of energy storage from fat alone. Using the lowest BMR value measured in Arctic foxes, an average sized fox of would need 471 kJ/day during the winter to survive. In Canada, Arctic foxes acquire from snow goose eggs at a rate of 2.7–7.3 eggs/h and store 80–97% of them. Scats provide evidence that they eat the eggs during the winter after caching. Isotope analysis shows that eggs can still be eaten after a year, and the metabolizable energy of a stored goose egg only decreases by 11% after 60 days; a fresh egg has about 816 kJ. Eggs stored in the summer are accessed the following spring prior to reproduction. Adaptations The Arctic fox lives in some of the most frigid extremes on the planet, but they do not start to shiver until the temperature drops to . Among its adaptations for survival in the cold is its dense, multilayered pelage, which provides excellent insulation. Additionally, the Arctic fox is the only canid whose foot pads are covered in fur. There are two genetically distinct coat color morphs: white and blue. The white morph has seasonal camouflage, white in winter and brown along the back with light grey around the abdomen in summer. The blue morph is often a dark blue, brown, or grey color year-round. Although the blue allele is dominant over the white allele, 99% of the Arctic fox population is the white morph. Two similar mutations to MC1R cause the blue color and the lack of seasonal color change. The fur of the Arctic fox provides the best insulation of any mammal. The Arctic fox has a low surface area to volume ratio, as evidenced by its generally compact body shape, short muzzle and legs, and short, thick ears. Since less of its surface area is exposed to the Arctic cold, less heat escapes from its body. Sensory modalities The Arctic fox has a functional hearing range between 125 Hz–16 kHz with a sensitivity that is ≤ 60 dB in air, and an average peak sensitivity of 24 dB at 4 kHz. Overall, the Arctic foxes hearing is less sensitive than the dog and the kit fox. The Arctic fox and the kit fox have a low upper-frequency limit compared to the domestic dog and other carnivores. The Arctic fox can easily hear lemmings burrowing under 4-5 inches of snow. When it has located its prey, it pounces and punches through the snow to catch its prey. The Arctic fox also has a keen sense of smell. They can smell carcasses that are often left by polar bears anywhere from . It is possible that they use their sense of smell to also track down polar bears. Additionally, Arctic foxes can smell and find frozen lemmings under of snow, and can detect a subnivean seal lair under of snow. Physiology The Arctic fox contains advantageous genes to overcome extreme cold and starvation periods. Transcriptome sequencing has identified two genes that are under positive selection: Glycolipid transfer protein domain containing 1 (GLTPD1) and V-akt murine thymoma viral oncogene homolog 2 (AKT2). GLTPD1 is involved in the fatty acid metabolism, while AKT2 pertains to the glucose metabolism and insulin signaling. The average mass specific BMR and total BMR are 37% and 27% lower in the winter than the summer. The Arctic fox decreases its BMR via metabolic depression in the winter to conserve fat storage and minimize energy requirements. According to the most recent data, the lower critical temperature of the Arctic fox is at in the winter and in the summer. It was commonly believed that the Arctic fox had a lower critical temperature below . However, some scientists have concluded that this statistic is not accurate since it was never tested using the proper equipment. About 22% of the total body surface area of the Arctic fox dissipates heat readily compared to red foxes at 33%. The regions that have the greatest heat loss are the nose, ears, legs, and feet, which is useful in the summer for thermal heat regulation. Also, the Arctic fox has a beneficial mechanism in their nose for evaporative cooling like dogs, which keeps the brain cool during the summer and exercise. The thermal conductivity of Arctic fox fur in the summer and winter is the same; however, the thermal conductance of the Arctic fox in the winter is lower than the summer since fur thickness increases by 140%. In the summer, the thermal conductance of the Arctic foxes body is 114% higher than the winter, but their body core temperature is constant year-round. One way that Arctic foxes regulate their body temperature is by utilizing a countercurrent heat exchange in the blood of their legs. Arctic foxes can constantly keep their feet above the tissue freezing point () when standing on cold substrates without losing mobility or feeling pain. They do this by increasing vasodilation and blood flow to a capillary rete in the pad surface, which is in direct contact with the snow rather than the entire foot. They selectively vasoconstrict blood vessels in the center of the foot pad, which conserves energy and minimizes heat loss. Arctic foxes maintain the temperature in their paws independently from the core temperature. If the core temperature drops, the pad of the foot will remain constantly above the tissue freezing point. Size The average head-and-body length of the male is , with a range of , while the female averages with a range of . In some regions, no difference in size is seen between males and females. The tail is about long in both sexes. The height at the shoulder is . On average males weigh , with a range of , while females average , with a range of . Taxonomy Vulpes lagopus is a 'true fox' belonging to the genus Vulpes of the fox tribe Vulpini, which consists of 12 extant species. It is classified under the subfamily Caninae of the canid family Canidae. Although it has previously been assigned to its own monotypic genus Alopex, recent genetic evidence now places it in the genus Vulpes along with the majority of other foxes. It was originally described by Carl Linnaeus in the 10th edition of Systema Naturae in 1758 as Canis lagopus. The type specimen was recovered from Lapland, Sweden. The generic name vulpes is Latin for "fox". The specific name lagopus is derived from Ancient Greek λαγώς (lagōs, "hare") and πούς (pous, "foot"), referring to the hair on its feet similar to those found in cold-climate species of hares. Looking at the most recent phylogeny, the Arctic fox and the red fox (Vulpes vulpes) diverged approximately 3.17MYA. Additionally, the Arctic fox diverged from its sister group, the kit fox (Vulpes macrotis), at about 0.9MYA. Origins The origins of the Arctic fox have been described by the "out of Tibet" hypothesis. On the Tibetan Plateau, fossils of the extinct ancestral Arctic fox (Vulpes qiuzhudingi) from the early Pliocene (5.08–3.6 MYA) were found along with many other precursors of modern mammals that evolved during the Pliocene (5.3–2.6 MYA). It is believed that this ancient fox is the ancestor of the modern Arctic fox. Globally, the Pliocene was about 2–3 °C warmer than today, and the Arctic during the summer in the mid-Pliocene was 8 °C warmer. By using stable carbon and oxygen isotope analysis of fossils, researchers claim that the Tibetan Plateau experienced tundra-like conditions during the Pliocene and harbored cold-adapted mammals that later spread to North America and Eurasia during the Pleistocene Epoch (2.6 million-11,700 years ago). Subspecies Besides the nominate subspecies, the common Arctic fox, V. l. lagopus, four other subspecies of this fox have been described: Bering Islands Arctic fox, V. l. beringensis Greenland Arctic fox, V. l. foragoapusis Iceland Arctic fox, V. l. fuliginosus Pribilof Islands Arctic fox, V. l. pribilofensis Distribution and habitat The Arctic fox has a circumpolar distribution and occurs in Arctic tundra habitats in northern Europe, northern Asia, and North America. Its range includes Greenland, Iceland, Fennoscandia, Svalbard, Jan Mayen (where it was hunted to extinction) and other islands in the Barents Sea, northern Russia, islands in the Bering Sea, Alaska, and Canada as far south as Hudson Bay. In the late 19th century, it was introduced into the Aleutian Islands southwest of Alaska. However, the population on the Aleutian Islands is currently being eradicated in conservation efforts to preserve the local bird population. It mostly inhabits tundra and pack ice, but is also present in Canadian boreal forests (northeastern Alberta, northern Saskatchewan, northern Manitoba, Northern Ontario, Northern Quebec, and Newfoundland and Labrador) and the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska. They are found at elevations up to above sea level and have been seen on sea ice close to the North Pole. The Arctic fox is the only land mammal native to Iceland. It came to the isolated North Atlantic island at the end of the last ice age, walking over the frozen sea. The Arctic Fox Center in Súðavík contains an exhibition on the Arctic fox and conducts studies on the influence of tourism on the population. Its range during the last ice age was much more extensive than it is now, and fossil remains of the Arctic fox have been found over much of northern Europe and Siberia. The color of the fox's coat also determines where they are most likely to be found. The white morph mainly lives inland and blends in with the snowy tundra, while the blue morph occupies the coasts because its dark color blends in with the cliffs and rocks. Migrations and travel During the winter, 95.5% of Arctic foxes utilize commuting trips, which remain within the fox's home range. Commuting trips in Arctic foxes last less than 3 days and occur between 0–2.9 times a month. Nomadism is found in 3.4% of the foxes, and loop migrations (where the fox travels to a new range, then returns to its home range) are the least common at 1.1%. Arctic foxes in Canada that undergo nomadism and migrations voyage from the Canadian archipelago to Greenland and northwestern Canada. The duration and distance traveled between males and females is not significantly different. Arctic foxes closer to goose colonies (located at the coasts) are less likely to migrate. Meanwhile, foxes experiencing low-density lemming populations are more likely to make sea ice trips. Residency is common in the Arctic fox population so that they can maintain their territories. Migratory foxes have a mortality rate >3 times higher than resident foxes. Nomadic behavior becomes more common as the foxes age. In July 2019, the Norwegian Polar Institute reported the story of a yearling female which was fitted with a GPS tracking device and then released by their researchers on the east coast of Spitsbergen in the Svalbard group of islands. The young fox crossed the polar ice from the islands to Greenland in 21 days, a distance of . She then moved on to Ellesmere Island in northern Canada, covering a total recorded distance of in 76 days, before her GPS tracker stopped working. She averaged just over a day, and managed as much as in a single day. Conservation status The Arctic fox has been assessed as least concern on the IUCN Red List since 2004. However, the Scandinavian mainland population is acutely endangered, despite being legally protected from hunting and persecution for several decades. The estimate of the adult population in all of Norway, Sweden, and Finland is fewer than 200 individuals. Of these, especially in Finland, the Arctic fox is even classified as critically endangered, because even though the animal was pacified in Finland since 1940, the population has not recovered despite that. As a result, the populations of Arctic fox have been carefully studied and inventoried in places such as the Vindelfjällens Nature Reserve (Sweden), which has the Arctic fox as its symbol. The abundance of the Arctic fox tends to fluctuate in a cycle along with the population of lemmings and voles (a 3- to 4-year cycle). The populations are especially vulnerable during the years when the prey population crashes, and uncontrolled trapping has almost eradicated two subpopulations. The pelts of Arctic foxes with a slate-blue coloration were especially valuable. They were transported to various previously fox-free Aleutian Islands during the 1920s. The program was successful in terms of increasing the population of blue foxes, but their predation of Aleutian Canada geese conflicted with the goal of preserving that species. The Arctic fox is losing ground to the larger red fox. This has been attributed to climate change—the camouflage value of its lighter coat decreases with less snow cover. Red foxes dominate where their ranges begin to overlap by killing Arctic foxes and their kits. An alternative explanation of the red fox's gains involves the gray wolf. Historically, it has kept red fox numbers down, but as the wolf has been hunted to near extinction in much of its former range, the red fox population has grown larger, and it has taken over the niche of top predator. In areas of northern Europe, programs are in place that allow the hunting of red foxes in the Arctic fox's previous range. As with many other game species, the best sources of historical and large-scale population data are hunting bag records and questionnaires. Several potential sources of error occur in such data collections. In addition, numbers vary widely between years due to the large population fluctuations. However, the total population of the Arctic fox must be in the order of several hundred thousand animals. The world population of Arctic foxes is thus not endangered, but two Arctic fox subpopulations are. One is on Medny Island (Commander Islands, Russia), which was reduced by some 85–90%, to around 90 animals, as a result of mange caused by an ear tick introduced by dogs in the 1970s. The population is currently under treatment with antiparasitic drugs, but the result is still uncertain. The other threatened population is the one in Fennoscandia (Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Kola Peninsula). This population decreased drastically around the start of the 20th century as a result of extreme fur prices, which caused severe hunting also during population lows. The population has remained at a low density for more than 90 years, with additional reductions during the last decade. The total population estimate for 1997 is around 60 adults in Sweden, 11 adults in Finland, and 50 in Norway. From Kola, there are indications of a similar situation, suggesting a population of around 20 adults. The Fennoscandian population thus numbers around 140 breeding adults. Even after local lemming peaks, the Arctic fox population tends to collapse back to levels dangerously close to nonviability. The Arctic fox is classed as a "prohibited new organism" under New Zealand's Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act 1996, preventing it from being imported into the country. See also Arctic rabies virus References Further reading Nowak, Ronald M. (2005). Walker's Carnivores of the World. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. . External links State of the Environment Norway: Arctic fox Smithsonian Institution – North American Mammals: Vulpes lagopus Photo Gallery by islandsmyndir.is https://www.britannica.com/animal/Arctic-fox Fox, arctic Holarctic fauna Mammals described in 1758 Mammals of Europe Mammals of Asia Mammals of Greenland Mammals of Iceland Mammals of North America Mammals of Russia Mammals of Canada Mammals of the United States Mammals of the Arctic Taxa named by Carl Linnaeus Vulpes Habitats Directive species

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxon%20%28disambiguation%29

Anglo-Saxon (disambiguation)

Anglo-Saxons were Germanic tribes that settled in Britain and founded England. Anglo-Saxon may also refer to: Anglo-Saxon (anthropology) or Nordic race, outdated racial concept Anglo-Saxon England, the history of Anglo-Saxons Anglo-Saxon model, modern macroeconomic term Anglo-Saxon world, modern societies based on or influenced by English customs Old English or Anglo-Saxon, the earliest historical form of the English language , one of several ships White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, sociological term in the U.S. Anglo-Saxons (slur), a derogatory term for English-speaking countries used in Russian propaganda See also Anglo (disambiguation), a prefix Saxon (disambiguation)

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid%20Meier%27s%20Alpha%20Centauri

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri is a 4X video game, considered a spiritual sequel to the Civilization series. Set in a science fiction depiction of the 22nd century, the game begins as seven competing ideological factions land on the planet Chiron ("Planet") in the Alpha Centauri star system. As the game progresses, Planet's growing sentience becomes a formidable obstacle to the human colonists. Sid Meier, designer of Civilization, and Brian Reynolds, designer of Civilization II, developed Alpha Centauri after they left MicroProse to join with Jeff Briggs in creating a new video game developer: Firaxis Games. Electronic Arts released both Alpha Centauri and its expansion, Sid Meier's Alien Crossfire, in 1999. The following year, Aspyr Media ported both titles to Classic Mac OS while Loki Software ported them to Linux. Alpha Centauri features improvements on Civilization IIs game engine, including simultaneous multiplay, social engineering, climate, customizable units, alien native life, additional diplomatic and spy options, additional ways to win, and greater mod-ability. Alien Crossfire introduces five new human and two non-human factions, as well as additional technologies, facilities, secret projects, native life, unit abilities, and a victory condition. The game received wide critical acclaim, being compared favorably to Civilization II. Critics praised its science fiction storyline (comparing the plot to works by Stanley Kubrick, Frank Herbert, Arthur C. Clarke, and Isaac Asimov), the in-game writing, the voice acting, the user-created custom units, and the depth of the technology tree. Alpha Centauri also won several awards for best game of the year and best strategy game of the year. Synopsis Setting Space-race victories in the Civilization series conclude with a journey to Alpha Centauri. Beginning with that premise the Alpha Centauri narrative starts in the 22nd century, after the United Nations sends "Unity", a colonization mission, to Alpha Centauri's planet Chiron ("Planet"). Unbeknownst to humans, advanced extraterrestrials ("Progenitors") had been conducting experiments in vast distributed nervous systems, culminating in a planetary biosphere-sized presentient nervous system ("Manifold") on Chiron, leaving behind monoliths and artifacts on Planet to guide and examine the system's growth. Immediately prior to the start of the game, a reactor malfunction on the Unity spacecraft wakes the crew and colonists early and irreparably severs communications with Earth. After the captain is assassinated, the most powerful leaders on board build ideological factions with dedicated followers, conflicting agendas for the future of mankind, and "desperately serious" commitments. As the ship breaks up, seven escape pods, each containing a faction, are scattered across Planet. In the Alien Crossfire expansion pack, players learn that alien experiments led to disastrous consequences at Tau Ceti, creating a hundred-million-year evolutionary cycle that ended with the eradication of most complex animal life in several neighboring inhabited star systems. After the disaster (referred to by Progenitors as "Tau Ceti Flowering"), the Progenitors split into two factions: Manifold Caretakers, opposed to further experimentation and dedicated to preventing another Flowering; and Manifold Usurpers, favoring further experimentation and intending to induce a controlled Flowering in Alpha Centauris Planet. In Alien Crossfire, these factions compete along with the human factions for control over the destiny of Planet. Characters and factions The game focuses on the leaders of seven factions, chosen by the player from the 14 possible leaders in Alpha Centauri and Alien Crossfire, and Planet (voiced by Alena Kanka). The characters are developed from the faction leaders' portraits, the spoken monologues accompanying scientific discoveries and the "photographs in the corner of a commlink – home towns, first steps, first loves, family, graduation, spacewalk." The leaders in Alpha Centauri comprise: Lady Deirdre Skye, a Scottish activist (voiced by Carolyn Dahl), of Gaia's Stepdaughters; Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang, a Chinese Legalist official (voiced by Lu Yu), of the Human Hive; Academician Prokhor Zakharov, a Russian academic (voiced by Yuri Nesteroff) of the University of Planet; CEO Nwabudike Morgan, a Namibian businessman (voiced by Regi Davis), of Morgan Industries; Colonel Corazon Santiago, an American militiawoman (voiced by Wanda Niño) of the Spartan Federation; Sister Miriam Godwinson, an American minister and social psychologist (voiced by Gretchen Weigel), of the Lord's Believers; and Commissioner Pravin Lal, an Indian surgeon and diplomat (voiced by Hesh Gordon), of the Peacekeeping Forces. The player controls one of the leaders and competes against the others to colonize and conquer Planet. The Datalinks (voiced by Robert Levy and Katherine Ferguson) are minor characters who provide information to the player. Each faction excels at one or two important aspects of the game and follows a distinct philosophical belief, such as technological utopianism, Conclave Christianity, "free-market" capitalism, militarist survivalism, Chinese Legalism, U.N. Charter humanitarianism, or Environmentalist Gaia philosophy. The game takes place on Planet, with its "rolling red ochre plains" and "bands of lonely terraformed green". The seven additional faction leaders in Alien Crossfire are Prime Function Aki Zeta-Five, a Norwegian research assistant-turned-cyborg (voiced by Allie Rivenbark), of The Cybernetic Consciousness; Captain Ulrik Svensgaard, an American fisherman and naval officer (voiced by James Liebman), of The Nautilus Pirates; Foreman Domai, an Australian labor leader (voiced by Frederick Serafin), of The Free Drones; Datajack Sinder Roze, a Trinidadian hacker (voiced by Christine Melton), of The Data Angels; Prophet Cha Dawn, a human born on Planet (voiced by Stacy Spenser) of The Cult of Planet; Guardian Lular H'minee, a Progenitor leader (voiced by Jeff Gordon), of The Manifold Caretakers; and Conqueror Judaa Maar, a Progenitor leader (voiced by Jeff Gordon), of The Manifold Usurpers. Plot The story unfolds via the introduction video, explanations of new technologies, videos obtained for completing secret projects, interludes, and cut-scenes. The native life consists primarily of simple wormlike alien parasites and a type of red fungus that spreads rapidly via spores. The fungus is difficult to traverse, provides invisibility for the enemy, provides few resources, and spawns "mindworms" that attack population centres and military units by neurally parasitising them. Mindworms can eventually be captured and bred in captivity and used as terroristic bioweapons, and the player eventually discovers that the fungus and mindworms can think collectively. A voice intrudes into the player's dreams and soon waking moments, threatening more attacks if the industrial pollution and terraforming by the colonists is not reversed. The player discovers that Planet is a dormant semi-sentient hive organism that will soon experience a metamorphosis which will destroy all human life. To counter this threat, the player or a computer faction builds "The Voice of Alpha Centauri" secret project, which artificially links Planet's distributed nervous system into the human Datalinks, delaying Planet's metamorphosis into full self-awareness but incidentally increasing its ultimate intelligence substantially by giving it access to all of humanity's accumulated knowledge. Finally, the player or a computer faction embraces the "Ascent to Transcendence" in which humans too join their brains with the hive organism in its metamorphosis to godhood. Thus, Alpha Centauri closes "with a swell of hope and wonder in place of the expected triumphalism", reassuring "that the events of the game weren't the entirety of mankind's future, but just another step." Gameplay Alpha Centauri, a turn-based strategy game with a hard science fiction setting, is played from an isometric perspective. Many game features from Civilization II are present, but renamed or slightly tweaked: players establish bases (Civilization II's cities), build facilities (buildings) and secret projects (Wonders of the World), explore territory, research technology, and conquer other factions (civilizations). In addition to conquering all non-allied factions, players may also win by obtaining votes from three quarters of the total population (similar to Civilization IVs Diplomatic victory), "cornering the Global Energy Market", completing the Ascent to Transcendence secret project, or for alien factions, constructing six Subspace Generators. The main map (the upper two thirds of the screen) is divided into squares, on which players can establish bases, move units and engage in combat. Through terraforming, players may modify the effects of the individual map squares on movement, combat and resources. Resources are used to feed the population, construct units and facilities, and supply energy. Players can allocate energy between research into new technology and energy reserves. Unlike Civilization II, new technology grants access to additional unit components rather than pre-designed units, allowing players to design and re-design units as their factions' priorities shift. Energy reserves allow the player to upgrade units, maintain facilities, and attempt to win by the Global Energy Market scenario. Bases are military strongpoints and objectives that are vital for all winning strategies. They produce military units, house the population, collect energy, and build secret projects and Subspace Generators. Facilities and secret projects improve the performance of individual bases and of the entire faction. In addition to terraforming, optimizing individual base performance and building secret projects, players may also benefit their factions through social engineering, probe teams, and diplomacy. Social engineering modifies the ideologically based bonuses and penalties forced by the player's choice of faction. Probe teams can sabotage and steal information, units, technology, and energy from enemy bases, while diplomacy lets the player create coalitions with other factions. It also allows the trade or transfer of units, bases, technology and energy. The Planetary Council, similar to the United Nations Security Council, takes Planet-wide actions and determines population victories. In addition to futuristic technological advances and secret projects, the game includes alien life, structures and machines. "Xenofungus" and "sea fungus" provide movement, combat, and resource penalties, as well as concealment for "mind worms" and "spore launchers". Immobile "fungal towers" spawn native life. Native life, including the seaborne "Isles of the Deep" and "Sealurks" and airborne "Locusts of Chiron", use psionic combat, an alternate form of combat which ignores weapons and armor. Monoliths repair units and provide resources; artifacts yield new technology and hasten secret projects; landmarks provide resource bonuses; and random events add danger and opportunity. Excessive development leads to terraforming-destroying fungus blooms and new native life. Alpha Centauri provides a single player mode and supports customization and multiplayer. Players may customize the game by choosing options at the beginning of the game, using the built-in scenario and map editors, and modifying Alpha Centauris game files. In addition to a choice of seven (or 14 in Alien Crossfire) factions, pre-game options include scenario game, customized random map, difficulty level, and game rules that include victory conditions, research control, and initial map knowledge. The scenario and map editors allow players to create customized scenarios and maps. The game's basic rules, diplomatic dialog, and the factions' starting abilities are in text files, which "the designers have done their best to make it reasonably easy to modify..., even for non-programmers." Alpha Centauri supports play by email ("PBEM") and TCP/IP mode featuring simultaneous movement, and introduces direct player-to-player negotiation, allowing the unconstrained trade of technology, energy, maps, and other elements. Development Inspirations In 1996, MicroProse released the lauded Civilization II, designed by Brian Reynolds. Spectrum Holobyte who owned MicroProse at the time, opted to consolidate their business under the MicroProse name, moving the company from Maryland to California by the time the game shipped, and laying off several MicroProse employees. Disagreements between the new management and its employees prompted Reynolds, Jeff Briggs, and Sid Meier (designer of the original Civilization) to leave MicroProse and found Firaxis. Although unable to use the same intellectual property as Civilization II, the new company felt that players wanted "a new sweeping epic of a turn-based game". Having just completed a game of human history up to the present, they wanted a fresh topic and chose science fiction. With no previous experience in science fiction games, the developers believed future history was a fitting first foray. For the elements of exploring and terraforming an alien world, they chose a plausible near future situation of a human mission to colonize the solar system's nearest neighbour and human factions. Reynolds researched science fiction for the game's writing. His inspiration included "classic works of science fiction", including Frank Herbert's The Jesus Incident and Hellstrom's Hive, A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge, and The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle for alien races; Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars, Slant by Greg Bear, and Stephen R. Donaldson's The Real Story for future technology and science; and Dune by Herbert and Bear's Anvil of Stars for negative interactions between humans. Alpha Centauri set out to capture the whole sweep of humanity's future, including technology, futuristic warfare, social and economic development, the future of the human condition, spirituality, and philosophy. Reynolds also said that "getting philosophy into the game" was one of the attractions of the game. Believing good science fiction thrives on constraint, the developers began with near-future technologies. As they proceeded into the future, they tried to present a coherent, logical, and detailed picture of future developments in physics, biology, information technology, economics, society, government, and philosophy. Alien ecologies and mysterious intelligences were incorporated into Alpha Centauri as external "natural forces" intended to serve as flywheels for the backstory and a catalyst for many player intelligences. Chris Pine, creator of the in-game map of Planet, strove to make Planet look like a real planet, which resulted in evidence of tectonic action. Another concern was that Planet matched the story, which resulted in the fungus being connected across continents, as it is supposed to be a gigantic neural network. Terraforming is a natural outgrowth of colonizing an alien world. The first playable prototype was just a map generator that tested climate changes during the game. This required the designers to create a world builder program and climatic model far more powerful than anything they had done before. Temperature, wind, and rainfall patterns were modeled in ways that allow players to make changes: for example, creating a ridge-line and then watching the effects. In addition to raising terrain, the player can also divert rivers, dig huge boreholes into the planet's mantle, and melt ice caps. In addition to scientific advances, the designers speculated on the future development of human society. The designers allow the player to decide on a whole series of value choices and choose a "ruthless", "moderate", or "idealistic" stance. Reynolds said the designers don't promote a single "right" answer, instead giving each value choice positive and negative consequences. This design was intended to force the player to "think" and make the game "addictive". He also commented that Alpha Centauris fictional nature allowed them to draw their characters "a lot more sharply and distinctly than the natural blurring and greyness of history". Chiron, the name of the planet, is the name of the only non-barbaric centaur in Greek mythology and an important loregiver and teacher for humanity. The name also pays homage to James P. Hogan's 1982 space opera novel Voyage from Yesteryear, in which a human colony is artificially planted by an automatic probe on a planet later named by colonists as Chiron. In the game, Chiron has two moons, named after the centaurs Nessus and Pholus, with the combined tidal force of Earth's Moon, and is the second planet out from Alpha Centauri A, the innermost planet being the Mercury-like planet named after the centaur Eurytion. Alpha Centauri B is also dubbed Hercules, a reference to him killing several centaurs in mythology, and the second star preventing the formation of larger planets. The arrival on Chiron is referred to as "Planetfall", which is a term used in many science fiction novels, including Robert A. Heinlein's Future History series, and Infocom's celebrated comic interactive fiction adventure Planetfall. Vernor Vinge's concept of technological singularity is the origin of the Transcendence concept. The game's cutscenes use montages of live-action video, CGI, or both; most of the former is from the 1992 experimental documentary Baraka. Alpha Centauri In July 1996, Firaxis began work on Alpha Centauri, with Reynolds heading the project. Meier and Reynolds wrote playable prototype code and Jason Coleman wrote the first lines of the development libraries. Because the development of Gettysburg took up most of Firaxis' time, the designers spent the first year prototyping the basic ideas. By late 1996, the developers were playing games on the prototype, and by the middle of the next year, they were working on a multiplayer engine. Although Firaxis intended to include multiplayer support in its games, an important goal was to create games with depth and longevity in single-player mode because they believed that the majority of players spend most of their time playing this way. Reynolds felt that smart computer opponents are an integral part of a classic computer game, and considered it a challenge to make them so. Reynolds' previous games omitted internet support because he believed that complex turn-based games with many player options and opportunities for player input are difficult to facilitate online. Reynolds said that the most important principle of game design is for the designer to play the game as it is developed; Reynolds claimed that this was how a good artificial intelligence (AI) was built. To this end, he would track the decisions he made and why he made them as he played the game. The designer also watched what the computer players did, noting "dumb" actions and trying to discover why the computer made them. Reynolds then taught the computer his reasoning process so the AI could find the right choice when presented several attractive possibilities. He said the AI for diplomatic personalities was the best he had done up to that point. Doug Kaufman, a co-designer of Civilization II, was invited to join development as a game balancer. Reynolds cited the Alpha Centauris balance for the greater sense of urgency and the more pressing pacing than in his earlier game, Sid Meier's Colonization. According to producer Timothy Train, in designing the strengths and weaknesses of the factions, the goal was to suggest, without requiring, certain strategies and give the player interesting and fun things to do without unbalancing the game. He didn't want a faction to be dependent on its strength or a faction's power to be dominant over the rest. Train felt that fun meant the factions always have something fun to do with their attributes. Around the summer of 1997, the staff began research on the scientific realities involved in interstellar travel. In late 1997, Bing Gordon—then Chief Creative Officer of Electronic Arts—joined the team, and was responsible for the Planetary Council, extensive diplomacy, and landmarks. A few months before the 1998 Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), the team incorporated the Explore/Discover/Build/Conquer marketing campaign into the game. The game was announced in May 1998 at E3. In the latter half of 1998, the team produced a polished and integrated interface, wrote the game manual and foreign language translations, painted the faction leader portraits and terrain, built the 3D vehicles and vehicle parts, and created the music. Michael Ely directed the Secret Project movies and cast the faction leaders. 25 volunteers participated in Firaxis' first public beta test. The beta testers suggested the Diplomatic and Economic victories and the Random Events. The design team started with a very simple playable game. They strengthened the "fun" aspects and fixed or removed the unenjoyable ones, a process Sid Meier called "surrounding the fun". After the revision, they played it again, repeating the cycle of revision and play. Playing the game repeatedly and in-depth was a rule at Firaxis. In the single-player mode, the team tried extreme strategies to find any sure-fire paths to victory and to see how often a particular computer faction ends up at the bottom. The goal was a product of unprecedented depth, scope, longevity, and addictiveness, where the player is always challenged by the game to come up with new strategies with no all-powerful factions or unstoppable tactics. According to Reynolds, the process has been around since Sid Meier's early days at Microprose. At Firaxis, as iterations continue, they expand the group giving feedback, bringing in outside gamers with fresh perspectives. Alpha Centauri was the first Firaxis game with public beta testers. Finally, Brian Reynolds discussed the use of the demo in the development process. Originally a marketing tool released prior to the game, they started getting feedback. They were able to incorporate many suggestions into the retail version. According to Brian Reynolds, they made improvement in the game's interface, added a couple of new features and fixed a few glitches. They also improved some rules, fine-tuned the game balance and improved the AI. Finally, he adds that they continued to add patches to enhance the game after the game was released. In the months leading to the release of Alpha Centauri, multimedia producer Michael Ely wrote the 35 weekly episodes of Journey to Centauri detailing the splintering of the U.N. mission to Alpha Centauri. Alien Crossfire A month after Alpha Centauris February 1999 release, the Firaxis team began work on the expansion pack, Sid Meier's Alien Crossfire. Alien Crossfire features seven new factions (two that are non-human), new technologies, new facilities, new secret projects, new alien life forms, new unit special abilities, new victory conditions (including the new "Progenitor Victory") and several additional concepts and strategies. The development team included Train as producer and designer, Chris Pine as programmer, Jerome Atherholt and Greg Foertsch as artists, and Doug Kaufman as co-designer and game balancer. The team considered several ideas, including a return to a post-apocalyptic earth and the conquest of another planet in the Alpha Centauri system, before deciding to keep the new title on Planet. The premise allowed them to mix and match old and new characters and delve into the mysteries of the monoliths and alien artifacts. The backstory evolved quickly, and the main conflict centered on the return of the original alien inhabitants. The idea of humans inadvertently caught up in an off-world civil war focused the story. Train wanted to improve the "build" aspects, feeling that the god-game genre had always been heavily slanted towards the "Conquer" end of the spectrum. He wanted to provide "builders" with the tools to construct an empire in the face of heated competition. The internet community provided "invaluable" feedback. The first "call for features" was posted around April 1999 and produced the Fletchette Defense System, Algorithmic Enhancement, and The Nethack Terminus. The team had several goals: factions should not be "locked-in" to certain strategies; players should have interesting things to do without unbalancing the game, and the factions must be fun to play. The team believed the "coolness" of the Progenitor aliens would determine the success or failure of Alien Crossfire. They strove to make them feel significantly different to play, but still compatible with the existing game mechanics. The developers eventually provided the aliens with Battle Ogres, a Planetary survey, non-blind research, and other powers to produce "a nasty and potent race that would take the combined might of humanity to bring them down". Chris Pine modified the AI to account for the additions. The team also used artwork, sound effects, music, and diplomatic text to set the aliens apart. Other than the aliens, the Pirates proved to be the toughest faction to balance because their ocean start gave them huge advantages. Upon completion, the team felt that Alien Crossfire was somewhere between an expansion and a full-blown sequel. In the months leading to the release of Alien Crossfire, multimedia producer Michael Ely wrote the 9 episodes of Centauri: Arrival, introducing the Alien Crossfire factions. The game initially had a single production run. Electronic Arts bundled Alpha Centauri and Alien Crossfire in the Alpha Centauri Planetary Pack in 2000 and included both games in The Laptop Collection in 2003. In 2000, both Alpha Centauri and Alien Crossfire were ported to Classic Mac OS by Aspyr Media and to Linux by Loki Software. Reception Alpha Centauri received wide critical acclaim upon its release, with reviewers voicing respect for the game's pedigree, especially that of Reynolds and Meier. The video game review aggregator websites GameRankings and Metacritic, which collect data from numerous review websites, listed scores of 92% and 89%, respectively. The game was favorably compared to Reynold's previous title, Civilization II, and Rawn Shah of IT World Canada praised the expansion for a "believable" plot. However, despite its critical reception, it sold the fewest copies of all the games in the Civilization series. It sold more than 100,000 copies in its first two months of release. This was followed by 50,000 copies in April, May and June. In the United States, Alpha Centauri was the tenth-best-selling computer game of 1999's first half. Its sales in that country alone reached 224,939 copies by the end of 1999, and rose to 281,115 units by September 2000. Critical reaction The game showed well at the 1998 Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3). Walter Morbeck of GameSpot said that Alpha Centauri was "more than hi-tech physics and new ways to blow each other up", and that the game would feature realistic aliens. Terry Coleman of Computer Gaming World predicted that Alpha Centauri would be "another huge hit". OGR awarded it "Most Promising Strategy Game" and one of the top 25 games of E3 '98. In a vote of 27 journalists from 22 gaming magazine, Alpha Centauri won "Best Turn Based Strategy" of E3 Show Award. Aaron John Loeb, the Awards Committee Chairman, said "for those that understand the intricacies, the wonder, the glory of turn based 'culture building,' this is the game worth skipping class for." Alpha Centauri's science fiction storyline received high praise; IGN considered the game an exception to PC sci-fi cliches, and GamePro compared the plot to the works of writers Stanley Kubrick and Isaac Asimov. J.C. Herz of The New York Times suggested that the game was a marriage of SimCity and Frank Herbert's Dune. GamePros Dan Morris said "As the single-player campaign builds to its final showdown, the ramifications of the final theoretical discoveries elevate Alpha Centauri from great strategy game to science-fiction epic." Game Revolution said, "The well crafted story, admirable science-fiction world, fully realized scenario, and quality core gameplay are sure to please." Edge praised the uniqueness of expression saying it was "the same kind of old-fashioned, consensual storytelling that once drew universes out of ASCII." The in-game writing and faction leaders were also well-received for their believability, especially the voice acting. GameSpot reviewer Denny Atkin called the factions and their abilities Alpha Centauris "most impressive aspect". Greg Tito of The Escapist said, "the genius of the game is how it flawlessly blends its great writing with strategy elements." Alpha Centauri's turn-based gameplay, including the technology trees and factional warfare, was commonly compared to Civilization and Civilization II. The Adrenaline Vault's Pete Hines said, "While Alpha Centauri is the evolutionary off-spring to [Civilization] and [Civilization II], it is not [Civilization II] in space. Although the comparison is inevitable because of the lineage, it is still short-sighted." Edge in 2006 praised "Alpha Centauri's greater sophistications as a strategy game." IGN said "Alpha Centauri is a better game than Civilization II; it's deep, rich, rewarding, thought-provoking in almost every way." Game Revolution's reviewer was less magnanimous, saying "Alpha Centauri is at least as good a game as Civilization 2. But it is its great similarity that also does it the most detriment. Alpha Centauri simply does not do enough that is new; it just doesn't innovate enough to earn a higher grade." The ability to create custom units was praised, as was the depth of the tech tree. The artificial intelligence of computer-controlled factions, which featured adaptability and behavioral subtlety, was given mixed comments; some reviewers thought it was efficient and logical, while others found it confusing or erratic. Edge was disappointed in the game's diplomacy, finding "no more and no less than is expected from the genre" and unhappy with "the inability to sound out any real sense of relationship or rational discourse." The game's graphics were widely acknowledged to be above average at the time of its release, but not revolutionary. Its maps and interface were considered detailed and in accordance with a space theme, but the game was released with a limited color palette. The in-game cutscenes, particularly the full motion video that accompanied technological advances, were praised for their quality and innovation. Alpha Centauri's sound and music received similar comments; FiringSquad said "[The sound effect quality] sort of follows the same line as the unit graphics – not too splashy but enough to get the job done." Next Generation reviewed the PC version of the game, rating it five stars out of five, and stated that "Sid Meier creates yet another masterpiece in this game that, at a glance, looks all too familiar." Alpha Centauri has won several Game of the Year awards, including those from the Denver Post and the Toronto Sun. It won the "Turn-based Strategy Game of the Year" award from GameSpot as well. The Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences awarded Alpha Centauri for "PC Strategy Game of the Year" at the 2nd Annual Interactive Achievement Awards; it also received nominations for "Game of the Year", "Computer Entertainment Title of the Year", and "Outstanding Achievement in Interactive Design". In 2000, Alpha Centauri won the Origins Award for Best Strategy Computer Game of 1999. The editors of PC Gamer US named Alpha Centauri their "Best Turn-Based Strategy Game" of 1999, and wrote that it "set a new standard for this venerable genre." Alpha Centauri has the distinction of receiving gaming magazine PC Gamers highest score to date as of 2019 (98%), alongside Half-Life 2 and Crysis, surpassing Civilization IIs score (97%). Alien Crossfire was a runner-up for Computer Games Strategy Pluss 1999 "Add-on of the Year" award, which ultimately went to Heroes of Might and Magic III: Armageddon's Blade. Legacy There have been no direct sequels beyond Alien Crossfire, something that writer Greg Tito attributed to Reynolds leaving Firaxis in 2000 to form Big Huge Games. Alien Crossfire producer and lead designer Timothy Train also left Firaxis with Reynolds. However, a spiritual sequel, Civilization: Beyond Earth, was announced by Firaxis in April 2014 and released on October 24, 2014; several of those that worked on Alpha Centauri helped to develop the new title. A review in Polygon noted however that while the new game has better graphics, its story fails to rival the original, a sentiment echoed by another review in PC Gamer. Another in Engadget noted "as a spiritual successor to Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, however, it's a cut-rate disappointment". Many of the features introduced in Alpha Centauri were carried over into subsequent Civilization titles; upon its release, Civilization III was compared negatively to Alpha Centauri, whose Civilization characteristics were reminiscent of faction bonuses and penalties. The government system in Civilization IV closely resembles Alpha Centauris, and Civilization V includes a new victory condition: the completion of the 'Utopia project', which is reminiscent of the Ascent to Transcendence secret project. According to Edge magazine, Alpha Centauri remained "highly regarded" in 2006. A decade after its release, Sold-Out Software and GOG.com re-released the game for online-download sales. Escapist Magazine reviewed the game in 2014, noting that "Alpha Centauri is still playable. It still has a unique flavor that is unlike anything else". After the release of the expansion, multimedia producer Michael Ely wrote a trilogy of novels based on the game. Writer Steve Darnall and illustrator Rafael Kayanan also made a graphic novel entitled Alpha Centauri: Power of the Mindworms. Steve Jackson Games published GURPS Alpha Centauri, a sourcebook for the GURPS role-playing game set in the Alpha Centauri universe. See also Alpha Centauri in fiction Group mind (science fiction) Survivalism in fiction Notes References Further reading – covers the early years of colonization of the planet Chiron and describes the siege of United Nations HQ by the Spartans, the loss of Peacekeeper sovereignty and the consequent flight by the United Nations survivors into Gaian territory. – occurs years after the events of Centauri Dawn and describes the Gaia's Stepdaughters' use of "mindworms" to rebuff an attack by the technologically superior Morgan Industries. – follows the tension between the University of Planet and the Lord's Believers and describes the use of singularity bombs to destroy Morgan Industries and the Spartan Federation and the native life uprising which destroys humanity. External links Official website mirrored by alphacentauri2.info 1999 video games Video games set in the 22nd century 4X video games Fiction set around Alpha Centauri Aspyr games City-building games Civilization (series) Firaxis Games games Hard science fiction video games Fiction about interstellar travel Linux games Loki Entertainment games Classic Mac OS games MacOS games Multiplayer and single-player video games Multiplayer hotseat games Origins Award winners Religion in science fiction Science fiction video games Alpha Centauri Turn-based strategy video games Video games about extraterrestrial life Video games adapted into comics Video games developed in the United States Video games scored by Jeff Briggs Video games set on fictional planets Video games with expansion packs Video games with isometric graphics Video games with voxel graphics Windows games Xenoarchaeology in fiction

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu%20Sayyaf

Abu Sayyaf

Abu Sayyaf (; ; , ASG), officially known by the Islamic State as the Islamic State – East Asia Province, is a Jihadist militant and pirate group that followed the Wahhabi doctrine of Sunni Islam. It was based in and around Jolo and Basilan islands in the southwestern part of the Philippines, where for more than five decades, Moro groups had been engaged in an insurgency seeking to make Moro Province independent. The group was considered violent and was responsible for the Philippines' worst terrorist attack, the bombing of MV Superferry 14 in 2004, which killed 116 people. The name of the group was derived from Arabic (أبو; "father of"), and (سيّاف; "swordsmith"). , the group was estimated to have about 20 members, down from 1,250 in 2000. They used mostly improvised explosive devices, mortars and automatic rifles. The group had carried out bombings, kidnappings, assassinations and extortion. They have been involved in criminal activities, including rape, child sexual assault, forced marriage, drive-by shootings and drug trafficking. The goals of the group "appear to have alternated over time between criminal objectives and a more ideological intent". The group was designated as a terrorist group by Australia, Canada, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom and the United States. From January 15, 2002, to February 24, 2015, fighting Abu Sayyaf became a mission of the American military's Operation Enduring Freedom and part of the Global War on Terrorism. Several hundred U.S. soldiers were stationed in the area primarily to train Filipino troops in counter-terror and counterguerrilla operations, but, following a status of forces agreement and under Philippine law, they were not allowed to engage in direct combat. The group was founded by Abdurajak Abubakar Janjalani, and led after his death in 1998 by his younger brother Khadaffy Janjalani until his death in 2006. On July 23, 2014, Isnilon Hapilon, one of the group's leaders, swore an oath of loyalty to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State (IS). In September 2014, the group began kidnapping people for ransom, in the name of the IS. Background and history In the early 1970s, the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) was the main Muslim rebel group fighting in Basilan and Mindanao. Abdurajak Abubakar Janjalani, the older brother of Khadaffy Janjalani, had been a teacher from Basilan, who studied Islamic theology and Arabic in Libya, Syria and Saudi Arabia during the 1980s. Abdurajak went to Afghanistan to fight against the Soviet Union and the Afghan government during the Soviet–Afghan War. During that period, he was alleged to have met Osama bin Laden and been given $6 million to establish a more Islamic group drawn from the MNLF. Both Abdurajak Abubakar and Khadaffy were natives of Isabela City, one of the poorest cities of the Philippines and capital of Basilan. Abdurajak Abubakar Janjalani leadership (1989–1998) In the early 1990s, the MNLF moderated into governing the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, becoming the ruling government in majority Muslim areas of Mindanao in 1996. When Abdurajak returned to Basilan in 1990, he gathered radical members of the old MNLF who wanted to resume armed struggle and in 1991 established the Abu Sayyaf. Janjalani was funded by a Saudi Islamist, Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, who came to the Philippines in 1987 or 1988 and was head of the Philippine branch of the International Islamic Relief Organization foundation. A defector from Abu Sayyaf told Filipino authorities, "The IIRO was behind the construction of Mosques, school buildings, and other livelihood projects" but only "in areas penetrated, highly influenced and controlled by the Abu Sayyaf". According to the defector, "Only 10 to 30% of the foreign funding goes to the legitimate relief and livelihood projects and the rest go to terrorist operations". Khalifa married a local woman, Alice "Jameelah" Yabo. By 1995, Abu Sayyaf was active in large-scale bombings and attacks. The first attack was the assault on the town of Ipil, Zamboanga del Sur in April 1995. This year marked the escape of 20-year-old Khadaffy Janjalani from Camp Crame in Manila along with another member named Jovenal Bruno. On December 18, 1998, Abdurajak was killed in a gun battle with the Philippine National Police in Basilan. He was thought to have been about 39. The death of Aburajak marked a turning point in Abu Sayyaf operations. The group shifted to kidnappings, murders, and robberies, under his younger brother Khadaffy. The Sulu Archipelago experienced some of the fiercest fights between government troops and Abu Sayyaf through the early 1990s. It was reported that Abu Sayyaf began expanding into neighboring Malaysia and Indonesia by that time. Khadaffy Janjalani leadership (1999–2007) Until his death in a gun battle on September 4, 2006, Khaddafy Janjalani was considered the nominal leader of the group by the Armed Forces of the Philippines. Then-23-year-old Khadaffy took leadership of one of the Abu Sayyaf's factions in an internecine struggle. He then worked to consolidate his leadership, causing the group to appear inactive for a period. After his leadership was secured, Abu Sayyaf began a new strategy, taking hostages. The group's motive for kidnapping became more financial than religious during this period, according to locals. Hostage money probably provides the group's financing. Abu Sayyaf expanded its operations to Malaysia in 2000, when it abducted foreigners from two resorts. This action was condemned by most Islamic leaders. It was responsible for the kidnapping and murder of more than 30 foreigners and Christian clerics and workers, including Martin and Gracia Burnham. An influential commander named Abu Sabaya was killed at sea in June 2002 while trying to evade local forces. His death was considered a crucial turning point for the group, as the number of operatives working for Abu Sayyaf sharply decreased from 1,100 in 2001 to 450 in late 2002, and had since been stagnant for the next ten years. Ghalib Andang, alias Commander Robot, one of the group's leaders, was captured in Sulu in December 2003. On 14 March 2005, inmates from the Abu Sayyaf Group rioted inside Camp Bagong Diwa in Taguig in an apparent escape attempt and barricaded the second floor of the building, leading to a standoff which ended the next day when government forces stormed the prison. 24 Abu Sayyaf members, including Commanders Robot, Kosovo (Alhamser Limbong) and Global (Nadjmi Sabdullah), were killed, along with three prison guards and a police officer. An explosion at a military base in Jolo, on February 18, 2006, was blamed on the group by Brig. General Alexander Aleo. Khadaffy was indicted in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia for his alleged involvement in terrorist attacks, including hostage-taking and murder, against United States nationals and other foreign nationals. Consequently, on February 24, 2006, Khadaffy was among six fugitives in the second and most recent group of indicted fugitives to be added to the FBI Most Wanted Terrorists list along with two fellow members, Isnilon Totoni Hapilon and Jainal Antel Sali Jr. On December 13, 2006, it was reported that Abu Sayyaf members may have been planning attacks during the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit in the Philippines. The group was reported to have trained alongside Jemaah Islamiyah militants. The plot was reported to have involved detonating a car bomb in Cebu City where the summit was to take place. On December 27, the Philippine military reported that Khaddafi's remains had been recovered near Patikul, in Jolo and that DNA tests had been ordered to confirm the discovery. He was allegedly shot in the neck in an encounter with government troops in September on Luba Hills in Patikul, Sulu. 2010–2024 In a video published in the summer of 2014, senior Abu Sayyaf leader Isnilon Hapilon and other masked men swore their allegiance or "bay'ah" to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the "Islamic State" (IS) caliph. "We pledge to obey him on anything which our hearts desire or not and to value him more than anyone else. We will not take any emir (leader) other than him unless we see in him any obvious act of disbelief that could be questioned by Allah in the hereafter." For many years prior to this, Islamic State's competitor, al-Qaeda, had the support of Abu Sayyaf "through various connections". Observers were skeptical about whether the pledge would lead to Abu Sayyaf becoming an ISIS outpost in Southeast Asia, or was simply a way for the group to take advantage of the newer group's international publicity. In May 2017, Hapilon and other members of Abu Sayyaf joined the Islamic extremist Maute Group based in Lanao del Sur during their attempt to seize control of Marawi City and establish an IS caliphate in Mindanao, sparking the Battle of Marawi which destroyed much of the city and ended with his killing, along with that of Maute leader Omar Maute by government forces in October. In August 2020, MNLF chairman Nur Misuari turned in Abu Sayyaf sub-commander Anduljihad "Idang" Susukan to the Philippine National Police four months after Susukan surrendered to Misuari in Davao City. By 2022, the Islamic State's East Asia Province had absorbed pro-IS groups in Indonesia and a few militants in Thailand. In the latter country, alleged IS members have become involved in the South Thailand insurgency, claiming their first attack in Pattani on April 15, 2022. In 2023, the government declared that Sulu province was free of Abu Sayyaf militants. In December, ISIS declared responsbility for the deadly Mindanao State University bombing. On March 22, 2024, the Philippines announced that Abu Sayyaf had been "fully dismantled", bringing an end to the decades-long jihadist insurgency. Supporters and funding Abdurajak Abubakar Janjalani's first recruits were soldiers of MNLF and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). However, both MNLF and MILF deny links with Abu Sayyaf. Both officially distance themselves because of its attacks on civilians and its supposed profiteering. The Philippine military, however, has claimed that elements of both groups provide support to Abu Sayyaf. The group was originally not thought to receive funding from outside sources, but intelligence reports from the United States, Indonesia and Australia found intermittent ties to the Indonesian Jemaah Islamiyah terrorist group, and the Philippine government considers the Abu Sayyaf to be part of Jemaah Islamiyah. The government noted that initial funding for ASG came from al-Qaeda through the brother-in-law of Osama bin Laden, Mohammed Jamal Khalifa. Al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorist Ramzi Yousef operated in the Philippines in the mid-1990s and trained Abu Sayyaf soldiers. The 2002 edition of the United States Department's Patterns of Global Terrorism mention links to Al-Qaeda. Continuing ties to Islamist groups in the Middle East indicate that al-Qaeda may be continuing support. As of mid-2005, Jemaah Islamiyah personnel reportedly had trained about 60 Abu Sayyaf cadres in bomb assembling and detonations. Funding The group obtained most of its financing through kidnap ransom and extortion. One report estimated its revenues from ransom payments in 2000 were between $10 and $25 million. According to the State Department, it may receive funding from radical Islamic benefactors in the Middle East and South Asia. It was reported that Libya facilitated ransom payments to Abu Sayyaf. It was also suggested that Libyan money could possibly be channeled to Abu Sayyaf. Russian intelligence agencies connected with Victor Bout's planes reportedly provided Abu Sayyaf with arms. In 2014 and since, kidnapping for ransom has been the primary means of funding. The chart below collects events that Abu Sayyaf received ransoms or payments that are euphemistically called "board and lodgings". The more detailed information can be seen in the Timeline of Abu Sayyaf attacks. Motivation, beliefs, targets Filipino Islamist guerrillas such as Abu Sayyaf have been described as "rooted in a distinct class made up of closely-knit networks built through the marriage of important families through socioeconomic backgrounds and family structures", according to Michael Buehler. This tight-knit, familial structure provides resilience but also limits their growth. Commander of the Western Mindanao Command Lieutenant General Rustico Guerrero, describes Abu Sayyaf as "a local group with a local agenda". Two kidnapping victims, (Martin and Gracia Burnham) who were kept in captivity by ASG for over a year, "gently engaged their captors in theological discussion" and found Abu Sayyaf fighters to be unfamiliar with the Qur'an. They had only "a sketchy" notion of Islam, which they saw as "a set of behavioural rules, to be violated when it suited them", according to author Mark Bowden. As "holy warriors, they were justified in kidnapping, killing and stealing. Having sex with women captives was justified by their claiming them as "wives". Unlike MILF and MNLF, the group is not recognised by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, and according to author Robert East, was seen as "nothing more than a criminal operation" at least prior to 2001. A Center for Strategic and International Studies report by Jack Fellman notes the political rather than religious motivation of ASG. He quotes Khadaffy's statement that his brother was right to split from MNLF because "up to now, nothing came out" of attempts to gain more autonomy for Moro Muslims. This suggests, Fellman believes, that ASG "is merely the latest, albeit most violent, iteration of Moro political dissatisfaction that has existed for the last several decades". Some Abu Sayyaf members are also "shabu" (methamphetamine) users as described by surviving hostages who saw Abu Sayyaf members taking shabu as well from military findings who found drug packets in many of the abandoned Abu Sayyaf nests that justified their motivation as extreme criminals and terrorists as their state of mind were under the influence of drugs rather than being consciously fighting for the betterment of their region as well rights to living under their minority religion without any discrimination from the majority Filipinos. Its spokesman known as Abu Rami ( 2017) appeared to lack knowledge of the activities of other members, as the group had apparently separated into many small groups with their own leaders. Targets Most Abu Sayyaf victims have been Filipinos; however, in recent years (especially from 2011 onwards), Australian, British, Canadian, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Malaysian, Norwegian, Swiss and Vietnamese nationals have been kidnapped or attacked. Previously, Americans were particularly targeted. An unnamed ASG spokesman allegedly stated, "We have been trying hard to get an American because they may think we are afraid of them". He added, "We want to fight the American people." In 1993, Abu Sayyaf kidnapped an American Bible translator. In 2000, Abu Sayyaf captured an American Muslim and demanded that the United States release Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman and Ramzi Yousef, who were jailed for their involvement in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in New York City. Between March 2016 – July 2017, the majority of Abu Sayyaf kidnap for ransom operations shifted to the high seas. Seventeen ships were boarded and some sixty-five hostages from six countries were taken. In total, thirty hostages have been released (usually after a ransom was paid), seven escaped, three were rescued by Philippine security forces, and four were executed. Two others were killed during the attacks while eight seamen escaped during the shipjackings. An additional forty seamen were not taken hostage. Crimes and terrorism Abu Sayyaf has carried out numerous bombings, kidnappings, assassinations, and extortion activities. These include the 2000 Sipadan kidnappings, the 2001 Dos Palmas kidnappings and the 2004 SuperFerry 14 bombing. Kidnappings Although the group has engaged in kidnapping hostages to be exchanged for ransom for many years, this means of funding grew dramatically beginning in 2014, providing funds for the group's rapid growth. In the Philippines Journalists abducted since 2000 ABS-CBN's Newsbreak reported that Abu Sayyaf abducted at least 20 journalists from 2000 to 2008 (mostly foreign journalists). All of them were eventually released upon payment of ransom. GMA-7 television reporter Susan Enriquez (April 2000, Basilan, a few days); 10 Foreign journalists (7 German, 1 French, 1 Australian and 1 Danish, in May 2000, Jolo, for 10 hours); German Andreas Lorenz of the magazine Der Spiegel (July 2000, Jolo, for 25 days; he was also kidnapped in May); French television reporter Maryse Burgot and cameraman Jean-Jacques Le Garrec and sound technician Roland Madura (July 2000, Jolo, for 2 months); ABS-CBN television reporter Maan Macapagal and cameraman Val Cuenca (July 2000, Jolo, for 4 days); Philippine Daily Inquirer contributor and Net 25 television reporter Arlyn de la Cruz (January 2002, Zamboanga, for 3 months) GMA-7 television reporter Carlo Lorenzo and cameraman Gilbert Ordiales (September 2002, Jolo, for 6 days). Filipino Ces Drilon and news cameramen Jimmy Encarnacion and Angelo Valderrama released unharmed after ransom paid (June 2008 Maimbung, Sulu for 9 days; See 2008 Maimbung kidnappings). Jordanian TV journalist Baker Atyani and his two Filipino crews were kidnapped in June 2012 by the Abu Sayyaf militants they had sought to interview in the jungles of Sulu province. The two crew were freed in February 2013. Al Arabiya News Channel stated that their correspondent, Atyani, was handed over to the local governor's office on December 4, 2013. However, police and military officials could not ascertain whether Atyani had escaped from his captors or was freed. Jeffrey Schilling On August 31, 2000, American citizen and Muslim convert Jeffrey Schilling from Oakland, California, was captured on Jolo while visiting a terrorist camp with his new wife, Ivy Osani (a cousin of Abu Sabaya, one of the rebel leaders), whom he had met online. ASG demanded a $10 million ransom. Rebels also sarcastically threatened to behead him in 2001 as a "birthday present" to then Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, who responded by declaring "all-out war" on them. The beheading threat was withdrawn after Schilling's mother, Carol, flew to the Philippines and appealed for mercy on local radio. On April 12, 2001, Philippine soldiers raided a rebel camp and rescued the American. The United States praised the Philippine government for freeing Schilling. Many commentators have been critical of Schilling, who claims to have walked willingly into the camp after he was invited by his wife's cousin, a member of Abu Sayyaf. Schilling was one of more than 40 hostages taken by Abu Sayyaf in 2000, including 21 tourists and workers seized in a raid on Sipadan diving resort in neighboring Malaysia. Many of the hostages were released after Libya paid millions of dollars. A Libyan official stated that Schilling had visited the Jolo camp often before his capture. Philippine intelligence sources say he was interested in selling military equipment to the rebels, while the bandits accused him of being a CIA agent. Abu Sayyaf threatened several times to kill Schilling. At one stage, Schilling reportedly went on a hunger strike to win his freedom. Martin and Gracia Burnham On May 27, 2001, an Abu Sayyaf raid kidnapped about 20 people from Dos Palmas, an expensive resort in Honda Bay, taking them to the north of Puerto Princesa City on the island of Palawan, which had been "considered completely safe". The most "valuable" hostages were three North Americans, Martin and Gracia Burnham, a missionary couple, and Guillermo Sobero, a Peruvian-American tourist who was later beheaded, following a $1 million ransom demand. The hostages and hostage-takers then returned to Abu Sayyaf territories in Mindanao. According to Bowden, the leader of the raid was Abu Sabaya. According to Gracia Burnham, she told her husband "to identify his kidnappers" to authorities "as 'the Osama bin Laden Group,' but Burnham was unfamiliar with that name and stuck with" Abu Sayyaf. After returning to Mindanao, Abu Sayyaf conducted numerous raids, including one that culminated in the Siege of Lamitan and "one at a coconut plantation called Golden Harvest; they took about 15 people captive there and later used bolo knives to hack the heads off two men. The number of hostages waxed and waned as some were ransomed and released, new ones were taken and others were killed." On June 7, 2002, about a year after the raid, Philippine army troops conducted a rescue operation in which Martin Burnham and Filipino nurse Ediborah Yap were killed. The remaining hostage was wounded and the hostage takers escaped. In July 2004, Gracia Burnham testified at a trial of eight Abu Sayyaf members and identified six of the suspects as her captors, including Alhamzer Limbong, Abdul Azan Diamla, Abu Khari Moctar, Bas Ishmael, Alzen Jandul, and Dazid Baize. "The eight suspects sat silently during her three-hour testimony, separated from her by a wooden grill. They face the death sentence if found guilty of kidnapping for ransom. The trial began this year and is not expected to end for several months." Alhamzer Limbong was later killed in a prison uprising. Burnham claimed that Philippine military officials were colluding with her captors, saying that the Armed Forces of the Philippines "didn't pursue us ... As time went on, we noticed that they never pursued us". 2007 Father Bossi kidnapping On June 10, 2007, Italian priest Reverend Giancarlo Bossi was kidnapped near Pagadian, capital of Zamboanga del Sur Province in the southern Philippines. Pope Benedict XVI made an appeal to free him. Bossi was released on July 19, 2007, at Karumatan, a Muslim town in Lanao del Norte Province, allegedly after the payment of ransom. Father Bossi died in Italy on September 23, 2012. In December 2020, Samad Awang, alias Ahmad Jamal, of the Abdussalam kidnap-for-ransom group was killed in a firefight with government troops in Zamboanga City. Awang was reportedly involved in the kidnapping of Italian missionary Fr. Giancarlo Bossi in 2007, businessman Joel Endino in 2011, and teacher Kathy Kasipong in 2013. 2009 Red Cross kidnapping On January 15, 2009, Abu Sayyaf kidnapped International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) delegates in Patikul, Sulu Province, Philippines. Three ICRC workers had finished conducting fieldwork in Sulu province, located in the southwest of the country when they were abducted by an unknown group, later confirmed as Albader Parad's group. All three were eventually released. According to a CNN story, Parad was reportedly killed, along with five other militants, in an assault by Philippine marines in Sulu province on Sunday, February 21, 2010. 2009 Irish priest kidnapping On October 11, 2009, Irish Catholic missionary Michael Sinnott, aged 79, from Barntown County Wexford was kidnapped from a gated compound in Pagadian, the capital of Zamboanga del Sur province, suspected to be part of ASG and some renegade members of MILF. Six kidnappers forced the priest into a mini-van and drove towards Sta. Lucia (district), where they transferred to a boat. Sinnott had a heart condition and was without medication when abducted. In early November, a demand for $US2 million ransom was made. On November 11, 2009, Father Sinnott was released in Zamboanga City. The Department of Foreign Affairs (Ireland) claimed that no ransom was paid by the Irish Government. 2010 Japanese treasure hunter On July 16, 2010, Japanese national Toshio Ito was kidnapped from Pangutaran, Sulu. At one point, the Philippine police believed the "treasure hunter", a Muslim convert also known by his Muslim name Mamaito Katayama, was acting as a cook for Abu Sayyaf; however, this was disputed by other nations, including the United States, which included him on its list of kidnap victims. A classified document obtained by Rappler lists Ito first, saying he was held captive by Abu Sayyaf's most senior leader, Radullan Sahiron, in Langpas, Indanan, Sulu early in 2013. 2011 Malaysian gecko trader On May 8, 2011, Malaysian gecko trader Mohammad Nasauddin Bin Saidin was kidnapped while hunting for gecko (tuko) in Indanan, Sulu. Saidin was freed on May 12, 2012. 2011 Indian national kidnapping On June 22, 2011, Indian national Biju Kolara Veetil was captured by four armed men while visiting his wife's relatives on the island of Jolo. A$10 million ransom was demanded. Veetil later denied that he was released in August 2012 because he had converted to Islam during captivity. Warren Rodwell Warren Richard Rodwell, a former Australian Army soldier and university English teacher, was shot through the right hand when seized from his home at Ipil, Zamboanga Sibugay on the island of Mindanao in the southern Philippines on December 5, 2011 by ASG militants. Rodwell later had to have a finger amputated. ASG threatened to behead Rodwell if their $US2 million ransom demand was not met. Both the Australian and Philippine governments had strict policies against paying ransoms. Australia formed a multi-agency task force to liaise with Rodwell's family and assist Philippine authorities. A news blackout was imposed. Filipino politicians helped negotiate the release. After the payment of $AUD94,000 for "board and lodging" expenses by his siblings, Rodwell was released on March 23, 2013. Arrests and killings On June 16, 2014, suspects Jimmy Nurilla (alias Doc) and Bakrin Haris were arrested. Both reportedly worked under Basilan-based Abu Sayyaf leader Khair Mundos and Furuji Indama. Authorities believed Nurilla and Haris took part in the Rodwell kidnapping, as well as the separate abduction of US citizen Gerfa Yeatts Lunsman and her son Kevin in 2012. In January 2015, Mindanao Examiner newspaper reported the arrest of Barahama Ali kidnap gang sub-leaders linked to the kidnapping of Rodwell, who was seized by at least 5 gunmen (disguised as policemen), and eventually handed over or sold by the kidnappers to the Abu Sayyaf in Basilan province. In May 2015, ex-Philippine National Police (PNP) officer Jun A. Malban, alias Michael Zoo, was arrested in Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia, for the crime of "Kidnapping for Ransom" after Rodwell identified him as the negotiator/spokesperson. Further PNP investigation revealed that Malban is the cousin of Abu Sayyaf leaders Khair and Borhan Mundos (both of whom were arrested in 2014). The director of the Anti-Kidnapping Group (AKG) stated that Malban's arrest resulted from close co-ordination by the PNP, National Bureau of Investigation (Philippines) and Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Commission with the Malaysian counterparts and through Interpol. In January 2018, Rodwell attended a court hearing for Malban and others in Ipil, Zamboanga Sibugay, pursuant to a Supreme Court petition to transfer his case for security reasons to a court in either Manila or Zamboanga City. In August 2015, Edeliza Sumbahon Ulep, alias Gina Perez, was arrested at Trento, Agusan del Sur during a joint manhunt operation by police and military units. Ulep was tagged as the ransom courier in the kidnapping. In August 2016, The Manila Times reported the arrest of the kidnap-for-ransom group of Barahama Alih sub-leader, Hasim Calon alias Husien (also a notorious drug dealer), in his hideout in Tenan village in Ipil town. Hasim Calon was involved in Rodwell's abduction. Earlier in 2016, police forces killed Waning Abdulsalam, a former MILF leader, in the village of Singkilon. Abdulsalam was one of the most wanted criminals in the southern Philippines and connected to ASG. He was linked to the kidnappings of Rodwell in 2011, Irish missionary Michael Sinnott in 2009 in Pagadian City, and Italian Catholic priest Giancarlo Bossi in Zamboanga del Sur's Payao town in 2007. In March 2019, combined security forces of the 44th Infantry Battalion, Philippine National Police, Philippine Drugs Enforcement Agency, National Bureau of Investigation and Philippine Coast Guard arrested five members (Benhazer Anduhol, Solaiman Calonof, Nicanel Maningo, Jay-ar Abba Quartocruz and Hashim Lucas Samdani) of Barahama Alih criminal gang during drug operations with warrants in Barangay Tenan of Ipil town, Zamboanga Sibugay. Military sources allege Barahama Alih Group was responsible for a number of kidnapping incidents in previous years including the abduction of Australian national Warren Rodwell, Italian priest Giancarlo Bossi, and some local Filipinos. In February 2018, Abu Sayyaf sub-commander Nurhassan Jamiri was reported by Malaysia regional intelligence sources as one of three gunmen killed in a gunfight with police in Sabah. Jamiri was atop the Philippines' most wanted list and implicated in dozens of ransom kidnappings including Rodwell. In March 2018, Jamiri turned up alive when he and thirteen followers surrendered to authorities in Basilan. Over the preceding two years, many Abu Sayyaf bandits had surrendered to authorities in Basilan, Sulu, and Tawi-Tawi. More were expected to yield because of the regional government's Program Against Violence and Extremism (PAVE), designed to provide opportunities and interventions, including psychosocial sessions, medical check-ups, introduction to farming systems, and expository tours outside the island provinces to facilitate the reintegration of former combatants into society. In April 2018, Rodwell lauded the surrenders and reintegration program, but said he would not interfere with the legal processing of any charges already filed against anyone involved with his own kidnapping. In June 2020, Inquirer newspaper reported the killing of Mamay Aburi by government troops in Titay, Zamboanga Sibugay after authorities attended to serve a warrant of arrest. Aburi was allegedly a subleader of a kidnap-for-ransom group and had been linked with the Abu Sayyaf Group based in Sulu. The provincial director of the Criminal Investigation and Detection Group (CIDG) said Aburi was involved in the 2011 kidnapping of Australian national Warren Rodwell and the 2019 abduction of the Hyrons couple in Tukuran, Zamboanga del Sur. In February 2021, The Manila Times reported that Abu Sayyaf subleader Arrasid Halissam was shot dead when he opened fire on police serving a warrant on him in the village of Santa Maria, Zamboanga City. Halissam was linked to numerous kidnappings such as Australian adventurer Warren Rodwell, Americans Gerfa Lunsmann and son Kevin, Chinese Yuan Lin Kai and Jian Luo, South Korean Nwi Seong Hong, and almost a dozen Filipinos. Halissam was also allegedly involved in the 2015 bombing in Zamboanga that killed two people and injured over fifty others. 2012 European bird watchers On February 1, 2012, two European bird watchers were seized on Tawi Tawi island. Swiss Lorenzo Vinciguerra escaped in December 2014 as government troops attacked the jungle camp where he was captive on the island of Jolo. Vinciguerra was shot by rebels as he escaped; however, his injuries were non-life-threatening. Dutch captive Ewold Horn was reportedly unable to escape. The whereabouts of Horn remained unknown. On May 31, 2019, Western Mindanao Command confirmed that Horn was shot dead during a clash with military in Patikul, Sulu. Additionally, the military advised that the wife of ASG leader Radulan Sahiron and five other ASG members were also killed. 2012 Mayor Jeffrey Lim Kidnapping On April 2, 2012, Mayor Jeffrey Lim of Salug, Zamboanga del Norte was kidnapped by ten armed men disguised as policemen. Lim was reportedly handed over to Abu Sayyaf. On November 6, he was freed near Zamboanga City after payment of P1.3M ($US25,000) ransom. On August 9, 2013, a Mindanao Pagadian Frontline report named a "Sehar Muloc" aka "Red Eye" as a suspect in the 2012 kidnapping of Mayor Jeffrey Lim. Abner Gumandol, alias Sehar Muloc and Red Eye, was said to be the leader of a criminal syndicate called the Muloc Group. Gumandol was arrested on June 12, 2016. 2014 Kabasalan ZSP kidnapping On September 11, 2014, Chinese national Li Pei Zhei was abducted by four gunmen in Kabasalan, Zamboanga Sibugay and taken to Basilan. He was released in Sitio Lugay-Lugay, Barangay Naga-Naga, Alicia, Zamboanga Sibugay on November 5, 2014. Police subsequently charged Ibni Basaludin, Yug Enriquez, Brahama Ali, and Ging-Ging Calon, all residents of Barangay Tenan, Ipil, Zamboanga Sibugay with kidnapping with serious illegal detention. 2015 Roseller Lim ZSP kidnapping On January 24, 2015, Korean national Nwi Seong Hong was abducted by armed men in Roseller Lim, Zamboanga Sibugay Province. The victim's son, Abby, escaped after he fought off the kidnappers. According to intelligence information from the JTG-SULU, the captors of were Algabsy Misaya, Idang Susukan, Alden Bagade and Mohammad Salud alias Ama Maas, Indanan-based members led by sub-leaders Isang Susukan and Anga Adji. On October 31, 2015, the body of 74-year-old Nwi Seong Hong was found in Barangay Bangkal, Patikul, Sulu. Investigators said the victim died due to severe illness. 2015 Samal Island kidnappings On September 21, 2015, Canadians Robert Hall and John Ridsdel, as well as Norwegian Kjartan Sekkingstad, and (Hall's girlfriend) Marites Flor; a Filipino woman, were abducted on Samal Island near Davao. Ridsdel was beheaded by Abu Sayyaf on April 25, 2016, following a ransom deadline. ASG reportedly demanded more than $8.1 million for Ridsdel and the others. On May 3, 2016, a video of the Ridsdel execution was released, along with new demands for the remaining hostages. A masked captor said, "Note to the Philippine government and to the Canadian government: The lesson is clear. John Ridsdel has been beheaded. Now there are three remaining captives here. If you procrastinate once again the negotiations, we will behead this all anytime". On May 15, Hall appeared in a new video, announcing that he and Norwegian Kjartan Sekkingstad would be decapitated at 3 pm on Monday June 13 absent a ransom of $16 million. Both hostages wore orange coveralls, similar to hostages in videos produced by IS, to which Abu Sayyaf had previously pledged allegiance. The deadline passed. Hall was beheaded. On June 24, Abu Sayyaf released Filipina Marites Flor. She was subsequently flown to Davao to meet President-elect Rodrigo Duterte. Duterte said he directed negotiations with the Abu Sayyaf. He did not elaborate. On September 17, 2016, remaining hostage Norwegian Kjartan Sekkingstad was released on Jolo island. Abu Rami, an ASG spokesman, claimed $638,000 was paid as ransom. 2015 Dipolog kidnapping On October 7, 2015, Italian national and pizza restaurant owner Rolando del Torchio was kidnapped in Dipolog, the capital of Zamboanga del Norte. On April 8, 2016, Del Torchio was released and found at Jolo port aboard MV KC Beatrice bound for Zamboanga City after his family paid P29 million ($US650,000) in ransom. 2019 Tukuran kidnapping On October 4, 2019, armed men abducted British national Allan Hyrons and his Filipina wife Wilma from their beach resort in Tukuran town, Zamboanga del Sur province on the southern island of Mindanao. After a brief exchange of gunfire in November between Abu Sayyaf and Philippine troops on the island of Jolo, the couple was abandoned and rescued. No ransom was reportedly paid. In Malaysia 2000 Sipadan kidnappings On May 3, 2000, Abu Sayyaf guerrillas occupied the Malaysian dive resort island Sipadan and took 21 hostages, including 10 tourists and 11 resort workers – 19 foreign nationals in total. The hostages were taken to an Abu Sayyaf base in Jolo. Two Muslim Malaysians were released soon after. Abu Sayyaf made various demands for the release of several prisoners, including 1993 World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and $2.4 million. In July, a Filipino television evangelist and 12 of members of the Jesus Miracle Crusade Church offered their help and went as mediators for the relief of other hostages. They, three French television crew members and a German journalist, all visiting Abu Sayyaf on Jolo, were also taken hostage. Most hostages were released in August and September 2000, partly due to mediation by Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and an offer of $25 million in "development aid". Abu Sayyaf conducted a second raid on the island of Pandanan near Sipadan on September 10 and seized three more Malaysians. The Philippine army launched a major offensive on September 16, 2000, rescuing all remaining hostages, except Filipino dive instructor Roland Ullah. He was freed in 2003. Abu Sayyaf coordinated with the Chinese 14K Triad gang in carrying out the kidnappings. The 14K Triad has militarily supported Abu Sayyaf. 2013 Pom Pom kidnappings On November 15, 2013, Abu Sayyaf militants raided a resort on the Malaysian island of Pom Pom. During the ambush, Taiwanese citizen Chang An-wei was kidnapped and her husband, Hsu Li-min, was killed. Chang was taken to the Sulu Archipelago. Chang was freed in Sulu Province and returned to Taiwan on December 21. 2014 Singamata, Baik Island and Kampung Air Sapang kidnappings On April 2, 2014, a kidnap gang believed to originate from Abu Sayyaf militants raided Singamata Reef Resort off Semporna. Chinese tourist Gao Huayun from Shanghai and Filipino resort worker Marcy Dayawan were abducted and taken to the Sulu Archipelago. The two hostages were later rescued after a collaboration between Malaysian and Philippines security forces. On May 6, five Abu Sayyaf gunmen raided a Malaysian fish farm on Baik Island Sabah, kidnapped the fish farm manager and took him to Jolo island. He was freed in July with the help of Malaysian negotiators. On June 16, two gunmen believed to be from Abu Sayyaf kidnapped a Chinese fish farm manager and one Filipino worker in Kampung Air Sapang. The worker managed to escape and disappeared. Meanwhile, the fish farm manager was taken to Jolo. He was released on December 10. Malaysian authorities identified five Filipinos, the "Muktadil brothers", as responsible for these cases. They sold their hostages to the Abu Sayyaf group. Of the five Muktadil brothers: Mindas Muktadil was killed by Philippine police in May 2015, Kadafi Muktadil was arrested in late 2015, Nixon Muktadil and Brown Muktadil were killed by the Philippine military on September 27, 2016, after they resisted arrest, while Badong Muktadil succumbed to his injuries while fleeing after he was shot when his brothers was killed. His body was discovered in a pump boat in Mususiasi. 2015 Ocean King Restaurant kidnappings On May 15, 2015, four armed Abu Sayyaf members kidnapped two Malaysian nationals from Ocean King Restaurant in an upscale resort in Sandakan, Sabah and took them to Parang, Sulu. Police identified the leaders of the group behind the abduction as Alhabsy Misaya, Alden Bagade and Angah Adji. On November 8, Thien Nyuk Fun, the seafood restaurant owner, was released after payment of 30 million pesos ($US675,000) ransom. The initial agreement of 30 million pesos was reportedly for both hostages; however, a faction within the Abu Sayyaf Group demanded more after Thien Nyuk Fun was released. Further negotiations broke down and the other hostage, electrical engineer Bernard Then, was beheaded on Jolo Island on November 17. Philippines and Malaysia waters 2014 German sailors kidnapping In April 2014, Germans Dr. Stefan Viktor Okonek and Henrike Dielen were captured on their yacht on the high seas near Borneo. Abu Sayyaf threatened to behead one of them. After payment of $US5.6 million in October 2014, the pair were released in Patikul, Sulu. 2016 Local and foreign sailors kidnappings On March 26, 2016, ten Indonesian seafarers were held hostage by ASG operating in Sulu Archipelago. They were abducted from the Brahma 12 tugboat and the Anand 12 barge near Tawi-Tawi province. The Indonesian vessels were freighting coal from South Borneo heading for Batangas port when hijacked. In April, the Indonesian government announced that the company that owned tugboat Brahma 12 had agreed to pay the 50-million-peso ($1 million) ransom. On May 2, they were released. On April 1, four Malaysian sailors aboard a tugboat from Manila were kidnapped when they arrived near the shore of Ligitan Island. Their companions, three Myanmar nationals and two Indonesians, were unharmed. On June 8, they were released. On April 15, four Indonesian sailors were kidnapped when two Indonesian tugboats from Cebu, Henry and Cristi, were attacked by Abu Sayyaf militants. While five of the passengers were safe, one was shot before he was rescued. They were released on May 11. A group of concerned Filipinos in Sabah urged Philippine president-elect Rodrigo Duterte to intervene for the release of four Malaysians held hostage by Abu Sayyaf. The issue strained the relationship between the Philippines and Malaysia. On June 21, seven Indonesian sailors were kidnapped while aboard a tugboat passing through the Sulu Archipelago. On July 9, three Indonesian fishermen were kidnapped near the coast of Lahad Datu, Sabah, Malaysia and released on September 17. On July 18, five Malaysian sailors were abducted near the coast of Lahad Datu. On August 3, an Indonesian sailor was kidnapped in the waters of Malaysia leaving two other crew members unharmed. This incident was reported by victims on August 5. Two of the hostages managed to escape after receiving persistent threats of beheading. On September 10, three Filipino fishermen were kidnapped on the shores of Pom Pom Island. On September 22, another Indonesian hostage was released. On September 27, one Malaysian boat-skipper was kidnapped from his trawler by seven armed militants before the group attacked another Indonesian trawler; however, no kidnappings were committed in the second incident. The hostage was released on October 1, with no ransom demand, along with three Indonesians hostages who were released the same day. On October 21, approximately ten Abu Sayyaf militants attacked a South Korean-bound vessel named MV Dongbang Gian and abducted a South Korean skipper and a Filipino crewman off Bongao, Tawi-Tawi. On November 5, German sailor Sabine Merz was shot dead while her husband Jürgen Kantner was abducted from their yacht off Tanjong Luuk Pisuk in Sabah. On or before February 27, 2017, Kantner was beheaded after a ransom of 30 million pesos ($US600,000) was not paid. On November 11, Vietnamese vessel MV Royale 16 with nineteen sailors on board was attacked by Abu Sayyaf near Basilan, abducting six sailors and injuring one. The remaining thirteen sailors were released. On November 20, two Indonesian fishermen were kidnapped by five gunmen off Lahad Datu. Due to the increase of attacks against foreign vessels by Abu Sayyaf, the governments of Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines agreed to jointly patrol their waters on May 5, 2016. The three countries formed another agreement on joint air patrols. During the first six months of 2016, Abu Sayyaf made $7.3 million, equivalent to Php 353 million, from ransom payoffs. Beheadings As part of its kidnap-for-ransom operations, the Abu Sayyaf has executed some of their male hostages if ransom demands were not met. The group had previously beheaded Christian civilians and others they consider kafir without demanding ransoms for their release, due to their religious affiliation. Bombings 2004 Superferry 14 Bombing Superferry 14 was a large ferry destroyed by a bomb on February 27, 2004, killing 116 people in the Philippines' worst terrorist attack and the world's deadliest terrorist attack at sea. On that day, the 10,192 ton ferry sailed out of Manila with about 900 passengers and crew on board. A television set filled with 8 lb. (4 kilograms) of TNT had been placed on board. 90 minutes out of port, the bomb exploded. 63 people were killed instantly and 53 were missing and presumed dead. Despite claims from terrorist groups, the blast was initially thought to have been an accident caused by a gas explosion. However, after divers righted the ferry five months after it had sunk, they found evidence of a bomb blast. A man called Redendo Cain Dellosa admitted to planting the bomb for Abu Sayyaf. Six suspects were arrested in connection with the bombing while the masterminds, Khadaffy Janjalani and Abu Sulaiman, were killed. 2016 Davao City bombing On September 2, 2016, an explosion occurred at a night market in Davao City, Philippines killing at least 15 and injuring 70. Shortly before the bombing, Abu Sayyaf made a threat following the intensified military operation against them. Abu Sayyaf spokesperson Abu Rami was reported to claim responsibility. He later denied the report and any involvement, saying a group allied to them; the Daulat Ul-Islamiya were responsible. Although the Abu Sayyaf spokesman denied involvement, the Philippine government blame the group. 2019 Jolo Cathedral bombings On January 27, 2019, two bombs detonated at the Roman Catholic Cathedral of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Jolo town which is the center of Abu Sayyaf stronghold. The bombings resulting to eighteen people were killed while 82 others were injured, mostly from Philippine Army's 35th Battalion and civilians inside the church. The Philippine military said the Abu Sayyaf under the faction of Ajang-Ajang are responsible which is also echoed by peace advocate with evidence from military intelligence operatives that they have intercepted plans of the latter to bomb the other parts of downtown Jolo months before. The bombings took place a week after a referendum for the creation of Bangsamoro Autonomous Region with the attacks is described as the opposition by the Abu Sayyaf group for their areas inclusion under the Bangsamoro authorities since the whole Sulu province itself is already known to be against the referendum with 163,526 oppose votes (54.3%). Criticism of attacks against civilians Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi in Qatar denounced the kidnappings and killings committed by Abu Sayyaf, asserting that they are not part of the dispute between the Abu Sayyaf and the Philippine government. He stated that it is shameful to commit such acts in the name of the Islamic faith, saying that such acts produce backlash against Islam and Muslims. During the 2000 Sipadan kidnappings, the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) condemned the kidnapping and offered to help secure their release. OIC Secretary General Azeddine Laraki told the Philippine government he was prepared to send an envoy to help save the hostages and issued a statement condemning the rebels. "The Secretary General has pointed out that this operation and the like are rejected by divine laws and that they are neither the appropriate nor correct means to resolve conflicts", the statement said. The terrorism against civilians committed were condemned by MNLF and MILF, who said that Abu Sayyaf strayed from their real paths of struggle, with MILF labeling Abu Sayyaf as "anti-Islam" soon after Ridsdel's beheading in 2016. MNLF described the group as "causing chaos to their community". Both Christian and Muslim groups in the Philippines condemned Abu Sayyaf beheadings. The kidnappings were criticized by Indonesia. On July 14, 2016, a group of Indonesian protesters gathered in front of the Philippine Embassy in Jakarta, holding banners that read "Go to hell Philippines and Abu Sayyaf" and "Destroy the Philippines and Abu Sayyaf" due to what was seen as the lack of action from the Philippine government. The group demanded a large scale military operation to destroy the Abu Sayyaf, with the Indonesian military proposing to send its forces to the Philippines prior to the protest, only to be rejected by the Philippine government on constitutional grounds. Military operations The Philippine military has engaged Abu Sayyaf since the 1990s. Under President Duterte, the Philippine government sought a peace agreement with the MNLF and MILF, but not the "bunch of criminals" in Abu Sayyaf. The Philippine military intensified operations in 2003, following the arrest of a Filipino-American who was alleged to have sold illegal weapons to the group. The suspect was tagged by US authorities as "one of the United States' most wanted fugitives". He was then deported by the Philippine government to face legal action in the United States. On July 29, 2016, the military gained control of an Abu Sayyaf stronghold in Tipo-Tipo. The Philippine military pledged to eliminate Abu Sayyaf. On August 25, President Duterte ordered the group to be "destroyed" after it beheaded a teenager. Following the incident, the Philippine military sent thousands of troops to fight and destroy Abu Sayyaf. Filipino Army Major Filemon Tan said, "The order of the president is to search and destroy the Abu Sayyaf so that's what we are doing". Both MNLF and MILF began helping to suppress extremism in Mindanao, which helps the peace process for both groups. Philippine security forces collaborated with Malaysia and Indonesia to maintain security in the Sulu Sea. The Indonesian government proposed to station army units in Mindanao to launch a major offensive against Abu Sayyaf. The Indonesian government called on the Malaysian and Philippine armies to launch combined land attacks together on Mindanao, while at the same time urging the Philippine government to allow Indonesia and Malaysia military forces to enter Philippine territory. The Vietnamese military started to hold military exercises against Abu Sayyaf (known locally as "pirates" by the Vietnamese) following the repeat kidnappings of Malaysian and Indonesian sailors. The Philippine military provided one battalion to go against each subgroup. On September 9, following the meeting between President Duterte and Indonesian President Joko Widodo, an agreement was reached to pursue the Abu Sayyaf. The Philippine President said in a statement: However, the government of Indonesia decided to not launch a military operation in the southern Philippines, stating that there is enough Philippine military personnel had been deployed. Indonesia's view was seconded by Malaysia. Philippine military chief Ricardo Visaya warned the Abu Sayyaf that they would continue with further major military operations. The military chief gave notice to Abu Sayyaf members to surrender or be "neutralised", (killed or apprehended). Some 20 Abu Sayyaf surrendered in Sumisip on September 22. The day before, Philippine armed forces confiscated 200 speedboats used by the Abu Sayyaf in Basilan, Sulu, Tawi-Tawi and Zamboanga. President Duterte rejected a proposal by Nur Misuari, the leader of MNLF to include Abu Sayyaf in peace talks. On September 27, another attempt to smuggle weapons to Abu Sayyaf was prevented by the Philippine National Police in San Juan City. Four people were arrested. By October 14, the Philippine military had launched 579 military operations, 426 of which were focused to "neutralise" group members. 54 engagements resulted in 56 Abu Sayyaf members killed, 21 surrendered and 17 arrested. Abu Sayyaf fatalities then increased to 102, with seven more apprehended. Notable Abu Sayyaf leaders were killed, including Nelson Muktadil, Braun Muktadil, their sub-leader Mohammad Said, Jamiri Jawhari, Musanna Jamiri, the group spokesman Abu Rami and Alhabsy Misaya. In addition, another 165 fast boats used for transport and kidnapping activities were confiscated. By April 13, 2017, 50 more ASG members had surrendered. In the same month, Philippine authorities discovered the presence of militants from Indonesia and Malaysia killed during the ongoing operations (notable foreigners such as Sanusi, Zulkifli Abdhir, Ibrahim Ali, Mohd Najib Husen and Mohisen were among the dead) as well the presence of a "traitor" among their security members when a top policewoman was caught for her ties with the group. Indonesia admitted the presence of its citizens who came from North Sulawesi and said they could not prevent them from joining, given the lack of security on their borders. Malaysia discovered that militants were using Sabah as a transit point. The two pledged to prevent cross-border terrorism and curb the activities of militants Early on November 26, 2016, Duterte stated that he would open peace talks with Abu Sayyaf group (as he did with the MNLF and MILF by offering federalism as a possible solution) while continuing to fight against the Maute group, a move criticized by Philippine analysts as it would be used by extreme rebels to claim for legitimacy as a group. In a statement, the President said: His statements were criticized by national media as leading to confusion about whether he wanted peace talks. Another IS-linked group, the Maute emerged in 2016. On December 7, Duterte told the Indonesian and Malaysian leaders that "they can bomb the Abu Sayyaf along with the hostages if the Abu Sayyaf continue to present persistent threats and the hostages should already know that there is repeated warnings to not go there". In early 2019, Duterte emphatically stated that he would never initiate or agree to any peace talks with Abu Sayyaf due to his detestation for the group's record of atrocities and its treatment of innocent people as young as 8 years old. In the aftermath of the 2019 Jolo Cathedral bombings, President Duterte ordered an "All-Out-War" directive against the Abu Sayyaf Group, which led to heavy ground operations, massive airstrikes, artillery bombardment in surrounding areas, the evacuation of civilian in other areas, and the creation of the 11th Infantry Division of the Philippine Army. See also Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters Siege of Marawi Notes References External links Most Wanted Terrorists, Federal Bureau of Investigation, US Department of Justice Council on Foreign Relations: Abu Sayyaf Group (Philippines, Islamist separatists) Reward For Information (on five ASG members), Rewards for Justice Program, US Department of State Looking for al-Qaeda in the Philippines Balik-Terrorism: The Return of Abu Sayyaf (PDF), Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College The bloodstained trail of the Abu Sayyaf, Agence France-Presse Jihadist groups Organizations based in Asia designated as terrorist Organized crime groups in the Philippines Organisations designated as terrorist by Australia Organisations designated as terrorist by Japan Salafi jihadists Organizations designated as terrorist by Canada

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentine%20cuisine

Argentine cuisine

Argentine cuisine is described as a blending of cultures, from the Indigenous peoples of Argentina who focused on ingredients such as humita, potatoes, cassava, peppers, tomatoes, beans, and yerba mate, to Mediterranean influences brought by the Spanish during the colonial period. This led to cultural blending of criollos (gauchos and early Spanish settlers), Indigenous, and sub-Saharan African (due to slave trading) in the cuisine. Later, this was complemented by the significant influx of Italian and Spanish immigrants to Argentina during the 19th and 20th centuries, who incorporated plenty of their food customs and dishes such as pizzas, pasta and Spanish tortillas. Beef is a main part of the Argentine diet due to its vast production in the country's plains. In fact, Argentine annual consumption of beef has averaged per capita, approaching per capita during the 19th century; consumption averaged in 2007. Beyond asado (the Argentine barbecue), no other dish more genuinely matches the national identity. Nevertheless, the country's vast area, and its cultural diversity, have led to a local cuisine of various dishes. The great immigratory waves consequently imprinted a large influence in the Argentine cuisine, after all Argentina was the second country in the world with the most immigrants with 6.6 million, only second to the United States with 27 million, and ahead of other immigratory receptor countries such as Canada, Brazil, Australia, etc. Argentine people have a reputation for their love of eating. Social gatherings are commonly centred on sharing a meal. Invitations to have dinner at home are generally viewed as a symbol of friendship, warmth, and integration. Sunday family lunch is considered the most significant meal of the week, whose highlights often include asado or pasta. Another feature of Argentine cuisine is the preparation of homemade food such as French fries, patties, and pasta to celebrate a special occasion, to meet friends, or to honour someone. Homemade food is also seen as a way to show affection. Argentine restaurants include a great variety of cuisines, prices, and flavours. Large cities tend to host everything from high-end international cuisine to bodegones (inexpensive traditional hidden taverns), less stylish restaurants, and bars and canteens offering a range of dishes at affordable prices. History Amerindians lived in Argentina thousands of years before European explorers arrived. They mostly lived off of agriculture, as well as hunting, gathering, and fishing. Generally, the most common crops at this time were maize, potatoes, common beans, quinoa, and squash. The Argentinian native people could be divided in three groups based on their main modality of acquiring food: Hunters and gatherers who inhabited the Patagonia, Pampa, and Chaco regions. Farmers in the northwestern, Cuyo, and Cordoba's mountain regions who mostly grew squash, melons, and sweet potatoes. These groups had great influence from Andean-Incan tradition. Farmers in the Mesopotamia plains who belonged to the guaraní culture. Spanish settlers came to Argentina in 1536 and began building chacras where Amerindians would work to harvest the food. The arrival of Europeans brought Argentina into the Columbian Exchange, with ingredients from the Old World such as wheat, grapevine, figs, and several kinds of fruits being introduced to the country for the first time. It was also during the Spanish colonial period that cattle, goat, and pig farming were first introduced to Argentina, forming the foundation of the large Argentine beef industry. Between 1853 and 1955, 6.6 million immigrants came to live in Argentina from Europe (especially from Italy, Wales, Germany and Switzerland), the Near and Middle East, Russia and Japan. They contributed to the development of Argentine cuisine by encouraging the production of a wider variety of foods. They also bought lands where they built chacras and encouraged the growth of farming. By this point, Argentina was the country with most immigrants only second to the United States. During the XIX century, social standing was not associated with access to food. The price of beef, fish, and bird meats was cheap and accessible. However, grains and wheat was scarce so bread was very expensive. Some of the most common dishes during this time were soups with pork chunks, cooked partridge with legumes, spinach bread, beef slices, and lamb stew. The most prominent spices were garlic, parsley, and pepper. By the turn of the century, Argentine Cuisine was on a constant decline due to shortage of several ingredients. However, eating habits began to shift with further immigration which facilitated a gastronomic revolution. Most immigrants in the 1900s came from Italy and Spain. The Italians introduced pizza, as well as a variety of pasta dishes, including spaghetti and lasagna. British, German, Jewish, and other immigrants also settled in Argentina, all bringing their styles of cooking and favorite foods with them. The British brought tea, starting the tradition of teatime. All of these cultures influenced the dishes of Argentina. At this time, Italian cuisine began to really become a part of the cuisine. The neighborhood of La Boca, Buenos Aires, was the first big Italian hub, and from here plenty of traditionally Italian ingredients and eating habits expanded across the country. Different kinds of pastas such as long noodles or tallarines, gnocchi, ravioli, and cannelloni filled with ricotta cheese became popular along with pizza, fainá (Argentinian version of the traditional Italian farinata), and milanesas. Different ways of preparing dishes were also adopted from Italian immigrants. These included the preparation of ice cream, fish, and shellfish. Spanish immigrants also left their mark, popularizing eating dry nuts, tomato sauce, pesto, olives, and olive oil. Additionally, deli stores started to incorporate traditional Iberian hams and sausages and great varieties of cheeses yet these were more limited. They were also mainly responsible for the massive diffusion of wine consumption, among some other habits. This occurred at the same time that other global products began arriving to Argentina such as saffron, cod, different varieties of beans, chickpeas, additional spices, chocolates, and tea. Typical foods Most regions of Argentina are known for their beef-oriented diet. Grilled meat from the asado (barbecue) is a staple, with steak and beef ribs especially common. The term asado itself refers to long strips of flank-cut beef ribs. Popular items such as chorizo (pork sausage), morcilla (blood sausage), chinchulines (chitterlings), mollejas (sweetbread), and other parts of the animal are also enjoyed. In Patagonia, however, lamb and chivito (goat) are eaten more frequently than beef. Whole lambs and goats are traditionally cooked over an open fire in a technique known as asado a la estaca. The most common condiment for asado is chimichurri, a sauce of herbs, garlic and vinegar. Unlike other preparations, Argentines do not include chilli in their version of chimichurri, but it does include a still-spicy, but milder form of red pepper, ají molido. Breaded and fried meats (milanesas) are used as snacks, in sandwiches, or eaten warm with mashed potatoes, purée. Empanadas, small pastries of meat, cheese, sweet corn, and many other fillings, are a common sight at parties and picnics, or as starters to a meal. They also vary in their looks, since they are folded with a traditional decorative edging called repulgue. The repulgue is not just aesthetic, but also serves as a way to identify the flavor of each empanada since they are traditionally ordered in dozens where people mix and match flavors. Empanadas are one of the most important staples of this country due to the wide array of varieties. The empanadas seen in Argentina today originate from a Spanish dish from the fifteenth century where travelers used easy-to-carry bread and filled it with a variety of ingredients. Eventually it evolved into a popular gastronomic item and spread across the world. Variations of empanadas both inside and outside of Argentina include the empanada gallega (Galician empanada), a large round meat pie made most commonly with tuna and mackerel (caballa in Spanish). Vegetables and salads are also eaten by Argentines; tomatoes, onions, lettuce, eggplants, squashes, and zucchini are common side dishes. Italian staples, such as pizza and pasta, are eaten as commonly as beef. Fideos (noodles), tallarines (fettuccine and tagliatelle), ñoquis (gnocchi) are traditionally served on the 29th day of the month, ravioles, and canelones (cannelloni) can be bought freshly made in many establishments in the larger cities. Italian-style ice cream is served in large parlours and even drive-through businesses. Other Italian staples are polenta, tarta pascualina, and pastafrola. In Chubut, the Welsh community is known for its teahouses, offering scones and torta galesa, which is rather like torta negra. A fosforito is a ham and cheese sandwich using puff pastry as the bread. Sandwiches de miga are delicate sandwiches made with crustless buttered English bread, very thinly sliced cured meat, cheese, and lettuce. They are often purchased from entrepreneurial home cooks and may be eaten for a light evening meal. A sweet paste, dulce de leche is another treasured national food, used to fill cakes and pancakes, spread over toasted bread for breakfast, or served with ice cream. In terms of sweets, Alfajores are another key staple. These are shortbread cookies sandwiched together with chocolate and dulce de leche or a fruit paste. The "policeman's" or "truck driver's" sweet is cheese with quince paste or dulce de membrillo. Dulce de batata is made of sweet potato/yam: this with cheese is the Martín Fierros sweet. Additionally, ice cream shops or heladerias are a big boom especially in the city of Buenos Aires. Argentinian ice cream comes in plenty of flavors (from fruits to cheesecake and even duce de leche flavors) and has a special smoothness as it follows a recipe very similar to that of Italian gelato. Apples, pears, peaches, kiwifruits, avocados, and plums are major exports. A traditional drink of Argentina is an infusion called mate (in Spanish, mate, with the accent on the first syllable [MAH-teh]). The name comes from the hollow gourd from which it is traditionally drunk. The mate (gourd) or other small cup is filled about three-quarters full with yerba mate, the dried leaves and twigs of the Ilex paraguariensis. The drink, which is rather bitter, is sipped through a metal or cane straw called a bombilla. Mate can be sweetened with sugar, or flavoured with aromatic herbs or dried orange peel. Hot but not boiling water is poured into the gourd, drunk, then the mate is refilled. The mate is nearly full of leaves, so each refill only makes a small drink, but many refills are possible before the yerba is spent. In small gatherings it is traditional for one mate to be passed from person to person, filled by whoever has the kettle. It is customary not to thank the refiller routinely; a final gracias (thank you) implies that the drinker has had enough. Drinking mate together is an important social ritual. Mate cocido is the same leaf, which rather than brewed is boiled and served, like tea, with milk and sugar to taste. Other typical drinks include wine (sometimes with soda water added); tea and coffee are equally important. Quilmes is the national brand of pale lager, named after the town of Quilmes, Buenos Aires, where it was first produced. Ingredients Argentine cuisine uses locally-grown cereals, grains, oil seeds, fruits and vegetables, as well as meat. Meat products have been dominant in the country since the 16th century. The country is regarded as a major beef, pork and poultry producing and consuming country. Certain areas such as those located in the south are usually engaged in activities involving sheep and lamb breeding, and shellfish, crustaceans, molluscs and salmonides fishing. The vast breeding activity involving any type of cattle has given rise to a highly developed dairy industry that includes products like cow, sheep and camelide, dulce de leche and yogurts. Some of the cheeses from Argentina are reggianito, sardo, provoleta and cremoso. Argentina can also be conceived as a great industry engaged in the production of dried fruits, olives, all types of oils and spices. In the Mesopotamia region, river fish such as silverside, surubi, dorado or boga are common. Regional differences Argentine cuisine is heavily influenced by its European roots and has regional variations. Asado, dulce de leche, empanadas, and yerba mate are found throughout Argentina. In many parts of the country, food is prepared differently and different kinds of foods are made; this includes to a smaller degree food from pre-Columbian times, as in the Northwest. Central region and la Pampa This region is composed of the city of Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires Province, Córdoba, La Pampa, Santa Fe, and Entre Ríos. This region, especially within the larger urban areas of Buenos Aires, Rosario, and Córdoba welcomed European immigrants. These were especially of Italian and Spanish descent. Nevertheless, there was also a migratory flow of German, Swiss, and Middle Eastern immigrants arriving in Argentina. As a result, dishes such as pasta, pizza, pucheros (stews), croquetas (fritters), sauces, embutidos (sausages), and chicken and meat courses brought a wider scope of options to daily menus. The bread-making, dessert, pastry, and dairy industries have achieved considerable development in this region. The above-mentioned dishes have developed a distinctively Argentine nuance. That is why, for example, Argentine pasta includes a wide variety of dishes ranging from spaghetti, fusiles (fusilli), ñoquis (gnocchi), ravioli, cintas (pasta ribbons), and lasagne to the Argentine-made sorrentinos, agnolottis (agnolotti), canelones (cannelloni), and fetuchines (fettuccine). Pizza—made with very thin, and sometimes thick, high-rising doughs, with or without cheese, cooked in the oven or a la piedra (on a stone oven), and stuffed with numerous ingredients—is a dish which can be found in nearly every corner of the country. Buenos Aires, Rosario, and Córdoba also serve it with fainá, which is a chick pea-flour dough placed over the piece of pizza. People say that what makes Argentine pizza unique is the blending of Italian and Spanish cultures. At the turn of the 19th century, immigrants from Naples and Genoa opened the first pizza bars, though Spanish residents subsequently owned most of the pizza businesses. Bread products are consumed all around the country. The deeply rooted bread, pastry, and dessert-making tradition derive from blending the above nationalities' products. Bakeries sell not only a wide scope of bread, cookies, and cakes, but also pastries. The latter resembles a sort of roll pastry whose main dough ingredient is either butter or fat and which may be simple or stuffed with dulce de leche, milk, jam, crema pastel, or quince or apple jelly, among other fillings. The most popular type of pastry is said to be that of medialunas (singular: medialuna, literally half-moon, that is to say, crescent), based upon French croissants. Sandwiches de miga are another type of bread products; they are made only with thin layers of white bread (generally referred to as crustless bread) and stuffed with food items ranging from ham and cheese to other more sophisticated combinations such as raw ham, tomatoes, olives, hard-boiled eggs, tuna, lettuce, red pepper, and the like. Desserts and sweets are usually stuffed or covered with dulce de leche. The latter can be eaten alone or on top of cakes, alfajores, panqueques (crepes), and pastries, or as a topping spread over flan de leche. Chantilly cream is widely consumed and used in preparing sweets and desserts. Additionally, cakes, sponge cakes, and puddings are very popular dishes. Italian ice creams in this region also achieved a significant degree of development by adding local flavours that somehow preserved the local spirit involved in their preparation. Although asado is eaten all over the country, its origin may be traced back to the Pampas. It entails many types of meat, which are generally eaten as follows: achuras (offal), morcilla (blood sausage), and sometimes also a provoleta (a piece of provolone cheese cooked on the grill with oregano) are eaten first. Then comes the choripán (a kind of spiced sausage made with pork or lamb and placed between two slices of bread), and finally meat such as asado de tira, vacío (flank steak), lomo (tenderloin), colita de cuadril (rump), matambre (rolled stuffed steak cut into slices and served cold), entraña (hanger steak); the list is never-ending. Cabrito al asador (roast kid or goat) is frequently eaten in the province of Córdoba. Northwest and Cuyo This region includes the provinces of Jujuy, Salta, Catamarca, Tucumán, Santiago del Estero, La Rioja, San Juan, Mendoza, and San Luis. It is also regarded as the one most influenced by Native Americans, and its foods are closely linked to the Andean-Incan tradition. When preparing regional dishes, potatoes and corn or wheat are almost always used, including quinoa (a cereal typically used in Incan cuisine), peppers, squashes, tomatoes and in some provinces beans. The most celebrated dishes are humita and tamal, in which the corn husk is stuffed with the corn filling itself, seasonings or meat. This region is the most suitable to taste empanadas, particularly those stuffed with meat and offering different types of tempting varieties such as the meat empanada, salteña also filled with potatoes, or the empanada tucumana, which is stuffed with matambre and cut with a knife, or empanadas made with cheese. Empanadas are individual-sized and closed savoury pastries which may be fried or baked in the oven and are generally eaten with the hands. Stews such as locro, carbonada, pollo al disco, and cazuelas (casseroles) are also typical dishes characterizing this region, which also include pumpkin or potato pudding stuffed with meat. There are also some local holidays in this region related to food. For example, in Salta they hold a festival dedicated to a locally grown bean similar to Edamame. During this holiday, the traditional foods of corn and beans are celebrated. Meals of all kinds are eaten, always with these two ingredients as a side dish, and even competitions of who can eat a set number of beans in the shortest period of time are held. Mesopotamia The humid and verdant area of north-east Argentina known as Mesopotamia, comprising the provinces of Chaco, Corrientes, Misiones and Formosa is another area heavily influenced by Native Americans, particularly by the Guaraní tribe. Abounding in rivers and shores, it offers a wide diversity of fish species, such as dorado, pacú, surubi, boga and silverside. Widely grown in this area, cassava is typically included in the region's dishes, as are other components of meals, such as the chipá (cassava and cheese bread). However, in this area Cassava is cooked alone too, boiled or fried, often as a side dish for Asado and empanadas. As well, mbeyú, chipá avatí, sopa paraguaya, sopa correntina, chipa solo or chipá con carne, el quibebé, el borí borí, chipá guasú o pastel de choclo, mbaipy, chipá mbocá o chipá caburé and some other similar meals that have as basis:manioc, corn, cheese and, sometimes, some meat.. Chipá from Cassava is often eaten during breakfast with yerba mate, prepared with hot water, or with café con leche. Sopa Paraguaya and pastel/Carta de Choclo are eaten for lunch or dinner. As regards products made with sugar, Papaya (mamón in Argentine Spanish) jam is typical of the north of this region. The principal product of this region is certainly yerba mate. Consumed countrywide, this product features a peculiarity of its own in this area: it is not only prepared with hot water but, driven by the region's high temperatures, it is common to see it prepared with cold water as well, in which case the beverage is known as tereré. Patagonia The large southern region of Patagonia is made up of the provinces Neuquén, Río Negro, Chubut, Santa Cruz and Tierra del Fuego. This area also includes the Antarctica and Islas del Atlántico Sur. (or southern atlantic islands). Their most typical food ingredients include fish and seafood from the sea and rivers and the products of the sheep that are widely farmed there. Marine species such as salmon, spider crabs, squid and other shellfish and molluscs may be caught in the Atlantic Ocean. There are trout in the rivers. The many berries grown in the area include cherries, bilberries, strawberries, rosa mosqueta and elders, which are made into jams. The Northern and Central European settlements in this region have built up large-scale production of chocolate and its by-products. Viennese and German cuisine and pastries are also typically associated with this region. Mutton and lamb, together with wild boar and venison tend to make up the region's meat-based dishes. Also typical of the southern region are smoked products, including salmon, stag, wild boar, and pheasant. Patagonia has been profoundly influenced by the tribes living there since long before Europeans arrived, in particular, the Mapuches and the Araucanos. A typical dish prepared by the latter is the curanto (a term meaning "hot stone"). Its preparation involves making a fire in a hole about 150 cm deep in the ground, and heating stones in it. A bed of nalca or maqui leaves is arranged on top of the stones, and ingredients are added in turn on top. Ingredients vary, but may include beef, lamb, pork, chicken, Argentine chorizos (pork sausages), potatoes, sweet potatoes, apples and holed squashes filled with cheese, cream and peas. The food is covered with leaves and damp pieces of cloth to keep the heat in, and covered with plenty of soil. Alcoholic beverages Though wine (vino) has traditionally been the most popular alcoholic beverage in Argentina, beer (cerveza; the Italian birra is frequently used) in recent decades has competed with wine in popularity. Breweries appeared in Argentina at the end of the 1860s, started by Alsatian colonists. The first were nearly all in the downtown of Buenos Aires (el égido de la Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires), and soon Polish brewers began industrial production of beer: San Carlos in the province of Santa Fe, Río Segundo and Córdoba in the province of Córdoba, Quilmes and Llavallol on the outskirts of La Plata (in Buenos Aires Province), San Miguel de Tucumán in the province of Tucumán and on the outskirts of the cities of Mendoza and Salta. The local consumption of beer has risen dramatically in the last generation: Argentines consumed 233 million litres in 1980 and 1.57 billion in 2007 (40 litres per capita). Outpacing that of wine since 2001, the growing production and consumption of beer have supported the existence of related events, for example, beer festivals called Oktoberfests or "Fiestas de la Cerveza" in locations that have a significant German population (Villa General Belgrano in Córdoba, San Carlos and Esperanza in the province of Santa Fe, etc.). Such celebrations copy, in an Argentine manner, Munich's Oktoberfest, and similarly are tourist attractions. However, the presence of a vigorous population of Celtic lineage, principally of Irish origin, has supported the creation of other celebrations of beer, often for marketing purposes, such as Saint Patrick's Day (Día de San Patricio), patron of Ireland, which is celebrated with abundant libations. The consumption of alcoholic beverages in Argentina is similar to that of the United States and somewhat lower than the Western European average. Argentines enjoy a variety of alcoholic beverages and Argentina can boast a varied array of elaboraciones, whether industrial or artisanal. Besides beer and wine, Argentines frequently drink cider (here again, the heritage comes from Spain and Italy, more precisely from Asturias and Campania). Cider is the most popular beverage of the middle and lowers economic classes at Christmas and New Year (the upper classes proverbially preferring to celebrate with locally produced champagne, although real old-line "creole" aristocrats will still drink cider, which is much more traditional). Other widely consumed spirits are aguardiente (firewater) made from sugar cane, known as caña quemada ("burnt cane") or, simply, 'caña'''' ("cane"). A folkloric note about caña quemada: until 21 June it is traditional to drink caña quemada with ruda macho (a variant of common rue), it is supposed that this mixture prevents the flu and other illnesses. Caña competes, mainly in rural areas, with gin ("ginebra"—as in the Dutch kind of gin.) The bitter spirit Fernet, and particularly the Italian brand Fernet-Branca, is highly popular in Argentina. (A study in 2017 found that Argentines consume more than 75% of all fernet produced globally.) Fernet is most commonly enjoyed as a mixed drink with Coca-Cola. Given Fernet's qualities as a digestive aid, it is a common choice for an after-dinner digestif. There are many artisanally produced liqueurs (distilled, flavoured alcoholic beverages) in Argentina, for example, those flavoured with orange, egg, anise, coffee, cherry and, inevitably, dulce de leche. The Hesperidina is a type of liqueur made from orange peels, invented in Argentina around 1890. One may also encounter chitronchelo or (in Italian) citronella, based on lemon. This beverage arrived with immigrants from the Mezzogiorno and is produced both artisanally and industrially (for example, at Mar del Plata). Non-alcoholic specialties Argentines enjoy a wide variety of non-alcoholic infusions (although now and then both "families" are mixed; the for example, is mate mixed with caña or gin). Among these, mate has long been the most widely enjoyed; in 2006, over 700,000 metric tons were harvested in Argentina, mostly for domestic consumption. Mate is also one of the top exports from Argentina, as it is valued all over the world. The fact that mate is so prevalent in the Southern Cone, however, should not necessarily make visitors think that other infusions are rare in the region; in Argentina especially, given the strong European cultural imprint, the consumption of coffee is very common (141 cups per capita, annually). Chocolate infusions are also popular (the eating of chocolate is a Spanish influence, although the plant originated in Mesoamerica). This consumption grows during autumn and winter, or in the cold regions of the country; there are two dates where consumption of chocolate infusions is traditional in the primary educational centres: 25 May and 9 July, that is, the two national dates of Argentina. English cultural influence (reinforced at the end of the 19th century and the beginnings of the 20th by British contacts with the Far East) has also made the consumption of tea very common. Medicinal herbs are common in the whole country; among the most popular are: chamomile, lanceleaf, boldo, poleo, peperina, carqueja, thyme, canchalagua, rue (macho and hembra, that is, "male" and "female"), mallow, rosemary, passion flower, bira bira, palán palán, muña muña, to mention only the main ones. Many of these herbs are also used in apéritifs and bitters, whether alcoholic or not. Popular short-order dishes Common restoranes or restaurantes and (grill restaurants) nearly anywhere in Argentina today serve (into the small hours) quickly prepared meals that in the course of the 20th century came to be known as minutas, "short-order dishes". Some of the dishes included in the category of minutas are milanesas, churrascos, bifes (beefsteaks), escalopes, tallarines, ravioles (ravioli), ñoquis (gnocchi), although some are very typical of locations that sell food: "bifes" and "milanesas" are served "a caballo" ("on horseback", with fried egg on top), "milanesa completa" (a milanesa with two fried eggs and French fries), "revuelto Gramajo", "colchón de arvejas" (an omelette made with peas), "suprema de pollo" (chicken supreme, usually breaded as a milanesa), matambres, "lengua a la vinagreta" (pickled tongue), and "sandwiches" (sandwiches de miga) are made with sliced white bread, rather than, say, rolls. The most common sandwiches are those made of milanesa, baked ham and cheese, pan de miga, toast, pebetes, panchos (hot dogs), choripanes, morcipanes, etc.; from Montevideo comes a different species of sandwich called the chivito, even though it contains no goat meat.Picadas, which are consumed at home or in bars, cafés, "cafetines" and "bodegones" are also popular; they consist of an ensemble of plates containing cubes of cheese (typically from Mar del Plata or Chubut), pieces of salame, olives in brine, french fries, maníes (peanuts), etc.; picadas are eaten accompanied by an alcoholic beverage ("fernet", beer, wine with soda, to give some common examples). The people of Argentina greatly enjoy helado'' (ice creams of Italian lineage or sorbets Spanish lineage). In Spanish colonial times, a type of sorbet was made from hail or snow. Eating habits Breakfast typically is small and consists of coffee (or mate) and pastry. In most parts of Argentina, lunch is the largest meal of the day. Excluding the largest cities, such as Buenos Aires, Rosario or Cordoba, most towns close for lunchtime. This is when most people return home to enjoy a large meal and siesta. Traditional lunches in Argentina are long and well developed. Argentines often have a light evening snack (called a "merienda" – typically a coffee or mate and a pastry) and it is common to not eat dinner until 9 at night, or even later on weekends. See also Argentine pizza Cheese in Argentina Italian cuisine Spanish cuisine Uruguayan cuisine References External links SaltShaker – Blog on Buenos Aires "food, drink, and life". Pick Up the Fork – Guide to Buenos Aires' food, restaurant and bar scene Argentina on two steaks a day South American cuisine Latin American cuisine

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analysis%20of%20algorithms

Analysis of algorithms

In computer science, the analysis of algorithms is the process of finding the computational complexity of algorithms—the amount of time, storage, or other resources needed to execute them. Usually, this involves determining a function that relates the size of an algorithm's input to the number of steps it takes (its time complexity) or the number of storage locations it uses (its space complexity). An algorithm is said to be efficient when this function's values are small, or grow slowly compared to a growth in the size of the input. Different inputs of the same size may cause the algorithm to have different behavior, so best, worst and average case descriptions might all be of practical interest. When not otherwise specified, the function describing the performance of an algorithm is usually an upper bound, determined from the worst case inputs to the algorithm. The term "analysis of algorithms" was coined by Donald Knuth. Algorithm analysis is an important part of a broader computational complexity theory, which provides theoretical estimates for the resources needed by any algorithm which solves a given computational problem. These estimates provide an insight into reasonable directions of search for efficient algorithms. In theoretical analysis of algorithms it is common to estimate their complexity in the asymptotic sense, i.e., to estimate the complexity function for arbitrarily large input. Big O notation, Big-omega notation and Big-theta notation are used to this end. For instance, binary search is said to run in a number of steps proportional to the logarithm of the size of the sorted list being searched, or in , colloquially "in logarithmic time". Usually asymptotic estimates are used because different implementations of the same algorithm may differ in efficiency. However the efficiencies of any two "reasonable" implementations of a given algorithm are related by a constant multiplicative factor called a hidden constant. Exact (not asymptotic) measures of efficiency can sometimes be computed but they usually require certain assumptions concerning the particular implementation of the algorithm, called model of computation. A model of computation may be defined in terms of an abstract computer, e.g. Turing machine, and/or by postulating that certain operations are executed in unit time. For example, if the sorted list to which we apply binary search has elements, and we can guarantee that each lookup of an element in the list can be done in unit time, then at most time units are needed to return an answer. Cost models Time efficiency estimates depend on what we define to be a step. For the analysis to correspond usefully to the actual run-time, the time required to perform a step must be guaranteed to be bounded above by a constant. One must be careful here; for instance, some analyses count an addition of two numbers as one step. This assumption may not be warranted in certain contexts. For example, if the numbers involved in a computation may be arbitrarily large, the time required by a single addition can no longer be assumed to be constant. Two cost models are generally used: the uniform cost model, also called unit-cost model (and similar variations), assigns a constant cost to every machine operation, regardless of the size of the numbers involved the logarithmic cost model, also called logarithmic-cost measurement (and similar variations), assigns a cost to every machine operation proportional to the number of bits involved The latter is more cumbersome to use, so it is only employed when necessary, for example in the analysis of arbitrary-precision arithmetic algorithms, like those used in cryptography. A key point which is often overlooked is that published lower bounds for problems are often given for a model of computation that is more restricted than the set of operations that you could use in practice and therefore there are algorithms that are faster than what would naively be thought possible. Run-time analysis Run-time analysis is a theoretical classification that estimates and anticipates the increase in running time (or run-time or execution time) of an algorithm as its input size (usually denoted as ) increases. Run-time efficiency is a topic of great interest in computer science: A program can take seconds, hours, or even years to finish executing, depending on which algorithm it implements. While software profiling techniques can be used to measure an algorithm's run-time in practice, they cannot provide timing data for all infinitely many possible inputs; the latter can only be achieved by the theoretical methods of run-time analysis. Shortcomings of empirical metrics Since algorithms are platform-independent (i.e. a given algorithm can be implemented in an arbitrary programming language on an arbitrary computer running an arbitrary operating system), there are additional significant drawbacks to using an empirical approach to gauge the comparative performance of a given set of algorithms. Take as an example a program that looks up a specific entry in a sorted list of size n. Suppose this program were implemented on Computer A, a state-of-the-art machine, using a linear search algorithm, and on Computer B, a much slower machine, using a binary search algorithm. Benchmark testing on the two computers running their respective programs might look something like the following: Based on these metrics, it would be easy to jump to the conclusion that Computer A is running an algorithm that is far superior in efficiency to that of Computer B. However, if the size of the input-list is increased to a sufficient number, that conclusion is dramatically demonstrated to be in error: Computer A, running the linear search program, exhibits a linear growth rate. The program's run-time is directly proportional to its input size. Doubling the input size doubles the run-time, quadrupling the input size quadruples the run-time, and so forth. On the other hand, Computer B, running the binary search program, exhibits a logarithmic growth rate. Quadrupling the input size only increases the run-time by a constant amount (in this example, 50,000 ns). Even though Computer A is ostensibly a faster machine, Computer B will inevitably surpass Computer A in run-time because it is running an algorithm with a much slower growth rate. Orders of growth Informally, an algorithm can be said to exhibit a growth rate on the order of a mathematical function if beyond a certain input size , the function times a positive constant provides an upper bound or limit for the run-time of that algorithm. In other words, for a given input size greater than some 0 and a constant , the run-time of that algorithm will never be larger than . This concept is frequently expressed using Big O notation. For example, since the run-time of insertion sort grows quadratically as its input size increases, insertion sort can be said to be of order . Big O notation is a convenient way to express the worst-case scenario for a given algorithm, although it can also be used to express the average-case — for example, the worst-case scenario for quicksort is , but the average-case run-time is . Empirical orders of growth Assuming the run-time follows power rule, , the coefficient can be found by taking empirical measurements of run-time } at some problem-size points }, and calculating so that . In other words, this measures the slope of the empirical line on the log–log plot of run-time vs. input size, at some size point. If the order of growth indeed follows the power rule (and so the line on the log–log plot is indeed a straight line), the empirical value of will stay constant at different ranges, and if not, it will change (and the line is a curved line)—but still could serve for comparison of any two given algorithms as to their empirical local orders of growth behaviour. Applied to the above table: It is clearly seen that the first algorithm exhibits a linear order of growth indeed following the power rule. The empirical values for the second one are diminishing rapidly, suggesting it follows another rule of growth and in any case has much lower local orders of growth (and improving further still), empirically, than the first one. Evaluating run-time complexity The run-time complexity for the worst-case scenario of a given algorithm can sometimes be evaluated by examining the structure of the algorithm and making some simplifying assumptions. Consider the following pseudocode: 1 get a positive integer n from input 2 if n > 10 3 print "This might take a while..." 4 for i = 1 to n 5 for j = 1 to i 6 print i * j 7 print "Done!" A given computer will take a discrete amount of time to execute each of the instructions involved with carrying out this algorithm. Say that the actions carried out in step 1 are considered to consume time at most T1, step 2 uses time at most T2, and so forth. In the algorithm above, steps 1, 2 and 7 will only be run once. For a worst-case evaluation, it should be assumed that step 3 will be run as well. Thus the total amount of time to run steps 1-3 and step 7 is: The loops in steps 4, 5 and 6 are trickier to evaluate. The outer loop test in step 4 will execute ( n + 1 ) times, which will consume T4( n + 1 ) time. The inner loop, on the other hand, is governed by the value of j, which iterates from 1 to i. On the first pass through the outer loop, j iterates from 1 to 1: The inner loop makes one pass, so running the inner loop body (step 6) consumes T6 time, and the inner loop test (step 5) consumes 2T5 time. During the next pass through the outer loop, j iterates from 1 to 2: the inner loop makes two passes, so running the inner loop body (step 6) consumes 2T6 time, and the inner loop test (step 5) consumes 3T5 time. Altogether, the total time required to run the inner loop body can be expressed as an arithmetic progression: which can be factored as The total time required to run the inner loop test can be evaluated similarly: which can be factored as Therefore, the total run-time for this algorithm is: which reduces to As a rule-of-thumb, one can assume that the highest-order term in any given function dominates its rate of growth and thus defines its run-time order. In this example, n2 is the highest-order term, so one can conclude that . Formally this can be proven as follows: A more elegant approach to analyzing this algorithm would be to declare that [T1..T7] are all equal to one unit of time, in a system of units chosen so that one unit is greater than or equal to the actual times for these steps. This would mean that the algorithm's run-time breaks down as follows: Growth rate analysis of other resources The methodology of run-time analysis can also be utilized for predicting other growth rates, such as consumption of memory space. As an example, consider the following pseudocode which manages and reallocates memory usage by a program based on the size of a file which that program manages: while file is still open: let n = size of file for every 100,000 kilobytes of increase in file size double the amount of memory reserved In this instance, as the file size n increases, memory will be consumed at an exponential growth rate, which is order . This is an extremely rapid and most likely unmanageable growth rate for consumption of memory resources. Relevance Algorithm analysis is important in practice because the accidental or unintentional use of an inefficient algorithm can significantly impact system performance. In time-sensitive applications, an algorithm taking too long to run can render its results outdated or useless. An inefficient algorithm can also end up requiring an uneconomical amount of computing power or storage in order to run, again rendering it practically useless. Constant factors Analysis of algorithms typically focuses on the asymptotic performance, particularly at the elementary level, but in practical applications constant factors are important, and real-world data is in practice always limited in size. The limit is typically the size of addressable memory, so on 32-bit machines 232 = 4 GiB (greater if segmented memory is used) and on 64-bit machines 264 = 16 EiB. Thus given a limited size, an order of growth (time or space) can be replaced by a constant factor, and in this sense all practical algorithms are for a large enough constant, or for small enough data. This interpretation is primarily useful for functions that grow extremely slowly: (binary) iterated logarithm (log*) is less than 5 for all practical data (265536 bits); (binary) log-log (log log n) is less than 6 for virtually all practical data (264 bits); and binary log (log n) is less than 64 for virtually all practical data (264 bits). An algorithm with non-constant complexity may nonetheless be more efficient than an algorithm with constant complexity on practical data if the overhead of the constant time algorithm results in a larger constant factor, e.g., one may have so long as and . For large data linear or quadratic factors cannot be ignored, but for small data an asymptotically inefficient algorithm may be more efficient. This is particularly used in hybrid algorithms, like Timsort, which use an asymptotically efficient algorithm (here merge sort, with time complexity ), but switch to an asymptotically inefficient algorithm (here insertion sort, with time complexity ) for small data, as the simpler algorithm is faster on small data. See also Amortized analysis Analysis of parallel algorithms Asymptotic computational complexity Best, worst and average case Big O notation Computational complexity theory Master theorem (analysis of algorithms) NP-Complete Numerical analysis Polynomial time Program optimization Profiling (computer programming) Scalability Smoothed analysis Termination analysis — the subproblem of checking whether a program will terminate at all Time complexity — includes table of orders of growth for common algorithms Information-based complexity Notes References External links Computational complexity theory

2233

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%86lle%20of%20Sussex

Ælle of Sussex

Ælle (also Aelle or Ella) is recorded in early sources as the first king of the South Saxons, reigning in what is now called Sussex, England, from 477 to perhaps as late as 514. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Ælle and three of his sons are said to have landed at a place called Cymensora and fought against the local Britons. The chronicle goes on to report a victory in 491, at present day Pevensey, where the battle ended with the Saxons slaughtering their opponents to the last man. Ælle was the first king recorded by the 8th century chronicler Bede to have held "imperium", or overlordship, over other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. In the late 9th-century Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (around four hundred years after his time) Ælle is recorded as being the first bretwalda, or "Britain-ruler", though there is no evidence that this was a contemporary title. Ælle's death is not recorded and although he may have been the founder of a South Saxon dynasty, there is no firm evidence linking him with later South Saxon rulers. The 12th-century chronicler Henry of Huntingdon produced an enhanced version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that included 514 as the date of Ælle's death, but this is not secure. Historical context Historians are divided on the detail of Ælle's life and existence as it was during the least-documented period in English history of the last two millennia. By the early 5th century, Britain had been Roman for over three hundred and fifty years. Amongst the enemies of Roman Britain were the Picts of central and northern Scotland, and the Gaels known as Scoti, who were raiders from Ireland. Also vexatious were the Saxons, the name Roman writers gave to the peoples who lived in the northern part of what is now Germany and the southern part of the Jutland peninsula. Saxon raids on the southern and eastern shores of England had been sufficiently alarming by the late 3rd century for the Romans to build the Saxon Shore forts, and subsequently to establish the role of the Count of the Saxon Shore to command the defence against these incursions. Roman control of Britain finally ended in the early part of the 5th century; the date usually given as marking the end of Roman Britain is 410, when the Emperor Honorius sent letters to the British, urging them to look to their own defence. Britain had been repeatedly stripped of troops to support usurpers' claims to the Roman empire, and after 410 the Roman armies never returned. Sources for events after this date are extremely scarce, but a tradition, reported as early as the mid-6th century by a British priest named Gildas, records that the British sent for help against the barbarians to Aetius, a Roman consul, probably in the late 440s. No help came. Subsequently, a British leader named Vortigern is supposed to have invited continental mercenaries to help fight the Picts who were attacking from the north. The leaders, whose names are recorded as Hengest and Horsa, rebelled, and a long period of warfare ensued. The invaders—Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Frisians—gained control of parts of England, but lost a major battle at Mons Badonicus (the location of which is not known). Some authors have speculated that Ælle may have led the Saxon forces at this battle, while others reject the idea out of hand. The British thus gained a respite, and peace lasted at least until the time Gildas was writing: that is, for perhaps forty or fifty years, from around the end of the 5th century until midway through the sixth. Shortly after Gildas's time, the Anglo-Saxon advance was resumed, and by the late 6th century nearly all of southern England was under the control of the continental invaders. Early sources There are two early sources that mention Ælle by name. The earliest is The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, a history of the English church written in 731 by Bede, a Northumbrian monk. Bede mentions Ælle as one of the Anglo-Saxon kings who exercised what he calls "imperium" over "all the provinces south of the river Humber"; "imperium" is usually translated as "overlordship". Bede gives a list of seven kings who held "imperium", and Ælle is the first of them. The other information Bede gives is that Ælle was not a Christian—Bede mentions a later king as "the first to enter the kingdom of heaven". The second source is the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a collection of annals assembled in the Kingdom of Wessex in c. 890, during the reign of Alfred the Great. The Chronicle has three entries for Ælle, from 477 to 491, as follows: 477: Ælle and his 3 sons, Cymen and Wlencing and Cissa, came to the land of Britain with 3 ships at the place which is named Cymen's shore, and there killed many Welsh and drove some to flight into the wood called Andredes leag. 485: Here Ælle fought against the Welsh near the margin of Mearcred's Burn. 491: Here Ælle and Cissa besieged Andredes cester, and killed all who lived in there; there was not even one Briton left there. The Chronicle was put together about four hundred years after these events. It is known that the annalists used material from earlier chronicles, as well as from oral sources such as sagas, but there is no way to tell where these lines came from. The terms 'British' and 'Welsh' were used interchangeably, as 'Welsh' is the Saxon word meaning 'foreigner', and was applied to all the native Romano-British of the era. Three of the places named may be identified: "Cymen's shore" ("Cymenes ora" in the original) is believed to be located at what is now a series of rocks and ledges, in the English Channel off Selsey Bill, on the south coast, known as the Owers. It has been suggested that Ower is derived from the word ora that is found only in placenames where Jutish and West Saxon dialects were in operation (mainly in southern England). It is possible that the stretch of low ground along the coast from Southampton to Bognor was called Ora, "the shore", and that district names were used by the various coastal settlements, Cymens ora being one of them. The wood called "Andredes leag" is the Weald, which at that time was a forest extending from north-west Hampshire all through northern Sussex. "Andredes cester" is thought to be Anderitum, the Saxon Shore fort built by the Roman rebel Carausius in the late 3rd century at Pevensey Castle, just outside the town. Some believe Andredes cester may have been an imperial stronghold somewhere else as Henry of Huntingdon described the place as a fortified city and gave a very full account of the siege which is inconsistent with the geography of ancient Pevensey and little archaeological evidence of sustained settlement there. Also, in his "Britannia", William Camden suggests that it could be Newenden, Kent. The Chronicle mentions Ælle once more under the year 827, where he is listed as the first of the eight "bretwaldas", or "Britain-rulers". The list consists of Bede's original seven, plus Egbert of Wessex. There has been much scholarly debate over just what it meant to be a "bretwalda", and the extent of Ælle's actual power in southern England is an open question. It is also noteworthy that there is a long gap between Ælle and the second king on Bede's list, Ceawlin of Wessex, whose reign began in the late 6th century; this may indicate a period in which Anglo-Saxon dominance was interrupted in some way. Earlier sources than Bede exist which mention the South Saxons, though they do not name Ælle. The earliest reference is still quite late, however, at about 692: a charter of King Nothhelm's, which styles him "King of the South Saxons". Charters are documents which granted land to followers or to churchmen, and which would be witnessed by the kings who had power to grant the land. They are one of the key documentary sources for Anglo-Saxon history, but no original charters survive from earlier than 679. There are other early writers whose works can shed light on Ælle's time, though they do not mention either him or his kingdom. Gildas's description of the state of Britain in his time is useful for understanding the ebb and flow of the Anglo-Saxon incursions. Procopius, a Byzantine historian, writing not long after Gildas, adds to the meagre sources on population movement by including a chapter on England in one of his works. He records that the peoples of Britain—he names the English, the British, and the Frisians—were so numerous that they were migrating to the kingdom of the Franks in great numbers every year, although this is probably a reference to Britons emigrating to Armorica to escape the Anglo-Saxons. They subsequently gave their name to the area they settled as Brittany, or la petite Bretagne (lit., "little Britain"). Evidence from place names in Sussex The early dates given in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for the colonization of Sussex are supported by an analysis of the place names of the region. The strongest evidence comes from place names that end in "-ing", such as Worthing and Angmering. These are known to derive from an earlier form ending in "-ingas". "Hastings" for example, derives from "Hæstingas" which may mean "the followers or dependents of a person named Hæsta", although others suggest the heavily Romanised region may have had names of Gallo-Roman origin derived from "-ienses". From west of Selsey Bill to east of Pevensey can be found the densest concentration of these names anywhere in Britain. There are a total of about forty-five place names in Sussex of this form, but personal names either were not associated with these places or fell out of use. The preservation of Ælle's sons in Old English place names is unusual. The names of the founders, in other origin legends, seem to have British and/ or Latin roots not Old English. It is likely that the foundation stories were actually known before the 9th century, but the annalists manipulated them to provide a common origin for the new regime. The origin stories purported that the British were defeated and replaced by invading Anglo-Saxons arriving in small ships. These stories were largely believed right up to the 19th century, but are now regarded as myths. Reign If the dates given by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle are accurate to within half a century, then Ælle's reign lies in the middle of the Anglo-Saxon expansion, and prior to the final conquest of the Britons. It also seems consistent with the dates given to assume that Ælle's battles predate Mons Badonicus.This in turn would explain the long gap, of fifty or more years, in the succession of the "bretwaldas": if the peace gained by the Britons did indeed hold till the second half of the 6th century, it is not to be expected that an Anglo-Saxon leader should have anything resembling overlordship of England during that time. The idea of a pause in the Anglo-Saxon advance is also supported by the account in Procopius of 6th century migration from Britain to the kingdom of the Franks. Procopius's account is consistent with what is known to be a contemporary colonization of Armorica (now Brittany, in France); the settlers appear to have been at least partly from Dumnonia (modern Cornwall), and the area acquired regions known as Dumnonée and Cornouaille. It seems likely that something at that time was interrupting the general flow of the Anglo-Saxons from the continent to Britain. The dates for Ælle's battles are also reasonably consistent with what is known of events in the kingdom of the Franks at that time. Clovis I united the Franks into a single kingdom during the 480s and afterwards, and the Franks' ability to exercise power along the southern coast of the English channel may have diverted Saxon adventurers to England rather than the continent. It is possible, therefore, that a historical king named Ælle existed, who arrived from the continent in the late 5th century, and who conquered much of what is now Sussex. He may have been a prominent war chief with a leadership role in a federation of Anglo-Saxon groups fighting for territory in Britain at that time. This may be the origin of the reputation that led Bede to list him as holding overlordship over southern Britain. The battles listed in the Chronicle are compatible with a conquest of Sussex from west to east, against British resistance stiff enough to last fourteen years. His area of military control may have extended as far as Hampshire and north to the upper Thames valley, but it certainly did not extend across all of England south of the Humber, as Bede asserts. The historian Guy Halsall argues that as Ælle immediately preceded the late sixth-century King Ceawlin as Bretwalda, it is far more likely that Ælle dates to the mid sixth century, and that the Chronicle has moved his dates back a century in order to provide a foundation myth for Sussex which puts it chronologically and geographically between the origins of the kingdoms of Kent and Wessex. Death and burial Ælle's death is not recorded by the Chronicle, which gives no information about him, or his sons, or the South Saxons until 675, when the South Saxon king Æthelwalh was baptized. It has been conjectured that, as Saxon war leader, Ælle may have met his death in the disastrous battle of Mount Badon when the Britons halted Saxon expansion. If Ælle died within the borders of his own kingdom then it may well have been that he was buried on Highdown Hill with his weapons and ornaments in the usual mode of burial among the South Saxons. Highdown Hill is the traditional burial-place of the kings of Sussex. See also Timeline of conflict in Anglo-Saxon Britain Notes References Primary sources Secondary sources External links 510s deaths 6th-century English monarchs 5th-century English monarchs Anglo-Saxon warriors Founding monarchs People whose existence is disputed South Saxon monarchs Year of birth unknown

2235

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghans

Afghans

Afghans (Persian/; ) or Afghan people are nationals or citizens of Afghanistan, or people with ancestry from there. Afghanistan is made up of various ethnicities, of which Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks are the largest. The three main languages spoken by Afghans are Dari, Pashto and Uzbek many Afghans are bilingual speaking both Dari and Pashto. Background The earliest mention of the name Afghan (Abgân) is by Shapur I of the Sassanid Empire during the 3rd century CE, In the 4th century the word "Afghans/Afghana" (αβγανανο) as reference to the Pashtun people is mentioned in the Bactrian documents found in Northern Afghanistan. The word 'Afghan' is of Persian origin to refer to the Pashtun people. Some scholars suggest that the word "Afghan" is derived from the words awajan/apajan in Avestan and ava-Han/apa-Han in Sanskrit, which means "killing, striking, throwing and resisting, or defending." Under the Sasanians, and possibly the Parthian Empire, the word was used to refer to men of a certain Persian sect. In the past, several scholars sought a connection with "horse", Skt.aśva-, Av.aspa-, i.e.the Aśvaka or Aśvakayana the name of the Aśvakan or Assakan, ancient inhabitants of the Hindu Kush region. Some have theorized that name of the Aśvakan or Assakan has been preserved in that of the modern Pashtun, with the name Afghan being derived from Asvakan. As an adjective, the word Afghan also means "of or relating to Afghanistan or its people, language or culture". According to the 1964 Constitution of Afghanistan, all Afghans citizens are equal in rights and obligations before the law. The fourth article of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan which was valid until 2021 states that citizens of Afghanistan consist of Pashtun, Tajik, Uzbek, Turkmen, Baloch, Pashayi, Nuristani, Aimaq, Arab, Kyrgyz, Qizilbash, Gurjar, Brahui, and members of other ethnicities. There are political disputes regarding this: there are members of the non-Pashtun ethnicities of Afghanistan that reject the term Afghan being applied to them, and there are Pashtuns in Pakistan that wish to have the term Afghan applied to them. The pre-nation state, historical ethnonym Afghan was used to refer to a member of the Pashtun ethnic group. Due to the changing political nature of the state the meaning has changed, and term has shifted to be the national identity of people from Afghanistan from all ethnicities. From a more limited, ethnological point of view, "Afḡhān" is the term by which the Persian-speakers of Afghanistan (and the non-Pashtō-speaking ethnic groups generally) designate the Pashtūn. The equation Afghans = Pashtūn has been propagated all the more, both in and beyond Afghanistan, because the Pashtūn tribal confederation has maintained its hegemony in the country, numerically and politically. Afghanistani, Afghani and Afghanese The less common Afghanistani (افغانستانی) is an alternative identity marker for citizens of Afghanistan. The term "Afghanistani" refers to someone who possesses the nationality of Afghanistan, regardless of what race, ethnic, religious background. In multiethnic Afghanistan, the term "Afghan" has always been associated with Pashtun people. Some non-Pashtun citizens such as Tajiks, Hazaras, and Uzbeks have viewed it as a part of Pashtun hegemony that devised to erase their ethnic identity. The term Afghanistani has been used among some refugees and diasporas, particularly among non-Pashtuns. The term Afghani refers to the unit of Afghan currency. The term is also often used in the English language (and appears in some dictionaries) for a person or thing related to Afghanistan, although some have expressed the opinion that this usage is incorrect. A reason for this usage can be because the term "Afghani" (افغانی) is in fact a valid demonym for Afghans in the overall Persian language, whereas "Afghan" is derived from Pashto. Thus "Afghan" is the anglicized term of "Afghani" when translating from Dari, but not Pashto. Another variant is Afghanese, which has been seldom used in place of Afghan. Ethnicity Afghans come from various ethnic backgrounds. The largest ethnic groups are Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras, who make up approximately 95% of the population of Afghanistan. They are of diverse origins including of Iranic, Turkic or Mongolic ethnolinguistic roots. Religion The Afghan people of all ethnicities are predominantly and traditionally followers of Islam, of whom around 90% are of the Sunni branch, and 10% Shia. Other religious minorities include the Afghan Hindus, Afghan Sikhs, Afghan Zoroastrians, Afghan Jews and Afghan Christians. Culture Afghan culture has existed for over three millennia, dating back to the time of the Achaemenid Empire in 500 BCE. Afghans have both common cultural features and those that differ between regions with each of the 34 provinces having its own unique distinctive cultures partly as a result of geographic obstacles that divide the country. Afghanistan's culture is historically linked to nearby Persia, including both countries following the Islamic religion, the Solar Hijri calendar and speaking similar languages, this is due to Iran and Afghanistan being culturally close to each other for thousands of years. See also Demographics of Afghanistan Afghan (ethnonym) Name of Afghanistan Afghan diaspora Pashtuns References Sources External links Afghan News Exonyms

2236

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acadia%20University

Acadia University

Acadia University is a public, predominantly undergraduate university located in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Canada, with some graduate programs at the master's level and one at the doctoral level. The enabling legislation consists of the Acadia University Act and the Amended Acadia University Act 2000. The Wolfville Campus houses Acadia University Archives and the Acadia University Art Gallery. Acadia offers over 200 degree combinations in the faculties of arts, pure and applied science, professional studies, and theology. The student-faculty ratio is 15:1 and the average class size is 28. Open Acadia offers correspondence and distance education courses. History Acadia began as an extension of Horton Academy in 1828, which was founded in Horton, Nova Scotia, by Baptists from Nova Scotia and Queen's College in 1838, who will be gathered into the Canadian Baptists of Atlantic Canada (Canadian Baptist Ministries). It was designed to prepare men for the ministry and to supply education for lay members. In 1838, the Nova Scotia Baptist Education Society founded Queen's College (named for Queen Victoria). The college began with 21 students in January 1839. The name "Queen's College" was denied to the Baptist school, so it was renamed "Acadia College" in 1841, in reference to the history of the area as an Acadian settlement. Acadia College awarded its first degrees in 1843 and became Acadia University in 1891, established by the Acadia University Act. The Granville Street Baptist Church (now First Baptist Church Halifax) has played a supporting role throughout its history. Many individuals who have made significant contributions to Acadia University, including the first president John Pryor, were members of the First Baptist Church Halifax congregation. In 1851, the power of appointing governors was transferred from the Nova Scotia Baptist Education Society to the Baptist Convention of the Maritime Provinces. Charles Osborne Wickenden, an architect, and J.C. Dumaresq designed the Central Building, Acadia College, 1878–79. Clara Belle Marshall, from Mount Hanley, Nova Scotia, became the first woman to graduate from Acadia University in 1879. In 1891, there were changes in the Act of Incorporation. Andrew R. Cobb designed several campus buildings including: Raynor Hall Residence, 1916; and Horton House, designed by Cobb in the Georgian style, and built by James Reid of Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, which was opened in 1915 as Horton Academy. Today, Horton Hall is the home of the Department of Psychology and Research and Graduate Studies. In 1967 Emmerson Hall was converted to classrooms and offices for the School of Education. It is a registered Heritage Property. Unveiled on 16 August 1963, a wooden and metal organ in Manning Chapel, Acadia University, is dedicated to Acadia University's war dead of the First and Second World Wars and the Korean War. A book of remembrance in Manning Chapel, Acadia University was unveiled on 1 March 1998 through the efforts of the Wolfville Historical Society. In 1966, it terminated its affiliation with the Canadian Baptists of Atlantic Canada (Canadian Baptist Ministries). The denomination maintains nine seats on the university's Board of Governors. Acadia is a laureate of Washington's Smithsonian Institution and a part of the permanent research collection of the National Museum of American History. Acadia is also the only Canadian university selected for inclusion in the Education and Academia category of the Computerworld Smithsonian Award. Faculty strikes Acadia University's Board of Governors and members of the Acadia University Faculty Association (AUFA) have ratified a new collective agreement covering the period 1 July 2010 to 30 June 2014. The faculty of Acadia University have been on strike three times in the history of the institution. The first was 24 February to 12 March 2004. The second was 15 October to 5 November 2007. The second strike was resolved after the province's labour minister, Mark Parent, appointed a mediator, on 1 November, to facilitate an agreement. The third strike began on 1 February 2022 and ended 1 March 2022 with both sides agreeing to binding arbitration. Academics Rankings In Maclean's 2023 Guide to Canadian Universities, Acadia was ranked fifth in the publication's "primarily undergraduate" Canadian university category, tied with Bishop's University. In the same year, the publication ranked Acadia 33rd, in Maclean's reputation survey. Faculties Acadia is organized into four faculties: Arts, Pure & Applied Science, Professional Studies and Theology. Each faculty is further divided into departments and schools specialized in areas of teaching and research. Research Acadia has over 15 research centres and 6 research chairs. Undergraduate students have the opportunity to participate in many research opportunities in a small university setting. The Division of Research & Graduate Studies is separate from the faculties and oversees graduate students as well as Acadia's research programs. Acadia's research programs explore coastal environments, ethno-cultural diversity, social justice, environmental monitoring and climate change, organizational relationships, data mining, the impact of digital technologies, and lifestyle choices contributing to health and wellness. Acadia's research centres include the Tidal Energy Institute, the Acadia Institute for Data Analytics, and the Beaubassin Field Station. Applied research opportunities include research with local wineries and grape growers, alternative insect control techniques and technologies. Innovation Acadia Advantage In 1996, Acadia University introduced a new initiative. Named the Acadia Advantage, it integrated the use of notebook computers into the undergraduate curriculum and featured innovations in teaching. By 2000, all full-time, undergraduate Acadia students were taking part in the initiative. The initiative went beyond leasing notebook computers to students during the academic year, and included training, user support and the use of course-specific applications at Acadia. Acadia is a laureate of Washington's Smithsonian Institution and a part of the permanent research collection of the National Museum of American History. It is the only Canadian university selected for inclusion in the Education and Academia category of the Computerworld Smithsonian Award. In addition, Acadia University received the Pioneer Award for Ubiquitous Computing. In 2001, it achieved high rankings in the annual Maclean's University Rankings, including Best Overall for Primarily Undergraduate University in their opinion survey, and it received the Canadian Information Productivity Award in 1997 as the first university in Canada to fully utilize information technology in the undergraduate curriculum. In September 2008, Acadia moved to a student-owned notebook computer version of the Acadia Advantage, now named Acadia Advantage 2.0. The new Agri-Technology Access Centre in the Innovation Pavilion provides companies and industry organizations with access to specialized technology, lab space, subject-matter expertise and commercialization support services. It also enables Acadia to advance its applied research strength in a priority sector – agriculture – and expand its technology transfer and commercialization activities. The Science Complex renewal project was supported by an investment of $15.98 million by the Federal and Provincial governments. Athletics Acadia's sports teams are called the Axemen and Axewomen. They participate in the Atlantic University Sports conference of U Sports. Men's and women's varsity teams that have won more conference and national championships than any other institution in Atlantic University Sport. Routinely, more than one-third of Acadia's varsity athletes also achieve Academic All-Canadian designation through Canadian Interuniversity Sport by maintaining a minimum average of 80 per cent. In September 2006, Acadia University announced its partnership with the Wolfville Tritons Swim Club and the Acadia Masters Swim Club to form the Acadia Swim Club and return competitive swimming to the university after a 14-year hiatus. On 26 September 2008, the university announced its intention to return swimming to a varsity status in September 2009. Fight song Notable among a number of songs commonly played and sung at various events such as commencement, convocation, and athletic games are: Stand Up and Cheer, the Acadia University fight song. According to 'Songs of Acadia College' (Wolfville, NS 1902–3, 1907), the songs include: 'Acadia Centennial Song' (1938); 'The Acadia Clan Song'; 'Alma Mater - Acadia;' 'Alma Mater Acadia' (1938) and 'Alma Mater Song.' Symbols In 1974, Acadia was granted a coat of arms designed by the College of Arms in London, England. The coat of arms is two-tone, with the school's official colours, garnet and blue, on the shield. The axes represent the school's origins in a rural setting, and the determination of its founders who cleared the land and built the school on donated items and labour. The open books represent the intellectual pursuits of a university, and the wolves heads are a whimsical representation of the university's location in Wolfville. "In pulvere vinces" (In dust you conquer) is the motto. The university seal depicts the Greek goddess of wisdom Athena in front of the first college hall. The university also uses a stylized "A" as a logo for its sports teams. Notable among a number of fight songs commonly played and sung at various events such as commencement, convocation, and athletic games are: the Acadia University alma mater set to the tune of "Annie Lisle". The lyrics are: Historic buildings Seminary House, also known as just "Sem", is a Second Empire style-building constructed in 1878 as a home for women attending the university. It was designated a National Historic Site of Canada in 1997 as Canada's oldest facility associated with the higher education of women. The building now serves as a co-ed residence, and Whitman House on campus now serves as the women's only residence. Carnegie Hall, built in 1909, is a large, two-storey, Neo-classical brick building. It was designated under the provincial Heritage Property Act in 1989 as its construction in 1909 signified Acadia's evolution from classical college to liberal university. The War Memorial House (more generally known as Barrax), which is a residence, and War Memorial Gymnasium are landmark buildings on the campus of Acadia University. The Memorial Hall and Gymnasium honours students who had enlisted and died in the First World War, and in the Second World War. Two granite shafts, which are part of the War Memorial Gymnasium complex at Acadia University, are dedicated to the university's war dead. The War Memorial House is dedicated to the war dead from Acadia University during the Second World War. Student life At Acadia University, students have access to the Student Union Building which serves as a hub for students and houses many Student Union organizations. The building houses The Axe Lounge, a convenience store, an information desk, two food outlets, and the Sexual Health Resource Centre. The university press, The Athenaeum is a member of CUP. Student government All students are represented by the Acadia Students' Union. Residences Approximately 1500 students live on-campus in 11 residences: Chase Court Chipman House Christofor Hall Crowell Tower (13 Story High-rise) Cutten House Dennis House - First floor houses student health services Eaton House Roy Jodrey Hall Seminary House - Also houses the School of Education in lower level War Memorial (Barrax) House Whitman House (Tully) - All female residence Willett House (former residence) People List of presidents and vice chancellors John Pryor, 1846–1850 John Cramp, 1851–1853 (and 1856–1869) Edmund Crawley, 1853–1856 John Cramp, 1856–1869 Artemas Wyman Sawyer, 1869–1896 Thomas Trotter, 1897–1906 W.B. Hutchinson, 1907–1909 George Barton Cutten, 1910–1922 Frederic Patterson, 1923–1948 Watson Kirkconnell, 1948–1964 James Beveridge, 1964–1978 Allan Sinclair, 1978–1981 James Perkin, 1981–1993 Kelvin Ogilvie, 1993–2004 Gail Dinter-Gottlieb, 2004–2008 Tom Herman (Acting President), 2008–2009 Ray Ivany, 2009 – 2017 Peter J Ricketts, 2017 - 2023 Jeffrey J Hennessy, 2023 List of chancellors Alex Colville, 1981–1991 William Feindel, 1991–1996 Arthur Irving, 1996–2010 Libby Burnham, 2011–2018 Bruce Galloway, 2018–present Notable alumni Edgar Archibald, scientist and politician Norman Atkins, Canadian senator Solomon Adeniyi Babalola - Veteran Nigerian Baptist Missionary/Evangelist, Church Pastor, Church Administrator, Denominational Leader, and Theological Educator Ron Barkhouse, MLA for Lunenburg East (Horton Academy) Gordon Lockhart Bennett, Lieutenant-Governor of Prince Edward Island Arthur Bourns, President of McMaster University Libby Burnham, lawyer, Chancellor of Acadia University Bob Cameron, football player Dalton Camp, journalist, politician and political strategist M. Elizabeth Cannon, University of Calgary's President & Vice-Chancellor Lillian Chase, physician Paul Corkum, physicist and F.R.S. John Wallace de Beque Farris, Canadian senator Mark Day, actor Michael Dick, CBC-TV Journalist Charles Aubrey Eaton (1868–1953), clergyman and politician William Feindel, neurosurgeon Dale Frail, astronomer Rob Ramsay, actor Alexandra Fuller, writer Gary Graham, musician, choral conductor Matthew Green, Member of Parliament Milton Fowler Gregg, VC laureate, politician Robbie Harrison, Nova Scotian politician and educator Richard Hatfield, Premier of New Brunswick Charles Brenton Huggins, Nobel Laureate Kenneth Colin Irving, industrialist Robert Irving, industrialist Ron James, Canadian comedian Lorie Kane, LPGA golfer Gerald Keddy, Member of Parliament Joanne Kelly, Actress Kenneth Komoski, Educator David H. Levy, astronomer Peter MacKay, lawyer, Canadian Minister of National Defense Henry Poole MacKeen, Lieutenant-Governor of Nova Scotia Paul Masotti, football player Harrison McCain, industrialist Donald Oliver, Canadian senator Henry Nicholas Paint (1830–1921), member of Parliament, merchant, landowner, Freeman Patterson, photographer, writer Robert Pope, Visual artist author, Keith R. Porter, Cell Biologist Heather Rankin, singer-songwriter, member of The Rankin Family Perry F. Rockwood, radio evangelist Erin Roger, scientist Jacob Gould Schurman, President of Cornell University Roger Tomlinson (1933–2014), geographer and "The Father of GIS" Rev. William A. White, noted black minister and missionary Rev. William Pearly Oliver, noted black minister and educator Lance Woolaver, playwright See also Acadia Divinity College Canadian government scientific research organizations Canadian industrial research and development organizations Canadian Interuniversity Sport Canadian university scientific research organizations Higher education in Nova Scotia List of universities in Nova Scotia List of National Historic Sites of Canada in Nova Scotia Shad (Summer Program) References Further reading Longley, R. S. Acadia University, 1838–1938. Wolfville, N.S.: Acadia University, 1939. External links Education in Kings County, Nova Scotia Universities in Nova Scotia Educational institutions established in 1838 Buildings and structures in Kings County, Nova Scotia 1838 establishments in Nova Scotia Maple League

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steel-string%20acoustic%20guitar

Steel-string acoustic guitar

The steel-string acoustic guitar is a modern form of guitar that descends from the gut-strung Romantic guitar, but is strung with steel strings for a brighter, louder sound. Like the modern classical guitar, it is often referred to simply as an acoustic guitar, or sometimes as a folk guitar. The most common type is often called a flat top guitar, to distinguish it from the more specialized archtop guitar and other variations. The standard tuning for an acoustic guitar is E-A-D-G-B-E (low to high), although many players, particularly fingerpickers, use alternate tunings (scordatura), such as open G (D-G-D-G-B-D), open D (D-A-D-F-A-D), drop D (D-A-D-G-B-E), or D-A-D-G-A-D (particularly in Irish traditional music). Construction Steel-string guitars vary in construction and materials. Different woods and approach to bracing affect the instrument's timbre or tone. While there is little scientific evidence, many players and luthiers believe a well-made guitar's tone improves over time. They theorize that a decrease in the content of hemicellulose, crystallization of cellulose, and changes to lignin over time all result in its wood gaining better resonating properties. Types Steel-string acoustic guitars are commonly constructed in several body types, varying in size, depth, and proportion. In general, the guitar's soundbox can be thought of as composed of two mating chambers: the upper bouts (a bout being the rounded corner of an instrument body) on the neck end of the body, and lower bouts (on the bridge end). These meet at the waist, or the narrowest part of the body face near the soundhole. The proportion and overall size of these two parts helps determine the overall tonal balance and "native sound" of a particular body style – the larger the body, the louder the volume. The parlor, 00, double-O, or grand concert body type is the major body style most directly derived from the classical guitar. It has the thinnest soundbox and the smallest overall size, making it very comfortable to play but lacking in volume projection relative to the larger types. Its smaller size makes it suitable for younger or smaller-framed players. It is well-suited to smaller rooms. Martin's 00-xxx series and Taylor's x12 series are common examples. The grand auditorium guitar, sometimes called the 000 or the triple-O is very similar in design to the grand concert, but slightly wider and deeper. Many 000-style guitars also have a convex back to increase the physical volume of the soundbox without making it deeper at the edges, which would affect comfort and playability. The result is a very balanced tone, comparable to the 00 but with greater volume and dynamic range and slightly more low-end response, making this body style very popular. Eric Clapton's signature Martin, for example, is of this style. Martin's 000-xxx series and Taylor's x14 series are well-known examples of the grand auditorium style. The dreadnought is a large-bodied guitar which incorporates a deeper soundbox, but a smaller and less-pronounced upper bout than most styles. Its size and power gave rise to its name, taken from the most formidable class of warship at the time of its creation in the early 20th century. The style was designed by Martin Guitars to produce a deeper sound than "classic"-style guitars, with very resonant bass. Its body's combination of compact profile with a deep sound has since been copied by virtually every major steel-string luthier, making it the most popular body type. Martin's "D" series guitars, such as the highly prized D-28, are classic examples of the dreadnought. The jumbo body type is bigger again than a grand auditorium but similarly proportioned, and is generally designed to provide a deep tone similar to a dreadnought's. It was designed by Gibson to compete with the dreadnought, but with maximum resonant space for greater volume and sustain. These come at the expense of being oversized, with a very deep sounding box, and thus somewhat more difficult to play. The foremost example of the style is the Gibson J-200, but like the dreadnought, most guitar manufacturers have at least one jumbo model. Any of these body type can incorporate a cutaway, where a section of the upper bout below the neck is scalloped out. This allows for easier access to the frets located atop the soundbox, at the expense of reduced soundbox volume and altered bracing, which can affect the resonant qualities and resulting tone of the instrument. All of these relatively traditional looking and constructed instruments are commonly referred to as flattop guitars. All are commonly used in popular music genres, including rock, blues, country, and folk. Other styles of guitar which enjoy moderate popularity, generally in more specific genres, include: The archtop, which incorporates an arched, violin-like top either carved out of solid wood or heat-pressed using laminations. It usually has violin style f-holes rather than a single round sound hole. It is most commonly used by swing and jazz players and often incorporates an electric pickup. The Selmer-Maccaferri guitar is usually played by those who follow the style of Django Reinhardt. It is an unusual-looking instrument, distinguished by a fairly large body with squarish bouts, and either a D-shaped or longitudinal oval soundhole. The strings are gathered at the tail like an archtop guitar, but the top is flatter. It also has a wide fingerboard and slotted head like a nylon-string guitar. The loud volume and penetrating tone make it suitable for single-note soloing, and it is frequently employed as a lead instrument in gypsy swing. The resonator guitar, also called the Dobro after its most prominent manufacturer, amplifies its sound through one or more metal cone-shaped resonators. It was designed to overcome the problem of conventional acoustic guitars being overwhelmed by horns and percussion instruments in dance orchestras. It became prized for its distinctive sound, however, and gained a place in several musical styles (most notably blues and bluegrass), and retains a niche well after the proliferation of electric amplification. The 12-string guitar replaces each string with a course of two strings. The lower pairs are tuned an octave apart. Its unique sound was made famous by artists such as Lead Belly, Pete Seeger and Leo Kottke. Tonewoods Traditionally, steel-string guitars have been made of a combination of various tonewoods, or woods considered to have pleasing resonant qualities when used in instrument-making. The term is ill-defined and the wood species that are considered tonewoods have evolved throughout history. Foremost for making steel-string guitar tops are Sitka spruce, the most common, and Alpine and Adirondack spruce. The back and sides of a particular guitar are typically made of the same wood; Brazilian rosewood, East Indian rosewood, and Honduras mahogany are traditional choices, however, maple has been prized for the figuring that can be seen when it is cut in a certain way (such as flame and quilt patterns). A common non-traditional wood gaining popularity is sapele, which is tonally similar to mahogany but slightly lighter in color and possessing a deep grain structure that is visually appealing. Due to decreasing availability and rising prices of premium-quality traditional tonewoods, many manufacturers have begun experimenting with alternative species of woods or more commonly available variations on the standard species. For example, some makers have begun producing models with red cedar or mahogany tops, or with spruce variants other than Sitka. Cedar is also common in the back and sides, as is basswood. Entry-level models, especially those made in East Asia, often use nato wood, which is again tonally similar to mahogany but is cheap to acquire. Some have also begun using non-wood materials, such as plastic or graphite. Carbon-fiber and phenolic composite materials have become desirable for building necks, and some high-end luthiers produce all-carbon-fiber guitars. Assembly The steel-string acoustic guitar evolved from the gut-string Romantic guitar, and because steel strings have higher tension, heavier construction is required overall. One innovation is a metal bar called a truss rod, which is incorporated into the neck to strengthen it and provide adjustable counter-tension to the stress of the strings. Typically, a steel-string acoustic guitar is built with a larger soundbox than a standard classical guitar. A critical structural and tonal component of an acoustic guitar is the bracing, a systems of struts glued to the inside of the back and top. Steel-string guitars use different bracing systems from classical guitars, typically using X-bracing instead of fan bracing. (Another simpler system, called ladder bracing, where the braces are all placed across the width of the instrument, is used on all types of flat-top guitars on the back.) Innovations in bracing design have emerged, notably the A-brace developed by British luthier Roger Bucknall of Fylde Guitars. Most luthiers and experienced players agree that a good solid top (as opposed to laminated or plywood) is the most important factor in the tone of the guitar. Solid backs and sides can also contribute to a pleasant sound, although laminated sides and backs are acceptable alternatives, commonly found in mid-level guitars (in the range of US$300–$1000). From the 1960s through the 1980s, "by far the most significant developments in the design and construction of acoustic guitars" were made by the Ovation Guitar Company. It introduced a composite roundback bowl, which replaced the square back and sides of traditional guitars; because of its engineering design, Ovation guitars could be amplified without producing the obnoxious feedback that had plagued acoustic guitars before. Ovation also pioneered with electronics, such as pickup systems and electronic tuners. Amplification A steel-string guitar can be using any of three techniques: a microphone, possibly clipped to the guitar body; a detachable pickup, often straddling the soundhole and using the same magnetic principle as a traditional electric guitar; or a transducer built into the body. The last type of guitar is commonly called an acoustic-electric guitar as it can be played either "unplugged" as an acoustic, or plugged in as an electric. The most common type is a piezoelectric pickup, which is composed of a thin sandwich of quartz crystal. When compressed, the crystal produces a small electric current, so when placed under the bridge saddle, the vibrations of the strings through the saddle, and of the body of the instrument, are converted to a weak electrical signal. This signal is often sent to a pre-amplifier, which increases the signal strength and normally incorporates an equalizer. The output of the preamplifier then goes to a separate amplifier system similar to that for an electric guitar. Several manufacturers produce specialised acoustic guitar amplifiers, which are designed to give undistorted and full-range reproduction. Music and players Until the 1960s, the predominant forms of music played on the flat-top, steel-string guitar remained relatively stable and included acoustic blues, country, bluegrass, folk, and several genres of rock. The concept of playing solo steel-string guitar in a concert setting was introduced in the early 1960s by such performers as Davey Graham and John Fahey, who used country blues fingerpicking techniques to compose original compositions with structures somewhat like European classical music. Fahey contemporary Robbie Basho added elements of Indian classical music and Leo Kottke used a Faheyesque approach to make the first solo steel-string guitar "hit" record. Steel-string guitars are also important in the world of flatpicking, as utilized by such artists as Clarence White, Tony Rice, Bryan Sutton, Doc Watson and David Grier. Luthiers have been experimenting with redesigning the acoustic guitar for these players. These flat-top, steel-string guitars are constructed and voiced more for classical-like fingerpicking and less for chordal accompaniment (strumming). Some luthiers have increasingly focused their attention on the needs of fingerstylists and have developed unique guitars for this style of playing. Many other luthiers attempt to recreate the guitars of the "Golden Era" of C.F. Martin & Co. This was started by Roy Noble, who built the guitar played by Clarence White from 1968 to 1972, and was followed by Bill Collings, Marty Lanham, Dana Bourgeois, Randy Lucas, Lynn Dudenbostel and Wayne Henderson, a few of the luthiers building guitars today inspired by vintage Martins, the pre–World War II models in particular. As prices for vintage Martins continue to rise exponentially, upscale guitar enthusiasts have demanded faithful recreations and luthiers are working to fill that demand. See also Guitar List of guitar manufacturers Dingulator Strumming References Acoustic guitars American musical instruments Rhythm section

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antipope%20John%20XXIII

Antipope John XXIII

Baldassarre Cossa ( 1370 – 22 December 1419) was Pisan antipope John XXIII (1410–1415) during the Western Schism. The Catholic Church regards him as an antipope, as he opposed Pope Gregory XII whom the Catholic Church recognizes as the rightful successor of Saint Peter. He was also an opponent of Antipope Benedict XIII, who was recognized by the French clergy and monarchy as the legitimate Pontiff. Cossa was born in the Kingdom of Naples. In 1403, he served as a papal legate in Romagna. He participated in the Council of Pisa in 1408, which sought to end the Western Schism with the election of a third alternative pope. In 1410, he succeeded Antipope Alexander V, taking the name John XXIII. At the instigation of Sigismund, King of the Romans, Pope John called the Council of Constance of 1413, which deposed John XXIII and Benedict XIII, accepted Gregory XII's resignation, and elected Pope Martin V to replace them, thus ending the schism. John XXIII was tried for various crimes, though later accounts question the veracity of those accusations. Towards the end of his life Cossa restored his relationship with the Church and was made Cardinal Bishop of Frascati by Pope Martin V. Early life Baldassarre Cossa was born on the island of Procida in the Kingdom of Naples, the son of Giovanni Cossa, lord of Procida. Initially he followed a military career, taking part in the Angevin-Neapolitan war. His two brothers were sentenced to death for piracy by Ladislaus of Naples. He studied law at the University of Bologna and obtained doctorates in both civil and canon law. Probably at the prompting of his family, in 1392 he entered the service of Pope Boniface IX, first working in Bologna and then in Rome. (The Western Schism had begun in 1378, and there were two competing popes at the time, one in Avignon supported by France and Spain, and one in Rome, supported by most of Italy, Germany and England.) In 1386 he is listed as canon of the cathedral of Bologna. In 1396, he became archdeacon in Bologna. He became Cardinal deacon of Saint Eustachius in 1402 and Papal legate in Romagna in 1403. Johann Peter Kirsch describes Cossa as "utterly worldly-minded, ambitious, crafty, unscrupulous, and immoral, a good soldier but no churchman". At this time Cossa also had some links with local robber bands, which were often used to intimidate his rivals and attack carriages. These connections added to his influence and power in the region. Role in the Western Schism Council of Pisa Cardinal Cossa was one of the seven cardinals who, in May 1408, withdrew their allegiance from Pope Gregory XII, stating that he had broken his solemn oath not to create new cardinals without consulting them in advance. In company with those cardinals who had been following Antipope Benedict XIII of Avignon, they convened the Council of Pisa, of which Cossa became a leading figure. The aim of the council was to end the schism; to this end they deposed both Gregory XII and Benedict XIII and elected a new pope Alexander V in 1409. Gregory and Benedict ignored this decision, however, so that there were now three simultaneous claimants to the papacy. Election to the papacy Alexander suddenly died while he was with Cardinal Baldassare Cossa at Bologna on the night of 3–4 May 1410. On 25 May 1410, Cossa was consecrated a pope taking the name John XXIII. He had become an ordained bishop only one day earlier. John XXIII was acknowledged as pope by France, England, Bohemia, Portugal, parts of the Holy Roman Empire, and numerous Northern Italian city states, including Florence and Venice and the Patriarchate of Aquileia; and in the beginning and in 1411-1413 by Hungary and Poland. However, the Avignon Pope Benedict XIII was regarded as pope by the Kingdoms of Aragon, Castile, Sicily and Scotland. Gregory XII was still favored by Ladislaus of Naples, Carlo I Malatesta, the princes of Bavaria, Louis III, Elector Palatine, and parts of Germany and Poland. John XXIII made the Medici Bank the bank of the papacy, contributing considerably to the family's wealth and prestige. The main enemy of John was Ladislaus of Naples, who protected Gregory XII in Rome. Following his election as pope, John spent a year in Bologna and then joined forces with Louis II of Anjou to march against Ladislaus. An initial victory proved short-lived and Ladislaus retook Rome in May 1413, forcing John to flee to Florence. In Florence he met Sigismund, King of the Romans. Sigismund wanted to end the schism and urged John to call a general council. John did so with hesitation, at first trying to have the council held in Italy (rather than in a German Imperial City, as Sigismund wanted). The Council of Constance was convened on 30 October 1414. During the third session, rival Pope Gregory XII authorized the council as well. The council resolved that all three popes should abdicate and a new pope be elected. Flight from the Council of Constance In March, John escaped from Constance disguised as a postman. According to the Klingenberger Chronicle, written by a noble client of Frederick IV, Duke of Austria, John XXIII travelled down the Rhine to Schaffhausen in a boat, while Frederick accompanied him with a small band of men on horseback. There was a huge outcry in Constance when it was discovered that John had fled, and Sigismund was furious about this setback to his plans for ending the Schism. The King of the Romans issued orders to all the powers on the Upper Rhine and in Swabia stating that he had declared Frederick to be an outlaw and that his lands and possessions were forfeit. In due course this led to a great deal of political upheaval and many Austrian losses in the region, notably in Aargau to the Swiss Confederation. In the meantime, Antipope John XXIII and Frederick fled further downriver along the Rhine to the town of Freiburg im Breisgau, which recognised the duke of Austria as its lord. There Sigismund's lieutenant Ludwig III, Elector Palatine caught up with them. He convinced Frederick that he stood to lose too much by harbouring the fugitive pope, and the Austrian duke agreed to give himself and John up and return to Constance. Deposition During his absence, John was deposed by the council, and upon his return he was tried for heresy, simony, schism and immorality, and found guilty on all counts. The 18th century historian Edward Gibbon wrote, "The more scandalous charges were suppressed; the vicar of Christ was accused only of piracy, rape, sodomy, murder and incest." John was given over to Ludwig III, Elector Palatine, who imprisoned him for several months in Heidelberg and Mannheim. The last remaining claimant in Avignon, Benedict XIII, refused to resign and was excommunicated. Martin V was elected as new pope in 1417. Death and burial Cossa was freed in 1418 after a heavy ransom was paid by the Medici. He went to Florence, where he submitted to Martin V, who made him Cardinal Bishop of Frascati. Cossa died only a few months later. The Medici oversaw the construction of his magnificent tomb by Donatello and Michelozzo in the Battistero di San Giovanni in Florence. Pope Martin V protested in vain against the inscription on the sarcophagus: "John the former pope". J.P. Kirsch remarks that "Undeniably secular and ambitious, his moral life was not above reproach, and his unscrupulous methods in no wise accorded with the requirements of his high office ... the heinous crimes of which his opponents in the council accused him were certainly gravely exaggerated." One historian concluded that John was "a great man in temporal things, but a complete failure and worthless in spiritual things". Fictional depictions John is portrayed by Steven Waddington in the 2016 television series Medici: Masters of Florence. The 1932 thriller Safe Custody by Dornford Yates, references John. Listing the members of an objectionable family, a character in the story says, "Then we come to his nephew—a promising lad of fifteen. He lies, steals, smells, assaults the servants and abuses any animal which he is satisfied will not retaliate. If Gibbon may be believed, Pope John the Twenty-third as a stripling must have resembled him". In 1983 American political satirist and novelist Richard Condon wrote A Trembling Upon Rome, a novel of historical fiction about the life of Baldassare Cossa. Russian writer Dmitry Balashov wrote the novel Baltazar Kossa () about Antipope John XXIII. Numbering issues He should not be confused with Pope John XXIII of the twentieth century. When Angelo Roncalli was elected pope in 1958, there was some confusion as to whether he would be John XXIII or John XXIV; he then declared that he was John XXIII to put this question to rest. There was no John XX, since that number was skipped due to an error by Medieval Pope John XXI; this is why Gibbon refers to the antipope John as John XXII. See also Papal selection before 1059 Papal conclave (since 1274) References Sources 1370s births 1419 deaths Popes who abdicated People from the Metropolitan City of Naples Antipopes Cardinal-bishops of Frascati Cardinal-nephews Deans of the College of Cardinals 15th-century antipopes 14th-century Italian Roman Catholic bishops

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobble%20Hill%20Tunnel

Cobble Hill Tunnel

The Cobble Hill Tunnel (also known as the Atlantic Avenue Tunnel) is an abandoned Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) tunnel beneath Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, New York City, running through the neighborhoods of Downtown Brooklyn and Cobble Hill. When open, it ran for about between Columbia Street and Boerum Place. It is the oldest railway tunnel beneath a city street in North America that was fully devoted to rail. It is also deemed the oldest subway tunnel in the world by the Guinness Book of World Records. Construction and operation Originally built as an open cut, construction began in May 1844, and opened for use on December 3, 1844, but was not completely finished until mid-1845. It was built mainly to satisfy public demand for creation of a grade-separated right of way for the Brooklyn and Jamaica Railroad (later Long Island Rail Road) on its way to the South Ferry at the foot of Atlantic Street (later Atlantic Avenue), where passengers could catch ferries to Manhattan. The construction of the cut also lowered the LIRR's grade through Cobble Hill. Around five years after opening the cut was roofed over, converting it into a tunnel. As originally built, the cut was wide and long. Once roofed over, the interior height of the newly created tunnel was . In exchange for building the cut, the City of Brooklyn granted the B&J permission to operate its steam locomotives on Atlantic Street west of Fifth Avenue (then Parmentier's Garden/Gowanus Lane), all the way to Brooklyn's South Ferry (the present location of Brooklyn's Pier 7). Prior to the cut being built, the LIRR's western terminus was Atlantic Street at Clinton Street. Train cars were hauled by teams of horses along Atlantic Street from Clinton Street to Parmentier's Garden, where steam locomotives were attached. While the cut was being built, the railroad operated to a temporary terminal at Pacific Street and Henry Street. The Cobble Hill Tunnel was part of the first rail link between New York City and Boston, Massachusetts. The railroad connected Lower Manhattan via the South Ferry to Greenport on the North Fork of Long Island; a ferry connected Greenport to Stonington, Connecticut, where a rail link continued to Boston. This avoided some difficult construction of bridges over the rivers of southern Connecticut. In 1848, the New York and New Haven Railroad Line was completed through Connecticut, providing a direct, faster rail connection from New York City to Boston. The Cobble Hill Tunnel and the Long Island Railroad remained the primary means of access to most of central Long Island from Manhattan and New York City. The ends of the tunnel were sealed in the fall of 1861. The similar Murray Hill Tunnel on the New York and Harlem Railroad was built as an open cut around 1836, roofed over around the 1850s, and is now in use for automobile traffic. Closure controversy In 1861, the New York State Legislature voted to ban railroad locomotives from within the limits of the City of Brooklyn. A tax assessment was ordered on all property owners along Atlantic Street (today Atlantic Avenue), to defray the costs of the closure. It was undisclosed at the time that New York State Governor John A. King was a major shareholder in the Brooklyn and Jamaica Railroad (later the Long Island Rail Road) and therefore had a conflict of interest and stood to benefit by the compensation payments to the railroad from the tax assessment. Dormancy Walt Whitman wrote of the tunnel: The old tunnel, that used to lie there under ground, a passage of Acheron-like solemnity and darkness, now all closed and filled up, and soon to be utterly forgotten, with all its reminiscences; however, there will, for a few years yet be many dear ones, to not a few Brooklynites, New Yorkers, and promiscuous crowds besides. For it was here you started to go down the island, in summer. For years, it was confidently counted on that this spot, and the railroad of which it was the terminus, were going to prove the permanent seat of business and wealth that belong to such enterprises. But its glory, after enduring in great splendor for a season, has now vanished—at least its Long Island Railroad glory has. The tunnel: dark as the grave, cold, damp, and silent. How beautiful look earth and heaven again, as we emerge from the gloom! It might not be unprofitable, now and then, to send us mortals—the dissatisfied ones, at least, and that's a large proportion—into some tunnel of several days' journey. We'd perhaps grumble less, afterward, at God's handiwork. In March 1916, the Bureau of Investigation suspected German terrorists were making bombs in the tunnel, and broke through the roof of the tunnel with jackhammers. They found nothing, installed an electric light, and resealed it. In the 1920s, it was rumored to be used for both mushroom growing and bootleg whiskey stills, even though there was no access into the main portion of the tunnel. It became an object of local folklore and legend. In 1936, the New York City Police Department unsuccessfully attempted to enter the tunnel, in order to look for the body of a hoodlum supposedly buried there. In 1941, it was rumored to have been inspected by the federal Works Progress Administration to determine its structural strength, but there is no evidence of this. A few years later, it was once again rumored to have been opened, this time by the FBI, in an unsuccessful search for spies; however, there is no evidence of this. During the late 1950s, it was sought by two rail historians, George Horn and Martin Schachne, but they did not gain access to the tunnel itself. Rediscovery Having fallen from public notice, the tunnel was rediscovered in 1980 by then 20-year-old Bob Diamond (born Robert Stephen Turin; October 6, 1959August 21, 2021), who entered from a manhole he located at Atlantic Avenue and Court Street, crawled a distance of underground through a filled-in section of tunnel less than high, and located the bulkhead wall that sealed off the main portion of the tunnel. With the assistance of a Brooklyn Union Gas Company engineering crew, he then broke through the massive concrete bulkhead wall, which is several feet thick. Diamond thereby opened access to the main portion of the tunnel, and began to popularize the tunnel as an antiquity. He led tours of its interior from 1982 until December 17, 2010, when the Department of Transportation terminated his contract, citing safety concerns. The tunnel has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1989. The History Channel series Cities of the Underworld ran a segment ("New York's Secret Societies") on the tunnel in 2008. See also Beach Pneumatic Transit Brooklyn Historic Railway Association Park Avenue main line, another railroad line in New York City that may have contained the oldest rail tunnels in the U.S. Track 61 (New York City) National Register of Historic Places listings in Kings County, New York References Notes Citations Further reading The Atlantic Avenue Tunnel (Arrt's Arrchives) Transportation buildings and structures in Brooklyn Long Island Rail Road Railway tunnels on the National Register of Historic Places Railroad tunnels in New York City History of transportation in New York City National Register of Historic Places in New York City Historic districts on the National Register of Historic Places in New York (state) Tunnels completed in 1844 Cobble Hill, Brooklyn National Register of Historic Places in Brooklyn Proposed buildings and structures in New York City Railway buildings and structures on the National Register of Historic Places in New York City 1844 establishments in New York (state)

2245

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annapolis%20Valley

Annapolis Valley

The Annapolis Valley is a valley and region in the province of Nova Scotia, Canada. It is located in the western part of the Nova Scotia peninsula, formed by a trough between two parallel mountain ranges along the shore of the Bay of Fundy. Statistics Canada defines the Annapolis Valley as an economic region, composed of Annapolis County, Kings County, and Hants County. Geography The valley measures approximately in length from Digby and the Annapolis Basin in the west to Wolfville and the Minas Basin in the east, spanning the counties of Digby, Annapolis and Kings. Some also include the western part of Hants County, including the towns of Hantsport and Windsor even further to the east, but geographically speaking they are part of the Avon River valley. The steep face of basaltic North Mountain shelters the valley from the adjacent Bay of Fundy and rises over in elevation near Lawrencetown. The granitic South Mountain rises to a somewhat higher elevation and shelters the valley from the climate of the Atlantic Ocean approximately 100 kilometres further south on the province's South Shore. The shelter provided by these two mountainous ridges has produced a microclimate which provides relatively mild temperatures for the region and, coupled with the fertile glacial sedimentary soils on the valley floor, the region is conducive to growing vegetable and fruit crops. Particularly famous for its apple crop, the valley hosts in excess of 1,000 farms of various types, the majority being relatively small family-owned operations. Within the valley itself are two major rivers, the Annapolis River which flows west from Caribou Bog in the central part of the valley into Annapolis Basin, and the Cornwallis River which flows east from Caribou Bog into Minas Basin. The North Mountain ridge forms the north side of the Annapolis Valley. Also flowing east, in two smaller valleys north of the Cornwallis River, are the Canard River and the Habitant River, both of which also flow into the Minas Basin. History Long settled by the Mi'kmaq nation, the valley experienced French settlement at the Habitation at Port-Royal, near modern-day Annapolis Royal in the western part of the valley, beginning in 1605. From there, the Acadians spread throughout the Valley, in various communities, building dykes to claim the tidal lands along the Annapolis and Cornwallis Rivers. They continued throughout the Annapolis Valley until the British-ordered expulsion of Acadians in 1755 which is memorialized at Grand-Pré in the eastern part of the valley. New England Planters moved in to occupy the abandoned Acadian farming areas and the region also saw subsequent settlement by Loyalist refugees of the American Revolutionary War, as well as foreign Protestants. These were followed by significant numbers of freed Africans in the War of 1812, Irish immigrants in the mid-19th century and Dutch immigrants after World War II. Agriculture in the Annapolis valley boomed in the late 19th century with the arrival of the Windsor and Annapolis Railway, later the Dominion Atlantic Railway, which developed large export markets for Annapolis Valley apples. The Annapolis Valley Regional Library was established in 1949. It was the first regional library system in Nova Scotia. Economy The Valley has traditionally been built on a diversified agricultural industry, with a wide range of output ranging from livestock to fruit trees and berries. The last quarter-century has also seen the development of a wine industry, with such notable wineries as Gaspereau Vineyards winning national and international awards for their produce. Today, the Valley is still largely dominated by agriculture but also has a growing diversity in its economies, partly aided by the importance of post-secondary education centres provided by Acadia University in Wolfville, and the Nova Scotia Community College campuses located in Kentville, Middleton, Lawrencetown, and Digby. Michelin has an important truck tire manufacturing plant in Waterville and the Department of National Defence has its largest air force base in Atlantic Canada located at CFB Greenwood along with an important training facility at Camp Aldershot, near Kentville. Tourism is also an important industry and the Annapolis Valley is known for its scenic farmland, although today some is threatened with suburban development in the eastern end, and a great deal has been abandoned. The valley also struggles with pollution from farm runoffs and residential sewers in its two major rivers, the Annapolis River and the Cornwallis River. The Annapolis Valley additionally has become home to the majority of Nova Scotia wineries, located in either the Gaspereau Valley or in the Canning, Grand Pré, or Bear River areas. The Valley is home to the annual Apple Blossom Festival, held in late spring. In July is the annual Steer Bar-B-Que in Kingston, and Heart of the Valley Festival in Middleton. August sees Mud Creek Days in Wolfville and the Annapolis Valley Exhibition in Lawrencetown. Bridgetown's Cider Festival comes in mid-September. The Canadian Deep Roots Music Festival is held each year at the end of September in Wolfville, a community-based festival, supported by both the Town of Wolfville and Acadia University and built by over 100 volunteers, and on in-kind and financial support from virtually all sectors of the Valley community. Late October sees Wolfville and Kings County play host to Devour! The Food Film Fest, an annual international film festival celebrating all things culinary. Farmers markets in Annapolis Royal, Bridgetown, Middleton, Kentville, Kingsport, Berwick and Wolfville bring a produce and other goods to the public every week. In the fall, there is the Pumpkin People in Kentville. Communities Communities in the Valley from west to east include: Digby Cornwallis Annapolis Royal Bridgetown Lawrencetown Middleton Greenwood Kingston Auburn Aylesford Berwick Waterville Cambridge Coldbrook Kentville New Minas Canning Wolfville Grand-Pré Glooscap Hantsport Mount Denson Falmouth Windsor References External links Annapolis Valley Tourism Valleys of Nova Scotia Wine regions of Canada Geographic regions of Nova Scotia Cuisine of Nova Scotia Alcohol in Nova Scotia

2246

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analgesic

Analgesic

An analgesic drug, also called simply an analgesic, antalgic, pain reliever, or painkiller, is any member of the group of drugs used for pain management. Analgesics are conceptually distinct from anesthetics, which temporarily reduce, and in some instances eliminate, sensation, although analgesia and anesthesia are neurophysiologically overlapping and thus various drugs have both analgesic and anesthetic effects. Analgesic choice is also determined by the type of pain: For neuropathic pain, recent research has suggested that classes of drugs that are not normally considered analgesics, such as tricyclic antidepressants and anticonvulsants may be considered as an alternative. Various analgesics, such as many NSAIDs, are available over the counter in most countries, whereas various others are prescription drugs owing to the substantial risks and high chances of overdose, misuse, and addiction in the absence of medical supervision. Etymology The word analgesic derives from Greek an- (, "without"), álgos (, "pain"), and -ikos (, forming adjectives). Such drugs were usually known as "anodynes" before the 20th century. Classification Analgesics are typically classified based on their mechanism of action. Paracetamol (acetaminophen) Paracetamol, also known as acetaminophen or APAP, is a medication used to treat pain and fever. It is typically used for mild to moderate pain. In combination with opioid pain medication, paracetamol is now used for more severe pain such as cancer pain and after surgery. It is typically used either by mouth or rectally but is also available intravenously. Effects last between two and four hours. Paracetamol is classified as a mild analgesic. Paracetamol is generally safe at recommended doses. NSAIDs Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (usually abbreviated to NSAIDs), are a drug class that groups together drugs that decrease pain and lower fever, and, in higher doses, decrease inflammation. The most prominent members of this group of drugs, aspirin, ibuprofen and naproxen, are all available over the counter in most countries. COX-2 inhibitors These drugs have been derived from NSAIDs. The cyclooxygenase enzyme inhibited by NSAIDs was discovered to have at least two different versions: COX1 and COX2. Research suggested most of the adverse effects of NSAIDs to be mediated by blocking the COX1 (constitutive) enzyme, with the analgesic effects being mediated by the COX2 (inducible) enzyme. Thus, the COX2 inhibitors were developed to inhibit only the COX2 enzyme (traditional NSAIDs block both versions in general). These drugs (such as rofecoxib, celecoxib, and etoricoxib) are equally effective analgesics when compared with NSAIDs, but cause less gastrointestinal hemorrhage in particular. After widespread adoption of the COX-2 inhibitors, it was discovered that most of the drugs in this class increase the risk of cardiovascular events by 40% on average. This led to the withdrawal of rofecoxib and valdecoxib, and warnings on others. Etoricoxib seems relatively safe, with the risk of thrombotic events similar to that of non-coxib NSAID diclofenac. Opioids Morphine, the archetypal opioid, and other opioids (e.g., codeine, oxycodone, hydrocodone, dihydromorphine, pethidine) all exert a similar influence on the cerebral opioid receptor system. Buprenorphine is a partial agonist of the μ-opioid receptor, and tramadol is a serotonin norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor (SNRI) with weak μ-opioid receptor agonist properties. Tramadol is structurally closer to venlafaxine than to codeine and delivers analgesia by not only delivering "opioid-like" effects (through mild agonism of the mu receptor) but also by acting as a weak but fast-acting serotonin releasing agent and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor. Tapentadol, with some structural similarities to tramadol, presents what is believed to be a novel drug working through two (and possibly three) different modes of action in the fashion of both a traditional opioid and as an SNRI. The effects of serotonin and norepinephrine on pain, while not completely understood, have had causal links established and drugs in the SNRI class are commonly used in conjunction with opioids (especially tapentadol and tramadol) with greater success in pain relief. Dosing of all opioids may be limited by opioid toxicity (confusion, respiratory depression, myoclonic jerks and pinpoint pupils), seizures (tramadol), but opioid-tolerant individuals usually have higher dose ceilings than patients without tolerance. Opioids, while very effective analgesics, may have some unpleasant side-effects. Patients starting morphine may experience nausea and vomiting (generally relieved by a short course of antiemetics such as phenergan). Pruritus (itching) may require switching to a different opioid. Constipation occurs in almost all patients on opioids, and laxatives (lactulose, macrogol-containing or co-danthramer) are typically co-prescribed. When used appropriately, opioids and other central analgesics are safe and effective; however, risks such as addiction and the body's becoming used to the drug (tolerance) can occur. The effect of tolerance means that frequent use of the drug may result in its diminished effect. When safe to do so, the dosage may need to be increased to maintain effectiveness against tolerance, which may be of particular concern regarding patients with chronic pain and requiring an analgesic over long periods. Opioid tolerance is often addressed with opioid rotation therapy in which a patient is routinely switched between two or more non-cross-tolerant opioid medications in order to prevent exceeding safe dosages in the attempt to achieve an adequate analgesic effect. Opioid tolerance should not be confused with opioid-induced hyperalgesia. The symptoms of these two conditions can appear very similar but the mechanism of action is different. Opioid-induced hyperalgesia is when exposure to opioids increases the sensation of pain (hyperalgesia) and can even make non-painful stimuli painful (allodynia). Alcohol Alcohol has biological, mental, and social effects which influence the consequences of using alcohol for pain. Moderate use of alcohol can lessen certain types of pain in certain circumstances. The majority of its analgesic effects come from antagonizing NMDA receptors, similarly to ketamine, thus decreasing the activity of the primary excitatory (signal boosting) neurotransmitter, glutamate. It also functions as an analgesic to a lesser degree by increasing the activity of the primary inhibitory (signal reducing) neurotransmitter, GABA. Attempting to use alcohol to treat pain has also been observed to lead to negative outcomes including excessive drinking and alcohol use disorder. Cannabis Medical cannabis, or medical marijuana, refers to cannabis or its cannabinoids used to treat disease or improve symptoms. There is evidence suggesting that cannabis can be used to treat chronic pain and muscle spasms, with some trials indicating improved relief of neuropathic pain over opioids. Combinations Analgesics are frequently used in combination, such as the paracetamol and codeine preparations found in many non-prescription pain relievers. They can also be found in combination with vasoconstrictor drugs such as pseudoephedrine for sinus-related preparations, or with antihistamine drugs for people with allergies. While the use of paracetamol, aspirin, ibuprofen, naproxen, and other NSAIDS concurrently with weak to mid-range opiates (up to about the hydrocodone level) has been said to show beneficial synergistic effects by combating pain at multiple sites of action, several combination analgesic products have been shown to have few efficacy benefits when compared to similar doses of their individual components. Moreover, these combination analgesics can often result in significant adverse events, including accidental overdoses, most often due to confusion that arises from the multiple (and often non-acting) components of these combinations. Alternative medicine There is some evidence that some treatments using alternative medicine can relieve some types of pain more effectively than placebo. The available research concludes that more research would be necessary to better understand the use of alternative medicine. Other drugs Nefopam—a monoamine reuptake inhibitor, and calcium and sodium channel modulator—is also approved for the treatment of moderate to severe pain in some countries. Flupirtine is a centrally acting K+ channel opener with weak NMDA antagonist properties. It was used in Europe for moderate to strong pain, as well as its migraine-treating and muscle-relaxant properties. It has no significant anticholinergic properties, and is believed to be devoid of any activity on dopamine, serotonin, or histamine receptors. It is not addictive, and tolerance usually does not develop. However, tolerance may develop in some cases. Ziconotide, a blocker of potent N‐type voltage‐gated calcium channels, is administered intrathecally for the relief of severe, usually cancer-related pain. Adjuvants Certain drugs that have been introduced for uses other than analgesics are also used in pain management. Both first-generation (such as amitriptyline) and newer antidepressants (such as duloxetine) are used alongside NSAIDs and opioids for pain involving nerve damage and similar problems. Other agents directly potentiate the effects of analgesics, such as using hydroxyzine, promethazine, carisoprodol, or tripelennamine to increase the pain-killing ability of a given dose of opioid analgesic. Adjuvant analgesics, also called atypical analgesics, include orphenadrine, mexiletine, pregabalin, gabapentin, cyclobenzaprine, hyoscine (scopolamine), and other drugs possessing anticonvulsant, anticholinergic, and/or antispasmodic properties, as well as many other drugs with CNS actions. These drugs are used along with analgesics to modulate and/or modify the action of opioids when used against pain, especially of neuropathic origin. Dextromethorphan has been noted to slow the development of and reverse tolerance to opioids, as well as to exert additional analgesia by acting upon NMDA receptors, as does ketamine. Some analgesics such as methadone and ketobemidone and perhaps piritramide have intrinsic NMDA action. High-alcohol liquor, two forms of which were found in the US Pharmacopoeia up until 1916 and in common use by physicians well into the 1930s, has been used in the past as an agent for dulling pain, due to the CNS depressant effects of ethyl alcohol, a notable example being the American Civil War. However, the ability of alcohol to relieve severe pain is likely inferior to many analgesics used today (e.g., morphine, codeine). As such, in general, the idea of alcohol for analgesia is considered a primitive practice in virtually all industrialized countries today. The anticonvulsant carbamazepine is used to treat neuropathic pain. Similarly, the gabapentinoids gabapentin and pregabalin are prescribed for neuropathic pain, and phenibut is available without prescription. Gabapentinoids work as α2δ-subunit blockers of voltage-gated calcium channels, and tend to have other mechanisms of action as well. Gabapentinoids are all anticonvulsants, which are most commonly used for neuropathic pain, as their mechanism of action tends to inhibit pain sensation originating from the nervous system. Other uses Topical analgesia is generally recommended to avoid systemic side-effects. Painful joints, for example, may be treated with an ibuprofen- or diclofenac-containing gel (The labeling for topical diclofenac has been updated to warn about drug-induced hepatotoxicity.); capsaicin also is used topically. Lidocaine, an anesthetic, and steroids may be injected into joints for longer-term pain relief. Lidocaine is also used for painful mouth sores and to numb areas for dental work and minor medical procedures. In February 2007 the FDA notified consumers and healthcare professionals of the potential hazards of topical anesthetics entering the bloodstream when applied in large doses to the skin without medical supervision. These topical anesthetics contain anesthetic drugs such as lidocaine, tetracaine, benzocaine, and prilocaine in a cream, ointment, or gel. Uses Topical nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs provide pain relief in common conditions such as muscle sprains and overuse injuries. Since the side effects are also lesser, topical preparations could be preferred over oral medications in these conditions. List of drugs with comparison Research Some novel and investigational analgesics include subtype-selective voltage-gated sodium channel blockers such as funapide and raxatrigine, as well as multimodal agents such as ralfinamide. See also Audioanalgesia Electroanalgesia Pain management Patient-controlled analgesia Pain in babies Congenital analgesia (insensitivity to pain) References Citations Sources . . Pain Opioids Agnosia

2250

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiotic%20stress

Abiotic stress

Abiotic stress is the negative impact of non-living factors on the living organisms in a specific environment. The non-living variable must influence the environment beyond its normal range of variation to adversely affect the population performance or individual physiology of the organism in a significant way. Whereas a biotic stress would include living disturbances such as fungi or harmful insects, abiotic stress factors, or stressors, are naturally occurring, often intangible and inanimate factors such as intense sunlight, temperature or wind that may cause harm to the plants and animals in the area affected. Abiotic stress is essentially unavoidable. Abiotic stress affects animals, but plants are especially dependent, if not solely dependent, on environmental factors, so it is particularly constraining. Abiotic stress is the most harmful factor concerning the growth and productivity of crops worldwide. Research has also shown that abiotic stressors are at their most harmful when they occur together, in combinations of abiotic stress factors. Examples Abiotic stress comes in many forms. The most common of the stressors are the easiest for people to identify, but there are many other, less recognizable abiotic stress factors which affect environments constantly. The most basic stressors include: High winds Extreme temperatures Drought Flood Other natural disasters, such as tornadoes and wildfires. Cold Heat Nutrient deficiency Lesser-known stressors generally occur on a smaller scale. They include: poor edaphic conditions like rock content and pH levels, high radiation, compaction, contamination, and other, highly specific conditions like rapid rehydration during seed germination. Effects Abiotic stress, as a natural part of every ecosystem, will affect organisms in a variety of ways. Although these effects may be either beneficial or detrimental, the location of the area is crucial in determining the extent of the impact that abiotic stress will have. The higher the latitude of the area affected, the greater the impact of abiotic stress will be on that area. So, a taiga or boreal forest is at the mercy of whatever abiotic stress factors may come along, while tropical zones are much less susceptible to such stressors. Benefits One example of a situation where abiotic stress plays a constructive role in an ecosystem is in natural wildfires. While they can be a human safety hazard, it is productive for these ecosystems to burn out every once in a while so that new organisms can begin to grow and thrive. Even though it is healthy for an ecosystem, a wildfire can still be considered an abiotic stressor, because it puts an obvious stress on individual organisms within the area. Every tree that is scorched and each bird nest that is devoured is a sign of the abiotic stress. On the larger scale, though, natural wildfires are positive manifestations of abiotic stress. What also needs to be taken into account when looking for benefits of abiotic stress, is that one phenomenon may not affect an entire ecosystem in the same way. While a flood will kill most plants living low on the ground in a certain area, if there is rice there, it will thrive in the wet conditions. Another example of this is in phytoplankton and zooplankton. The same types of conditions are usually considered stressful for these two types of organisms. They act very similarly when exposed to ultraviolet light and most toxins, but at elevated temperatures the phytoplankton reacts negatively, while the thermophilic zooplankton reacts positively to the increase in temperature. The two may be living in the same environment, but an increase in temperature of the area would prove stressful only for one of the organisms. Lastly, abiotic stress has enabled species to grow, develop, and evolve, furthering natural selection as it picks out the weakest of a group of organisms. Both plants and animals have evolved mechanisms allowing them to survive extremes. Detriments The most obvious detriment concerning abiotic stress involves farming. It has been claimed by one study that abiotic stress causes the most crop loss of any other factor and that most major crops are reduced in their yield by more than 50% from their potential yield. Because abiotic stress is widely considered a detrimental effect, the research on this branch of the issue is extensive. For more information on the harmful effects of abiotic stress, see the sections below on plants and animals. In plants A plant's first line of defense against abiotic stress is in its roots. If the soil holding the plant is healthy and biologically diverse, the plant will have a higher chance of surviving stressful conditions. The plant responses to stress are dependent on the tissue or organ affected by the stress. For example, transcriptional responses to stress are tissue or cell specific in roots and are quite different depending on the stress involved. One of the primary responses to abiotic stress such as high salinity is the disruption of the Na+/K+ ratio in the cytoplasm of the plant cell. High concentrations of Na+, for example, can decrease the capacity for the plant to take up water and also alter enzyme and transporter functions. Evolved adaptations to efficiently restore cellular ion homeostasis have led to a wide variety of stress tolerant plants. Facilitation, or the positive interactions between different species of plants, is an intricate web of association in a natural environment. It is how plants work together. In areas of high stress, the level of facilitation is especially high as well. This could possibly be because the plants need a stronger network to survive in a harsher environment, so their interactions between species, such as cross-pollination or mutualistic actions, become more common to cope with the severity of their habitat. Plants also adapt very differently from one another, even from a plant living in the same area. When a group of different plant species was prompted by a variety of different stress signals, such as drought or cold, each plant responded uniquely. Hardly any of the responses were similar, even though the plants had become accustomed to exactly the same home environment. Serpentine soils (media with low concentrations of nutrients and high concentrations of heavy metals) can be a source of abiotic stress. Initially, the absorption of toxic metal ions is limited by cell membrane exclusion. Ions that are absorbed into tissues are sequestered in cell vacuoles. This sequestration mechanism is facilitated by proteins on the vacuole membrane. An example of plants that adapt to serpentine soil are Metallophytes, or hyperaccumulators, as they are known for their ability to absorbed heavy metals using the root-to-shoot translocation (which it will absorb into shoots rather than the plant itself). They're also extinguished for their ability to absorb toxic substances from heavy metals. Chemical priming has been proposed to increase tolerance to abiotic stresses in crop plants. In this method, which is analogous to vaccination, stress-inducing chemical agents are introduced to the plant in brief doses so that the plant begins preparing defense mechanisms. Thus, when the abiotic stress occurs, the plant has already prepared defense mechanisms that can be activated faster and increase tolerance. Prior exposure to tolerable doses of biotic stresses such as phloem-feeding insect infestation have also been shown to increase tolerance to abiotic stresses in plant Impact on food production Abiotic stress mostly affects plants used in agriculture. Some examples of adverse conditions (which may be caused by climate change) are high or low temperatures, drought, salinity, and toxins. Rice (Oryza sativa) is a classic example. Rice is a staple food throughout the world, especially in China and India. Rice plants can undergo different types of abiotic stresses, like drought and high salinity. These stress conditions adversely affect rice production. Genetic diversity has been studied among several rice varieties with different genotypes, using molecular markers. Chickpea production is affected by drought. Chickpeas are one of the most important foods in the world. Wheat is another major crop that is affected by drought: lack of water affects the plant development, and can wither the leaves. Maize crops can be affected by high temperature and drought, leading to the loss of maize crops due to poor plant development. Soybean is a major source of protein, and its production is also affected by drought. Salt stress in plants Soil salinization, the accumulation of water-soluble salts to levels that negatively impact plant production, is a global phenomenon affecting approximately 831 million hectares of land. More specifically, the phenomenon threatens 19.5% of the world's irrigated agricultural land and 2.1% of the world's non-irrigated (dry-land) agricultural lands. High soil salinity content can be harmful to plants because water-soluble salts can alter osmotic potential gradients and consequently inhibit many cellular functions. For example, high soil salinity content can inhibit the process of photosynthesis by limiting a plant's water uptake; high levels of water-soluble salts in the soil can decrease the osmotic potential of the soil and consequently decrease the difference in water potential between the soil and the plant's roots, thereby limiting electron flow from H2O to P680 in Photosystem II's reaction center. Over generations, many plants have mutated and built different mechanisms to counter salinity effects. A good combatant of salinity in plants is the hormone ethylene. Ethylene is known for regulating plant growth and development and dealing with stress conditions. Many central membrane proteins in plants, such as ETO2, ERS1 and EIN2, are used for ethylene signaling in many plant growth processes. Mutations in these proteins can lead to heightened salt sensitivity and can limit plant growth. The effects of salinity has been studied on Arabidopsis plants that have mutated ERS1, ERS2, ETR1, ETR2 and EIN4 proteins. These proteins are used for ethylene signaling against certain stress conditions, such as salt and the ethylene precursor ACC is used to suppress any sensitivity to the salt stress. Phosphate starvation in plants Phosphorus (P) is an essential macronutrient required for plant growth and development, but it is present only in limited quantities in most of the world's soil. Plants use P mainly in the form of soluble inorganic phosphates (PO4−−−) but are subject to abiotic stress when there is not enough soluble PO4−−− in the soil. Phosphorus forms insoluble complexes with Ca and Mg in alkaline soils and with Al and Fe in acidic soils that make the phosphorus unavailable for plant roots. When there is limited bioavailable P in the soil, plants show extensive symptoms of abiotic stress, such as short primary roots and more lateral roots and root hairs to make more surface available for phosphate absorption, exudation of organic acids and phosphatase to release phosphates from complex P–containing molecules and make it available for growing plants' organs. It has been shown that PHR1, a MYB-related transcription factor, is a master regulator of P-starvation response in plants. PHR1 also has been shown to regulate extensive remodeling of lipids and metabolites during phosphorus limitation stress Drought stress Drought stress, defined as naturally occurring water deficit, is a main cause of crop losses in agriculture. This is because water is essential for many fundamental processes in plant growth. It has become especially important in recent years to find a way to combat drought stress. A decrease in precipitation and consequent increase in drought are extremely likely in the future due to an increase in global warming. Plants have come up with many mechanisms and adaptations to try and deal with drought stress. One of the leading ways that plants combat drought stress is by closing their stomata. A key hormone regulating stomatal opening and closing is abscisic acid (ABA). Synthesis of ABA causes the ABA to bind to receptors. This binding then affects the opening of ion channels, thereby decreasing turgor pressure in the stomata and causing them to close. Recent studies, by Gonzalez-Villagra, et al., have showed how ABA levels increased in drought-stressed plants (2018). They showed that when plants were placed in a stressful situation they produced more ABA to try to conserve any water they had in their leaves. Another extremely important factor in dealing with drought stress and regulating the uptake and export of water is aquaporins (AQPs). AQPs are integral membrane proteins that make up channels. These channels' main job is the transport of water and other essential solutes. AQPs are both transcriptionally and post-transcriptionally regulated by many different factors such as ABA, GA3, pH and Ca2+; and the specific levels of AQPs in certain parts of the plant, such as roots or leaves, helps to draw as much water into the plant as possible. By understanding the mechanisms of both AQPs and the hormone ABA, scientists will be better able to produce drought-resistant plants in the future. It is interesting that plants that are consistently exposed to drought have been found to form a sort of "memory". A study by Tombesi et al., found that plants which had previously been exposed to drought were able to come up with a sort of strategy to minimize water loss and decrease water use. They found that plants which were exposed to drought conditions actually changed the way they regulated their stomata and what they called "hydraulic safety margin" so as to decrease the vulnerability of the plant. By changing the regulation of stomata and subsequently the transpiration, plants were able to function better when less water was available. In animals For animals, the most stressful of all the abiotic stressors is heat. This is because many species are unable to regulate their internal body temperature. Even in the species that are able to regulate their own temperature, it is not always a completely accurate system. Temperature determines metabolic rates, heart rates, and other very important factors within the bodies of animals, so an extreme temperature change can easily distress the animal's body. Animals can respond to extreme heat, for example, through natural heat acclimation or by burrowing into the ground to find a cooler space. It is also possible to see in animals that a high genetic diversity is beneficial in providing resiliency against harsh abiotic stressors. This acts as a sort of stock room when a species is plagued by the perils of natural selection. A variety of galling insects are among the most specialized and diverse herbivores on the planet, and their extensive protections against abiotic stress factors have helped the insect in gaining that position of honor. In endangered species Biodiversity is determined by many things, and one of them is abiotic stress. If an environment is highly stressful, biodiversity tends to be low. If abiotic stress does not have a strong presence in an area, the biodiversity will be much higher. This idea leads into the understanding of how abiotic stress and endangered species are related. It has been observed through a variety of environments that as the level of abiotic stress increases, the number of species decreases. This means that species are more likely to become population threatened, endangered, and even extinct, when and where abiotic stress is especially harsh. See also Ecophysiology References Stress (biological and psychological) Biodiversity Habitat Agriculture Botany

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accusative%20case

Accusative case

In grammar, the accusative case (abbreviated ) of a noun is the grammatical case used to receive the direct object of a transitive verb. In the English language, the only words that occur in the accusative case are pronouns: "me", "him", "her", "us", "whom", and "them". For example, the pronoun she, as the subject of a clause, is in the nominative case ("She wrote a book"); but if the pronoun is instead the object of the verb, it is in the accusative case and she becomes her ("Fred greeted her"). For compound direct objects, it would be, e.g., "Fred invited her and me to the party". The accusative case is used in many languages for the objects of (some or all) prepositions. It is usually combined with the nominative case (for example in Latin). The English term, "accusative", derives from the Latin , which, in turn, is a translation of the Greek . The word can also mean "causative", and that might have derived from the Greeks, but the sense of the Roman translation has endured and is used in some other modern languages as the grammatical term for this case, for example in Russian (). The accusative case is typical of early Indo-European languages and still exists in some of them (including Albanian, Armenian, Latin, Sanskrit, Greek, German, Nepali, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, and Ukrainian), in the Finno-Ugric languages (such as Finnish and Hungarian), in all Turkic languages, in Dravidian languages like Malayalam and Tamil, and in Semitic languages (such as Arabic). Some Balto-Finnic languages, such as Finnish, have two cases for objects, the accusative and the partitive case. In morphosyntactic alignment terms, both do the accusative function, but the accusative object is telic, while the partitive is not. Modern English almost entirely lacks declension in its nouns; pronouns, however, have an understood case usage, as in them, her, him and whom, which merges the accusative and dative functions, and originates in old Germanic dative forms (see Declension in English). Example In the sentence The man sees the dog, the dog is the direct object of the verb "to see". In English, which has mostly lost grammatical cases, the definite article and noun – "the dog" – remain the same noun form without number agreement in the noun either as subject or object, though an artifact of it is in the verb and has number agreement, which changes to "sees". One can also correctly use "the dog" as the subject of a sentence: "The dog sees the cat." In a declined language, the morphology of the article or noun changes with gender agreement. For example, in German, "the dog" is . This is the form in the nominative case, used for the subject of a sentence. If this article/noun pair is used as the object of a verb, it (usually) changes to the accusative case, which entails an article shift in German – (The man sees the dog). In German, masculine nouns change their definite article from to in the accusative case. Latin The accusative case in Latin has minor differences from the accusative case in Proto-Indo-European. Nouns in the accusative case () can be used: as a direct object; to qualify duration of time, e.g., , "for many years"; , "for 200 years"; this is known as the accusative of duration of time, to qualify direction towards which e.g., , "homewards"; , "to Rome" with no preposition needed; this is known as the accusative of place to which, and is equivalent to the lative case found in some other languages. as the subject of an indirect statement with the verb as an infinitive, (e.g. , "He said that I had been cruel"; in later Latin works, such as the Vulgate, such a phrasing is replaced by and a regularly ordered sentence, having the subject in the nominative and the verb in the indicative mood, e.g., ). with case-specific prepositions such as (through), (to/toward), and (across); in exclamations, such as , "wretched me" (spoken by Circe to Ulysses in Ovid's ); to qualify purpose, e.g., , "for the purpose of departing"; , "for the purpose of weakening [or, effeminating] the spirit". For the accusative endings, see Latin declensions. German The accusative case is used for the direct object in a sentence. The masculine forms for German articles, e.g., "the", "a/an", "my", etc., change in the accusative case: they always end in -en. The feminine, neutral and plural forms do not change. For example, (dog) is a masculine () word, so the article changes when used in the accusative case: . (lit., I have a dog.) In the sentence, "a dog" is in the accusative case as it is the second idea (the object) of the sentence. Some German pronouns also change in the accusative case. The accusative case is also used after particular German prepositions. These include , , , , , , after which the accusative case is always used, and , , , , , , , , which can govern either the accusative or the dative. The latter prepositions take the accusative when motion or action is specified (being done into/onto the space), but take the dative when location is specified (being done in/on that space). These prepositions are also used in conjunction with certain verbs, in which case it is the verb in question which governs whether the accusative or dative should be used. Adjective endings also change in the accusative case. Another factor that determines the endings of adjectives is whether the adjective is being used after a definite article (the), after an indefinite article (a/an) or without any article before the adjective (many green apples). In German, the accusative case is also used for some adverbial expressions, mostly temporal ones, as in (This evening I'm staying at home), where is marked as accusative, although not a direct object. Russian In Russian, accusative is used not only to display the direct object of an action, but also to indicate the destination or goal of motion. It is also used with some prepositions. The prepositions and can both take accusative in situations where they are indicating the goal of a motion. In the masculine, Russian also distinguishes between animate and inanimate nouns with regard to the accusative; only the animates carry a marker in this case. The PIE accusative case has nearly eroded in Russian, merging with the genitive or the nominative in most declensions. Only singular first-declension nouns (ending in '', '', or '') have a distinct accusative ('', '', or ''). Finnish Traditional Finnish grammars say the accusative is the case of a total object, while the case of a partial object is the partitive. The accusative is identical either to the nominative or the genitive, except for personal pronouns and the personal interrogative pronoun /, which have a special accusative form ending in . The major new Finnish grammar, , breaks with the traditional classification to limit the accusative case to the special case of the personal pronouns and /. The new grammar considers other total objects as being in the nominative or genitive case. Hungarian The accusative case is assigned to the direct object in a sentence in Hungarian. The accusative marker is always , often preceded by a linking vowel to facilitate pronunciation. Every personal pronoun has an accusative form. For the Hungarian 1st and 2nd person singular accusative forms, the pronoun can often be dropped if it is clear from the context who the speaker is referring to. Semitic languages Accusative case marking existed in Proto-Semitic, Akkadian, and Ugaritic. It is preserved today in many Semitic languages as Modern Standard Arabic, Hebrew and Ge'ez. Accusative in Akkadian Nominative: (a/the man) Accusative: (I trust a/the man) Accusative in Arabic The accusative case is called in Arabic () and it has many other uses in addition to marking the object of a verb. Accusative in Hebrew In Hebrew, if the object of the sentence is a pronoun (e.g., I, you, s/he) and the transitive verb requires a direct object, the word is combined with the pronoun into an object pronoun. The combined words are: me: you (singular): (M); (F) him: her: we: you (plural): (M); (F) them: (M); (F) Japanese In Japanese, cases are marked by placing particles after nouns. The accusative case is marked with (, pronounced ). Turkish In Turkish, cases are marked with suffixes. The accusative case is marked with the suffixes , depending on vowel harmony. If a word ends in a vowel, is added before the suffix as a buffer consonant. The accusative is only used if the direct object of a sentence is definite. If it is indefinite, the nominative case is used. For example: {| |- | || || (nominative case) |- | || || (nominative case, indefinite direct object) |- | || || (accusative case, definite direct object) |} Malayalam In Malayalam, the accusative inflection is achieved using the suffix /-e/. Example: /raman/ → /ramane/. The sandhi also play a role here depending on the ending of the noun. Example: /maram/ → /maratte/ where /tt/ replaces /m/ when /e/ is suffixed. See also Morphosyntactic alignment Nota accusativi References Further reading Grammatical cases

2268

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemistry%20of%20ascorbic%20acid

Chemistry of ascorbic acid

Ascorbic acid is an organic compound with formula , originally called hexuronic acid. It is a white solid, but impure samples can appear yellowish. It dissolves freely in water to give mildly acidic solutions. It is a mild reducing agent. Ascorbic acid exists as two enantiomers (mirror-image isomers), commonly denoted "" (for "levo") and "" (for "dextro"). The isomer is the one most often encountered: it occurs naturally in many foods, and is one form ("vitamer") of vitamin C, an essential nutrient for humans and many animals. Deficiency of vitamin C causes scurvy, formerly a major disease of sailors in long sea voyages. It is used as a food additive and a dietary supplement for its antioxidant properties. The "" form can be made via chemical synthesis, but has no significant biological role. History The antiscorbutic properties of certain foods were demonstrated in the 18th century by James Lind. In 1907, Axel Holst and Theodor Frølich discovered that the antiscorbutic factor was a water-soluble chemical substance, distinct from the one that prevented beriberi. Between 1928 and 1932, Albert Szent-Györgyi isolated a candidate for this substance, which he called it "hexuronic acid", first from plants and later from animal adrenal glands. In 1932 Charles Glen King confirmed that it was indeed the antiscorbutic factor. In 1933, sugar chemist Walter Norman Haworth, working with samples of "hexuronic acid" that Szent-Györgyi had isolated from paprika and sent him in the previous year, deduced the correct structure and optical-isomeric nature of the compound, and in 1934 reported its first synthesis. In reference to the compound's antiscorbutic properties, Haworth and Szent-Györgyi proposed to rename it "a-scorbic acid" for the compound, and later specifically -ascorbic acid. Because of their work, in 1937 two Nobel Prizes: in Chemistry and in Physiology or Medicine were awarded to Haworth and Szent-Györgyi, respectively. Chemical properties Acidity Ascorbic acid is a furan-based lactone of 2-ketogluconic acid. It contains an adjacent enediol adjacent to the carbonyl. This −C(OH)=C(OH)−C(=O)− structural pattern is characteristic of reductones, and increases the acidity of one of the enol hydroxyl groups. The deprotonated conjugate base is the ascorbate anion, which is stabilized by electron delocalization that results from resonance between two forms: For this reason, ascorbic acid is much more acidic than would be expected if the compound contained only isolated hydroxyl groups. Salts The ascorbate anion forms salts, such as sodium ascorbate, calcium ascorbate, and potassium ascorbate. Esters Ascorbic acid can also react with organic acids as an alcohol forming esters such as ascorbyl palmitate and ascorbyl stearate. Nucleophilic attack Nucleophilic attack of ascorbic acid on a proton results in a 1,3-diketone: Oxidation The ascorbate ion is the predominant species at typical biological pH values. It is a mild reducing agent and antioxidant. It is oxidized with loss of one electron to form a radical cation and then with loss of a second electron to form dehydroascorbic acid. It typically reacts with oxidants of the reactive oxygen species, such as the hydroxyl radical. Ascorbic acid is special because it can transfer a single electron, owing to the resonance-stabilized nature of its own radical ion, called semidehydroascorbate. The net reaction is: RO• + → RO− + C6H7O → ROH + C6H6O6 On exposure to oxygen, ascorbic acid will undergo further oxidative decomposition to various products including diketogulonic acid, xylonic acid, threonic acid and oxalic acid. Reactive oxygen species are damaging to animals and plants at the molecular level due to their possible interaction with nucleic acids, proteins, and lipids. Sometimes these radicals initiate chain reactions. Ascorbate can terminate these chain radical reactions by electron transfer. The oxidized forms of ascorbate are relatively unreactive and do not cause cellular damage. However, being a good electron donor, excess ascorbate in the presence of free metal ions can not only promote but also initiate free radical reactions, thus making it a potentially dangerous pro-oxidative compound in certain metabolic contexts. Ascorbic acid and its sodium, potassium, and calcium salts are commonly used as antioxidant food additives. These compounds are water-soluble and, thus, cannot protect fats from oxidation: For this purpose, the fat-soluble esters of ascorbic acid with long-chain fatty acids (ascorbyl palmitate or ascorbyl stearate) can be used as antioxidant food additives. Other reactions It creates volatile compounds when mixed with glucose and amino acids at 90 °C. It is a cofactor in tyrosine oxidation. Uses Food additive The main use of -ascorbic acid and its salts is as food additives, mostly to combat oxidation. It is approved for this purpose in the EU with E number E300, the US, Australia, and New Zealand. Dietary supplement Another major use of -ascorbic acid is as a dietary supplement. It is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines. Niche, non-food uses Ascorbic acid is easily oxidized and so is used as a reductant in photographic developer solutions (among others) and as a preservative. In fluorescence microscopy and related fluorescence-based techniques, ascorbic acid can be used as an antioxidant to increase fluorescent signal and chemically retard dye photobleaching. It is also commonly used to remove dissolved metal stains, such as iron, from fiberglass swimming pool surfaces. In plastic manufacturing, ascorbic acid can be used to assemble molecular chains more quickly and with less waste than traditional synthesis methods. Heroin users are known to use ascorbic acid as a means to convert heroin base to a water-soluble salt so that it can be injected. As justified by its reaction with iodine, it is used to negate the effects of iodine tablets in water purification. It reacts with the sterilized water, removing the taste, color, and smell of the iodine. This is why it is often sold as a second set of tablets in most sporting goods stores as Potable Aqua-Neutralizing Tablets, along with the potassium iodide tablets. Intravenous high-dose ascorbate is being used as a chemotherapeutic and biological response modifying agent. It is undergoing clinical trials. It is sometimes used as a urinary acidifier to enhance the antiseptic effect of methenamine. Synthesis Natural biosynthesis of vitamin C occurs in many plants, and animals, by a variety of processes. Industrial preparation Seventy percent of the world's supply of ascorbic acid is produced in China. Ascorbic acid is prepared in industry from glucose in a method based on the historical Reichstein process. In the first of a five-step process, glucose is catalytically hydrogenated to sorbitol, which is then oxidized by the microorganism Acetobacter suboxydans to sorbose. Only one of the six hydroxy groups is oxidized by this enzymatic reaction. From this point, two routes are available. Treatment of the product with acetone in the presence of an acid catalyst converts four of the remaining hydroxyl groups to acetals. The unprotected hydroxyl group is oxidized to the carboxylic acid by reaction with the catalytic oxidant TEMPO (regenerated by sodium hypochlorite bleaching solution). Historically, industrial preparation via the Reichstein process used potassium permanganate as the bleaching solution. Acid-catalyzed hydrolysis of this product performs the dual function of removing the two acetal groups and ring-closing lactonization. This step yields ascorbic acid. Each of the five steps has a yield larger than 90%. A more biotechnological process, first developed in China in the 1960s, but further developed in the 1990s, bypasses the use of acetone-protecting groups. A second genetically modified microbe species, such as mutant Erwinia, among others, oxidises sorbose into 2-ketogluconic acid (2-KGA), which can then undergo ring-closing lactonization via dehydration. This method is used in the predominant process used by the ascorbic acid industry in China, which supplies 70% of world's ascorbic acid. Researchers are exploring means for one-step fermentation. Determination The traditional way to analyze the ascorbic acid content is the process of titration with an oxidizing agent, and several procedures have been developed. The popular iodometry approach uses iodine in the presence of a starch indicator. Iodine is reduced by ascorbic acid, and, when all the ascorbic acid has reacted, the iodine is then in excess, forming a blue-black complex with the starch indicator. This indicates the end-point of the titration. As an alternative, ascorbic acid can be treated with iodine in excess, followed by back titration with sodium thiosulfate using starch as an indicator. This iodometric method has been revised to exploit reaction of ascorbic acid with iodate and iodide in acid solution. Electrolyzing the solution of potassium iodide produces iodine, which reacts with ascorbic acid. The end of process is determined by potentiometric titration in a manner similar to Karl Fischer titration. The amount of ascorbic acid can be calculated by Faraday's law. Another alternative uses N-bromosuccinimide (NBS) as the oxidizing agent, in the presence of potassium iodide and starch. The NBS first oxidizes the ascorbic acid; when the latter is exhausted, the NBS liberates the iodine from the potassium iodide, which then forms the blue-black complex with starch. See also Colour retention agent Erythorbic acid: a diastereomer of ascorbic acid. Mineral ascorbates: salts of ascorbic acid Acids in wine References Further reading External links IPCS Poisons Information Monograph (PIM) 046 Interactive 3D-structure of vitamin C with details on the x-ray structure Organic acids Antioxidants Dietary antioxidants Coenzymes Corrosion inhibitors Furanones Vitamers Vitamin C Biomolecules 3-Hydroxypropenals

2279

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April%203

April 3

Events Pre-1600 686 – Maya king Yuknoom Yich'aak K'ahk' assumes the crown of Calakmul. 1043 – Edward the Confessor is crowned King of England. 1077 – The Patriarchate of Friûl, the first Friulian state, is created. 1559 – The second of two treaties making up the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis is signed, ending the Italian Wars. 1601–1900 1721 – Robert Walpole becomes, in effect, the first Prime Minister of Great Britain, though he himself denied that title. 1851 – Rama IV is crowned King of Thailand after the death of his half-brother, Rama III. 1860 – The first successful United States Pony Express run from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, California, begins. 1865 – American Civil War: Union forces capture Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the Confederate States of America. 1882 – American Old West: Robert Ford kills Jesse James. 1885 – Gottlieb Daimler is granted a German patent for a light, high-speed, four-stroke engine, which he uses seven months later to create the world's first motorcycle, the Daimler Reitwagen. 1888 – Jack the Ripper: The first of 11 unsolved brutal murders of women committed in or near the impoverished Whitechapel district in the East End of London, occurs. 1895 – The trial in the libel case brought by Oscar Wilde begins, eventually resulting in his imprisonment on charges of homosexuality. 1901–present 1920 – Attempts are made to carry out the failed assassination attempt on General Mannerheim, led by Aleksander Weckman by order of Eino Rahja, during the White Guard parade in Tampere, Finland. 1922 – Joseph Stalin becomes the first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. 1933 – First flight over Mount Everest, the British Houston-Mount Everest Flight Expedition, led by the Marquis of Clydesdale and funded by Lucy, Lady Houston. 1936 – Bruno Richard Hauptmann is executed for the kidnapping and death of Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr., the infant son of pilot Charles Lindbergh. 1942 – World War II: Japanese forces begin an assault on the United States and Filipino troops on the Bataan Peninsula. 1946 – Japanese Lt. General Masaharu Homma is executed in the Philippines for leading the Bataan Death March. 1948 – Cold War: U.S. President Harry S. Truman signs the Marshall Plan, authorizing $5 billion in aid for 16 countries. 1948 – In Jeju Province, South Korea, a civil-war-like period of violence and human rights abuses known as the Jeju uprising begins. 1955 – The American Civil Liberties Union announces it will defend Allen Ginsberg's book Howl against obscenity charges. 1956 – Hudsonville–Standale tornado: The western half of the Lower Peninsula of Michigan is struck by a deadly F5 tornado. 1968 – Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech; he was assassinated the next day. 1969 – Vietnam War: United States Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird announces that the United States will start to "Vietnamize" the war effort. 1973 – Martin Cooper of Motorola makes the first handheld mobile phone call to Joel S. Engel of Bell Labs. 1974 – The 1974 Super Outbreak occurs, the second largest tornado outbreak in recorded history (after the 2011 Super Outbreak). The death toll is 315, with nearly 5,500 injured. 1975 – Vietnam War: Operation Babylift, a mass evacuation of children in the closing stages of the war begins. 1975 – Bobby Fischer refuses to play in a chess match against Anatoly Karpov, giving Karpov the title of World Champion by default. 1980 – US Congress restores a federal trust relationship with the 501 members of the Shivwits, Kanosh, Koosharem, and the Indian Peaks and Cedar City bands of the Paiute people of Utah. 1981 – The Osborne 1, the first successful portable computer, is unveiled at the West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco. 1989 – The US Supreme Court upholds the jurisdictional rights of tribal courts under the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 in Mississippi Choctaw Band v. Holyfield. 1993 – The outcome of the Grand National horse race is declared void for the first (and only) time 1996 – Suspected "Unabomber" Theodore Kaczynski is captured at his Montana cabin in the United States. 1996 – A United States Air Force Boeing T-43 crashes near Dubrovnik Airport in Croatia, killing 35, including Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown. 1997 – The Thalit massacre begins in Algeria; all but one of the 53 inhabitants of Thalit are killed by guerrillas. 2000 – United States v. Microsoft Corp.: Microsoft is ruled to have violated United States antitrust law by keeping "an oppressive thumb" on its competitors. 2004 – Islamic terrorists involved in the 2004 Madrid train bombings are trapped by the police in their apartment and kill themselves. 2007 – Conventional-Train World Speed Record: A French TGV train on the LGV Est high speed line sets an official new world speed record of 574.8 km/h (159.6 m/s, 357.2 mph). 2008 – ATA Airlines, once one of the ten largest U.S. passenger airlines and largest charter airline, files for bankruptcy for the second time in five years and ceases all operations. 2008 – Texas law enforcement cordons off the FLDS's YFZ Ranch. Eventually 533 women and children will be taken into state custody. 2009 – Jiverly Antares Wong opens fire at the American Civic Association immigration center in Binghamton, New York, killing thirteen and wounding four before committing suicide. 2010 – Apple Inc. released the first generation iPad, a tablet computer. 2013 – More than 50 people die in floods resulting from record-breaking rainfall in La Plata and Buenos Aires, Argentina. 2016 – The Panama Papers, a leak of legal documents, reveals information on 214,488 offshore companies. 2017 – A bomb explodes in the St Petersburg metro system, killing 14 and injuring several more people. 2018 – YouTube headquarters shooting: A 38-year-old gunwoman opens fire at YouTube Headquarters in San Bruno, California, injuring three people before committing suicide. Births Pre-1600 1016 – Xing Zong, Chinese emperor (d. 1055) 1151 – Igor Svyatoslavich, Russian prince (d. 1202) 1395 – George of Trebizond, Greek philosopher, scholar and humanist (d. 1486) 1438 – John III of Egmont, Dutch nobleman (d. 1516) 1529 – Michael Neander, German mathematician and astronomer (d. 1581) 1540 – Maria de' Medici, Italian noblewoman, the eldest daughter of Cosimo I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany and Eleonora di Toledo. (d. 1557) 1593 – George Herbert, English poet (d. 1633) 1601–1900 1643 – Charles V, duke of Lorraine (d. 1690) 1682 – Valentin Rathgeber, German organist and composer (d. 1750) 1693 – George Edwards, English ornithologist and entomologist (d. 1773) 1715 – William Watson, English physician, physicist, and botanist (d. 1787) 1764 – John Abernethy, English surgeon and anatomist (d. 1831) 1769 – Christian Günther von Bernstorff, Danish-Prussian politician and diplomat (d. 1835) 1770 – Theodoros Kolokotronis, Greek general (d. 1843) 1778 – Pierre Bretonneau, French doctor who performed the first successful tracheotomy (d. 1862) 1781 – Swaminarayan, Indian religious leader (d. 1830) 1782 – Alexander Macomb, American general (d. 1841) 1783 – Washington Irving, American short story writer, essayist, biographer, historian (d. 1859) 1791 – Anne Lister, English diarist, mountaineer, and traveller (d. 1840) 1798 – Charles Wilkes, American admiral, geographer, and explorer (d. 1877) 1807 – Mary Carpenter, English educational and social reformer (d. 1877) 1814 – Lorenzo Snow, American religious leader, 5th President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (d. 1901) 1822 – Edward Everett Hale, American minister, historian, and author (d. 1909) 1823 – George Derby, American lieutenant and journalist (d. 1861) 1823 – William M. Tweed, American politician (d. 1878) 1826 – Cyrus K. Holliday, American businessman (d. 1900) 1837 – John Burroughs, American botanist and author (d. 1921) 1842 – Ulric Dahlgren, American colonel (d. 1864) 1848 – Arturo Prat, Chilean lawyer and captain (d. 1879) 1852 – Talbot Baines Reed, English author (d. 1893) 1858 – Jacob Gaudaur, Canadian rower (d. 1937) 1860 – Frederik van Eeden, Dutch psychiatrist and author (d. 1932) 1864 – Emil Kellenberger, Swiss target shooter (d. 1943) 1875 – Mistinguett, French actress and singer (d. 1956) 1876 – Margaret Anglin, Canadian actress, director, and producer (d. 1958) 1876 – Tomáš Baťa, Czech businessman, founded Bata Shoes (d. 1932) 1880 – Otto Weininger, Jewish-Austrian philosopher and author (d. 1903) 1881 – Alcide De Gasperi, Italian journalist and politician, 30th Prime Minister of Italy (d. 1954) 1882 – Philippe Desranleau, Canadian archbishop (d. 1952) 1883 – Ikki Kita, Japanese philosopher and author (d. 1937) 1885 – Allan Dwan, Canadian-American director, producer, and screenwriter (d. 1981) 1885 – Bud Fisher, American cartoonist (d. 1954) 1885 – Marie-Victorin Kirouac, Canadian botanist and academic (d. 1944) 1885 – St John Philby, English colonial and explorer (d. 1960) 1886 – Dooley Wilson, American actor and singer (d. 1953) 1887 – Ōtori Tanigorō, Japanese sumo wrestler, the 24th Yokozuna (d. 1956) 1887 – Nishizō Tsukahara, Japanese admiral (d. 1966) 1888 – Thomas C. Kinkaid, American admiral (d. 1972) 1889 – Grigoraș Dinicu, Romanian violinist and composer (d. 1949) 1893 – Leslie Howard, English actor (d. 1943) 1895 – Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Italian-American composer and educator (d. 1968) 1895 – Zez Confrey, American pianist and composer (d. 1971) 1897 – Joe Kirkwood Sr., Australian golfer (d. 1970) 1897 – Thrasyvoulos Tsakalotos, Greek general (d. 1989) 1898 – David Jack, English footballer and manager (d. 1958) 1898 – George Jessel, American actor, singer, and producer (d. 1981) 1898 – Henry Luce, American publisher, co-founded Time magazine (d. 1967) 1900 – Camille Chamoun, Lebanese lawyer and politician, 7th President of Lebanon (d. 1987) 1900 – Albert Walsh, Canadian lawyer and politician, 1st Lieutenant Governor of Newfoundland (d. 1958) 1901–present 1903 – Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, Indian social reformer and freedom fighter (d. 1988) 1904 – Iron Eyes Cody, American actor and stuntman (d. 1999) 1904 – Sally Rand, American dancer (d. 1979) 1904 – Russel Wright, American furniture designer (d. 1976) 1905 – Robert Sink, American general (d. 1965) 1910 – Ted Hook, Australian public servant (d. 1990) 1911 – Nanette Bordeaux, Canadian-American actress (d. 1956) 1911 – Michael Woodruff, English-Scottish surgeon and academic (d. 2001) 1911 – Stanisława Walasiewicz, Polish-American runner (d. 1980) 1912 – Dorothy Eden, New Zealand-English author (d. 1982) 1912 – Grigoris Lambrakis, Greek physician and politician (d. 1963) 1913 – Per Borten, Norwegian politician, 18th Prime Minister of Norway (d. 2005) 1914 – Ray Getliffe, Canadian ice hockey player (d. 2008) 1914 – Sam Manekshaw, Indian field marshal (d. 2008) 1915 – Piet de Jong, Dutch politician and naval officer, Prime Minister of the Netherlands (d. 2016) 1915 – İhsan Doğramacı, Turkish physician and academic (d. 2010) 1916 – Herb Caen, American journalist and author (d. 1997) 1916 – Cliff Gladwin, English cricketer (d. 1988) 1916 – Louis Guglielmi, Catalan composer (d. 1991) 1918 – Mary Anderson, American actress (d. 2014) 1918 – Louis Applebaum, Canadian composer and conductor (d. 2000) 1919 – Ervin Drake, American songwriter and composer (d. 2015) 1919 – Clairette Oddera, French-Canadian actress and singer (d. 2008) 1920 – Stan Freeman, American composer and conductor (d. 2001) 1920 – Yoshibayama Junnosuke, Japanese sumo wrestler, the 43rd Yokozuna (d. 1977) 1921 – Robert Karvelas, American actor (d. 1991) 1921 – Jan Sterling, American actress (d. 2004) 1922 – Yevhen Bulanchyk, Ukrainian hurdler (d. 1996) 1922 – Doris Day, American singer and actress (d. 2019) 1923 – Daniel Hoffman, American poet and academic (d. 2013) 1924 – Marlon Brando, American actor and director (d. 2004) 1924 – Roza Shanina, Russian sergeant and sniper (d. 1945) 1925 – Tony Benn, English pilot and politician, Secretary of State for Industry (d. 2014) 1926 – Alex Grammas, American baseball player, manager, and coach (d. 2019) 1926 – Gus Grissom, American colonel, pilot, and astronaut (d. 1967) 1927 – Wesley A. Brown, American general and engineer (d. 2012) 1928 – Don Gibson, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 2003) 1928 – Emmett Johns, Canadian priest, founded Dans la Rue (d. 2018) 1928 – Earl Lloyd, American basketball player and coach (d. 2015) 1928 – Jennifer Paterson, English chef and television personality (d. 1999) 1929 – Fazlur Rahman Khan, Bangladeshi engineer and architect, co-designed the Willis Tower and John Hancock Center (d. 1982) 1929 – Poul Schlüter, Danish lawyer and politician, 37th Prime Minister of Denmark (d. 2021) 1930 – Lawton Chiles, American soldier, lawyer, and politician, 41st Governor of Florida (d. 1998) 1930 – Helmut Kohl, German politician, Chancellor of Germany (d. 2017) 1930 – Mario Benjamín Menéndez, Argentinian general and politician (d. 2015) 1930 – Wally Moon, American baseball player and coach (d. 2018) 1931 – William Bast, American screenwriter and author (d. 2015) 1933 – Bob Dornan, American politician 1933 – Rod Funseth, American golfer (d. 1985) 1934 – Pamela Allen, New Zealand children's writer and illustrator 1934 – Jane Goodall, English primatologist and anthropologist 1934 – Jim Parker, American football player (d. 2005) 1935 – Harold Kushner, American rabbi and author (d. 2023) 1936 – Jimmy McGriff, American organist and bandleader (d. 2008) 1936 – Harold Vick, American saxophonist and flute player (d. 1987) 1938 – Jeff Barry, American singer-songwriter, and producer 1938 – Phil Rodgers, American golfer (d. 2018) 1939 – François de Roubaix, French composer (d. 1975) 1939 – Hawk Taylor, American baseball player and coach (d. 2012) 1939 – Paul Craig Roberts, American economist and politician 1941 – Jan Berry, American singer-songwriter (d. 2004) 1941 – Philippé Wynne, American soul singer (d. 1984) 1942 – Marsha Mason, American actress 1942 – Wayne Newton, American singer 1942 – Billy Joe Royal, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 2015) 1943 – Mario Lavista, Mexican composer (d. 2021) 1943 – Jonathan Lynn, English actor, director, and screenwriter 1943 – Richard Manuel, Canadian singer-songwriter and pianist (d. 1986) 1943 – Hikaru Saeki, Japanese admiral, the first female star officer of the Japan Self-Defense Forces 1944 – Peter Colman, Australian biologist and academic 1944 – Tony Orlando, American singer 1945 – Doon Arbus, American author and journalist 1945 – Bernie Parent, Canadian ice hockey player and coach 1945 – Catherine Spaak, French actress (d. 2022) 1946 – Nicholas Jones, English actor 1946 – Dee Murray, English bass player (d. 1992) 1946 – Hanna Suchocka, Polish politician, Prime Minister of Poland 1947 – Anders Eliasson, Swedish composer (d. 2013) 1948 – Arlette Cousture, Canadian author and screenwriter 1948 – Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, Dutch academic, politician, and diplomat, 11th Secretary General of NATO 1948 – Hans-Georg Schwarzenbeck, German footballer 1948 – Carlos Salinas de Gortari, Mexican economist and politician, 53rd President of Mexico 1949 – Lyle Alzado, American football player and actor (d. 1992) 1949 – A. C. Grayling, English philosopher and academic 1949 – Richard Thompson, English singer-songwriter and guitarist 1950 – Indrajit Coomaraswamy, Sri Lankan cricketer and economist 1951 – Brendan Barber, English trade union leader 1951 – Annette Dolphin, British academician and educator 1951 – Mitch Woods, American singer-songwriter and pianist 1952 – Mike Moore, American lawyer and politician 1953 – Sandra Boynton, American author and illustrator 1953 – Wakanohana Kanji II, Japanese sumo wrestler, the 56th Yokozuna (d. 2022) 1953 – James Smith, American boxer 1954 – Elisabetta Brusa, Italian composer 1954 – K. Krishnasamy, Indian physician and politician 1956 – Kalle Kulbok, Estonian politician 1956 – Boris Miljković, Serbian director and producer 1956 – Miguel Bosé, Spanish musician and actor 1956 – Ray Combs, American game show host (d. 1996) 1958 – Alec Baldwin, American actor, comedian, producer and television host 1958 – Adam Gussow, American scholar, musician, and memoirist 1958 – Francesca Woodman, American photographer (d. 1981) 1959 – David Hyde Pierce, American actor and activist 1960 – Arjen Anthony Lucassen, Dutch singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer 1961 – Tim Crews, American baseball player (d. 1993) 1961 – Eddie Murphy, American actor and comedian 1962 – Dave Miley, American baseball player and manager 1962 – Mike Ness, American singer-songwriter and guitarist 1962 – Jaya Prada, Indian actress and politician 1963 – Les Davidson, Australian rugby league player 1963 – Ricky Nixon, Australian footballer and manager 1963 – Criss Oliva, American guitarist and songwriter (d. 1993) 1964 – Marco Ballotta, Italian footballer and manager 1964 – Nigel Farage, English politician 1964 – Claire Perry, English banker and politician 1964 – Bjarne Riis, Danish cyclist and manager 1964 – Andy Robinson, English rugby player and coach 1964 – Jay Weatherill, Australian politician, 45th Premier of South Australia 1965 – Nazia Hassan, Pakistani pop singer-songwriter, lawyer and social activist (d. 2000) 1966 – John de Vries, Australian race car driver 1967 – Cat Cora, American chef and author 1967 – Pervis Ellison, American basketball player 1967 – Brent Gilchrist, Canadian ice hockey player 1967 – Cristi Puiu, Romanian director and screenwriter 1967 – Mark Skaife, Australian race car driver and sportscaster 1968 – Sebastian Bach, Bahamian-Canadian singer-songwriter and actor 1968 – Charlotte Coleman, English actress (d. 2001) 1968 – Jamie Hewlett, English director and performer 1968 – Tomoaki Kanemoto, Japanese baseball player 1969 – Rodney Hampton, American football player 1969 – Peter Matera, Australian footballer and coach 1969 – Ben Mendelsohn, Australian actor 1969 – Lance Storm, Canadian wrestler and trainer 1971 – Vitālijs Astafjevs, Latvian footballer and manager 1971 – Emmanuel Collard, French race car driver 1971 – Picabo Street, American skier 1972 – Jennie Garth, American actress and director 1972 – Catherine McCormack, English actress 1972 – Sandrine Testud, French tennis player 1973 – Nilesh Kulkarni, Indian cricketer 1973 – Adam Scott, American actor 1974 – Marcus Brown, American basketball player 1974 – Lee Williams, Welsh model and actor 1975 – Shawn Bates, American ice hockey player 1975 – Michael Olowokandi, Nigerian-American basketball player 1975 – Aries Spears, American comedian and actor 1975 – Yoshinobu Takahashi, Japanese baseball player 1975 – Koji Uehara, Japanese baseball player 1976 – Nicolas Escudé, French tennis player 1978 – Matthew Goode, English actor 1978 – Tommy Haas, German-American tennis player 1978 – John Smit, South African rugby player 1979 – Simon Black, Australian footballer and coach 1980 – Andrei Lodis, Belarusian footballer 1980 – Megan Rohrer, American pastor and transgender activist 1981 – Aaron Bertram, American trumpet player 1981 – DeShawn Stevenson, American basketball player 1982 – Jared Allen, American football player 1982 – Iain Fyfe, Australian footballer 1982 – Cobie Smulders, Canadian actress 1983 – Ben Foster, English footballer 1983 – Stephen Weiss, Canadian ice hockey player 1984 – Jonathan Blondel, Belgian footballer 1984 – Maxi López, Argentinian footballer 1985 – Jari-Matti Latvala, Finnish race car driver 1985 – Leona Lewis, English singer-songwriter and producer 1986 – Amanda Bynes, American actress 1986 – Stephanie Cox, American soccer player 1986 – Annalisa Cucinotta, Italian cyclist 1986 – Sergio Sánchez Ortega, Spanish footballer 1987 – Rachel Bloom, American actress, writer, and producer 1987 – Jay Bruce, American baseball player 1987 – Yileen Gordon, Australian rugby league player 1987 – Jason Kipnis, American baseball player 1987 – Martyn Rooney, English sprinter 1987 – Julie Sokolow, American singer-songwriter and guitarist 1987 – Yuval Spungin, Israeli footballer 1988 – Kam Chancellor, American football player 1988 – Brandon Graham, American football player 1988 – Peter Hartley, English footballer 1988 – Tim Krul, Dutch footballer 1989 – Romain Alessandrini, French footballer 1989 – Israel Folau, Australian rugby player and footballer 1989 – Joel Romelo, Australian rugby league player 1989 – Thisara Perera, Sri Lankan cricketer 1990 – Karim Ansarifard, Iranian footballer 1990 – Madison Brengle, American tennis player 1990 – Sotiris Ninis, Greek footballer 1990 – Natasha Negovanlis, Canadian actress and singer 1991 – Hayley Kiyoko, American actress and singer 1992 – Simone Benedetti, Italian footballer 1992 – Yuliya Yefimova, Russian swimmer 1993 – Pape Moussa Konaté, Senegalese footballer 1994 – Kodi Nikorima, New Zealand rugby league player 1994 – Dylann Roof, American mass murderer 1996 – Mayo Hibi, Japanese tennis player 1997 – Gabriel Jesus, Brazilian footballer 1998 – Paris Jackson, American actress, model and singer 1999 – Chanel Harris-Tavita, New Zealand-Samoan rugby league player Deaths Pre-1600 963 – William III, Duke of Aquitaine (b. 915) 1153 – al-Adil ibn al-Sallar, vizier of the Fatimid Caliphate 1171 – Philip of Milly, seventh Grand Master of the Knights Templar (b. ) 1203 – Arthur I, Duke of Brittany (b. 1187) 1253 – Saint Richard of Chichester 1287 – Pope Honorius IV (b. 1210) 1325 – Nizamuddin Auliya, Sufi saint (b. 1238) 1350 – Odo IV, Duke of Burgundy (b. 1295) 1538 – Elizabeth Boleyn, Countess of Wiltshire (b. 1480) 1545 – Antonio de Guevara, Spanish chronicler and moralist (b. 1481) 1601–1900 1606 – Charles Blount, 8th Baron Mountjoy, English general and politician, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (b. 1563) 1630 – Christopher Villiers, 1st Earl of Anglesey, English noble (b. c.  1593) 1637 – Joseph Yuspa Nördlinger Hahn, German rabbi 1680 – Chatrapati Shivaji Maharaj , Indian emperor, founded the Maratha Empire (b. 1630) 1682 – Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Spanish painter and educator (b. 1618) 1691 – Jean Petitot, French-Swiss painter (b. 1608) 1695 – Melchior d'Hondecoeter, Dutch painter (b. 1636) 1717 – Jacques Ozanam, French mathematician and academic (b. 1640) 1728 – James Anderson, Scottish lawyer and historian (b. 1662) 1792 – George Pocock, English admiral (b. 1706) 1804 – Jędrzej Kitowicz, Polish priest, historian, and author (b. 1727) 1826 – Reginald Heber, English priest (b. 1783) 1827 – Ernst Chladni, German physicist and academic (b. 1756) 1838 – François Carlo Antommarchi, French physician and author (b. 1780) 1844 – Edward Bigge, English cleric, 1st Archdeacon of Lindisfarne (b. 1807) 1846 – William Braine, English soldier and explorer (b. 1814) 1849 – Juliusz Słowacki, Polish-French poet and playwright (b. 1809) 1868 – Franz Berwald, Swedish composer and surgeon (b. 1796) 1880 – Felicita Vestvali, German actress and opera singer (b. 1831) 1882 – Jesse James, American criminal and outlaw (b. 1847) 1897 – Johannes Brahms, German pianist and composer (b. 1833) 1901–present 1901 – Richard D'Oyly Carte, English composer and talent agent (b. 1844) 1902 – Esther Hobart Morris, American lawyer and judge (b. 1814) 1930 – Emma Albani, Canadian-English operatic soprano (b. 1847) 1936 – Richard Hauptmann, German-American murderer (b. 1899) 1941 – Tachiyama Mineemon, Japanese sumo wrestler, the 22nd Yokozuna (b. 1877) 1941 – Pál Teleki, Hungarian academic and politician, 22nd Prime Minister of Hungary (b. 1879) 1943 – Conrad Veidt, German actor, director, and producer (b. 1893) 1946 – Masaharu Homma, Japanese general (b. 1887) 1950 – Kurt Weill, German-American composer and pianist (b. 1900) 1950 – Carter G. Woodson, American historian, author, and journalist, founded Black History Month (b. 1875) 1951 – Henrik Visnapuu, Estonian poet and playwright (b. 1890) 1952 – Miina Sillanpää, Finnish minister and politician (b. 1866) 1957 – Ned Sparks, Canadian-American actor (b. 1883) 1958 – Jaan Kärner, Estonian poet and author (b. 1891) 1962 – Manolis Kalomiris, Greek composer and educator (b. 1883) 1970 – Avigdor Hameiri, Israeli author (b. 1890) 1971 – Joseph Valachi, American gangster (b. 1904) 1972 – Ferde Grofé, American pianist and composer (b. 1892) 1975 – Mary Ure, Scottish-English actress (b. 1933) 1976 – David M. Dennison, American physicist and academic (b. 1900) 1976 – Claude-Henri Grignon, Canadian journalist and politician (b. 1894) 1978 – Ray Noble, English bandleader, composer, and actor (b. 1903) 1978 – Winston Sharples, American composer (b. 1909) 1981 – Juan Trippe, American businessman, founded Pan American World Airways (b. 1899) 1982 – Warren Oates, American actor (b. 1928) 1983 – Jimmy Bloomfield, English footballer and manager (b. 1934) 1986 – Peter Pears, English tenor and educator (b. 1910) 1987 – Tom Sestak, American football player (b. 1936) 1988 – Milton Caniff, American cartoonist (b. 1907) 1990 – Sarah Vaughan, American singer (b. 1924) 1991 – Charles Goren, American bridge player and author (b. 1901) 1991 – Graham Greene, English novelist, playwright, and critic (b. 1904) 1993 – Pinky Lee, American television host (b. 1907) 1994 – Frank Wells, American businessman (b. 1932) 1995 – Alfred J. Billes, Canadian businessman, co-founded Canadian Tire (b. 1902) 1996 – Ron Brown, American captain and politician, 30th United States Secretary of Commerce (b. 1941) 1997 – John Ugelstad, Norwegian chemical engineer and inventor (b. 1921) 1998 – Mary Cartwright, English mathematician and academic (b. 1900) 1999 – Lionel Bart, English composer (b. 1930) 1999 – Geoffrey Walsh, Canadian general (b. 1909) 2000 – Terence McKenna, American botanist and philosopher (b. 1946) 2000 – Dina Abramowicz, Librarian and YIVO and Yiddish language expert (b. 1909) 2005 – François Gérin, Canadian lawyer and politician (b. 1944) 2007 – Nina Wang, Chinese businesswoman (b. 1937) 2008 – Hrvoje Ćustić, Croatian footballer (b. 1983) 2012 – Mingote, Spanish cartoonist and journalist (b. 1919) 2012 – Richard Descoings, French civil servant (b. 1958) 2012 – Govind Narain, Indian politician, 8th Governor of Karnataka (b. 1917) 2012 – Chief Jay Strongbow, American wrestler (b. 1928) 2012 – José María Zárraga, Spanish footballer and manager (b. 1930) 2013 – Mariví Bilbao, Spanish actress (b. 1930) 2013 – Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, German-American author and screenwriter (b. 1927) 2014 – Régine Deforges, French author, playwright, and director (b. 1935) 2014 – Fred Kida, American illustrator (b. 1920) 2014 – Prince Michael of Prussia (b. 1940) 2014 – Jovan Pavlović, Serbian metropolitan (b. 1936) 2014 – Arthur "Guitar Boogie" Smith, American guitarist, fiddler, and composer (b. 1921) 2015 – Sarah Brady, American activist and author (b. 1942) 2015 – Bob Burns, American drummer and songwriter (b. 1950) 2015 – Shmuel Wosner, Austrian-Israeli rabbi and author (b. 1913) 2016 – Cesare Maldini, Italian footballer and manager (b. 1932) 2016 – Joe Medicine Crow, American anthropologist, historian, and author (b. 1913) 2016 – Koji Wada, Japanese singer and songwriter (b. 1974) 2017 – Kishori Amonkar, Indian classical vocalist (b. 1931) 2021 – Stan Stephens, Canadian-American politician, 20th Governor of Montana (b. 1929) 2022 – June Brown, English actress (b. 1927) 2024 – Bob Lanigan, Australian rugby league player (b. 1942) 2024 – Gaetano Pesce, Italian architect and designer (b. 1939) Holidays and observances Christian feast day: Agape, Chionia, and Irene Burgundofara Luigi Scrosoppi Richard of Chichester April 3 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics) References External links BBC: On This Day Historical Events on April 3 Days of the year April

2282

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexis%20Korner

Alexis Korner

Alexis Andrew Nicholas Koerner (19 April 1928 – 1 January 1984), known professionally as Alexis Korner, was a British blues musician and radio broadcaster, who has sometimes been referred to as "a founding father of British blues". A major influence on the sound of the British music scene in the 1960s, he was instrumental in the formation of several notable British bands including The Rolling Stones and Free. Korner was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the musical influence category in 2024. Early career Alexis Andrew Nicholas Koerner was born on 19 April 1928 in Paris, France, to an Austrian Jewish father and a mother of Greek, Turkish and Austrian descent. He spent his childhood in France, Switzerland and North Africa, and arrived in London in 1940 after the start of the Second World War. One memory of his youth was listening to a record by black pianist Jimmy Yancey during a German air raid. Korner said, "From then on all I wanted to do was play the blues." After the war, Korner played piano and guitar (his first guitar was built by friend and author Sydney Hopkins, who wrote Mister God, This Is Anna) and in 1949 joined Chris Barber's Jazz Band where he met blues harmonica player Cyril Davies. They started playing together as a duo, started the influential London Blues and Barrelhouse Club in 1955 and made their first record together in 1957. Korner made his first official record on Decca Records DFE 6286 in the company of Ken Colyer's Skiffle Group. His talent extended to playing mandolin on one of the tracks of this British EP, recorded in London on 28 July 1955. Korner encouraged many American blues artists, previously virtually unknown in Britain, to perform at the London Blues and Barrelhouse Club, which he established with Davies at the Round House pub in Soho. The 1960s In 1961, Korner and Davies formed Blues Incorporated, initially a loose-knit group of musicians with a shared love of electric blues and R&B music. The group included, at various times, Charlie Watts, Jack Bruce, Ginger Baker, Long John Baldry, Graham Bond, Danny Thompson and Dick Heckstall-Smith. It also attracted a wider crowd of mostly younger fans, some of whom occasionally performed with the group, including Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones, Geoff Bradford, Rod Stewart, John Mayall, and Jimmy Page. Although Cyril Davies left the group in late 1962, Blues Incorporated continued to record, with Korner at the helm, until 1966. However, by that time its originally stellar line-up (and crowd of followers) had mostly left to start their own bands. While his one-time acolytes, the Rolling Stones and Cream, made the front pages of music magazines all over the world, Korner was relegated to the role of 'elder statesman'. In 1966, Korner formed the trio Free At Last with Hughie Flint and Binky McKenzie. Flint later recalled “I played with Alexis, right after leaving The Bluesbreakers, in a trio, which Alexis named Free At Last, a sort of mini and slightly restricted version of Blues Incorporated. Playing with Alexis was very loose. We would play anything from Percy Mayfield’s ‘River’s Invitation’ to Charles Mingus' ‘Better Get It In Your Soul’ – with lots of freaky guitar and bass solos. Alexis, like John Mayall had the most eclectic taste in music, very knowledgeable, and generous, and I am indebted to both of them for my wide approach to music”. Although Free At Last was short-lived, Korner ensured its name lived on in part by christening another young group of aspiring musicians, Free. Korner was instrumental in the formation of the band in April 1968, and continued to mentor them until they secured a deal with Island Records. Although he himself was a blues purist, Korner criticised better-known British blues musicians during the blues boom of the late 1960s for their blind adherence to Chicago blues, as if the music came in no other form. He liked to surround himself with jazz musicians and often performed with a horn section drawn from a pool that included, among others, saxophone players Art Themen, Mel Collins, Dick Heckstall-Smith, and Lol Coxhill. While touring Scandinavia he formed the band New Church with guitarist and singer Peter Thorup. They subsequently were one of the support bands at the Rolling Stones Free Concert in Hyde Park, London, on 5 July 1969. Jimmy Page reportedly found out about a new singer, Robert Plant, who had been jamming with Korner, who wondered why Plant had not yet been discovered. Plant and Korner were recording an album with Plant on vocals until Page had asked him to join "the New Yardbirds", a.k.a. Led Zeppelin. Only two songs are in circulation from these recordings: "Steal Away" and "Operator". Korner gave one of his last radio interviews to BBC Midlands on the Record Collectors Show with Mike Adams and Chris Savory. Broadcasting In the 1960s Korner began a media career, working initially as a showbusiness interviewer and then on ITV's Five O'Clock Club, a children's TV show. Korner also wrote about blues for the music papers, and continued to maintain his own career as a blues artist, especially in Europe. Korner's main career in the 1970s was in broadcasting. In 1973, he presented a six-part documentary on BBC Radio 1, The Rolling Stones Story, and in 1977 he established a Sunday-night show on Radio 1, Alexis Korner's Blues and Soul Show, which ran until 1981. He also used his gravelly voice to great effect as an advertising voice-over artist. 1970s CCS period In 1970, Korner and Thorup formed a big-band ensemble, CCS – short for "The Collective Consciousness Society" – which had several hit singles produced by Mickie Most, including a version of Led Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love", which was used as the theme for BBC's Top of the Pops between 1970 and 1981. Another instrumental called "Brother" was used as the theme to the BBC Radio 1 Top 20/40 when Tom Browne/Simon Bates presented the programme in the 1970s. It was also used in the 1990s on Radio Luxembourg for the Top 20 Singles chart. This was the period of Korner's greatest commercial success in the UK. In 1973, he provided a voice part for the Hot Chocolate single release Brother Louie. 1970s to 1984 In 1973, he and Peter Thorup formed another group, Snape, with Boz Burrell, Mel Collins, and Ian Wallace, who were previously together in King Crimson. Korner also played on B.B. King's In London album, and cut his own, similar "supersession" album; Get Off My Cloud, with Keith Richards, Steve Marriott, Peter Frampton, Nicky Hopkins and members of Joe Cocker's Grease Band. In the mid-1970s, while touring Germany, Korner established an intensive working relationship with bassist Colin Hodgkinson who played for the support act Back Door. They would continue to collaborate right up until Korner's death. In 1978, for Korner's 50th birthday, an all-star concert was held featuring many of his above-mentioned friends, as well as Eric Clapton, Paul Jones, Chris Farlowe, Zoot Money and others, which was later released as The Party Album, and as a video. In 1981, Korner joined another "supergroup", Rocket 88, a project led by Ian Stewart based on boogie-woogie keyboard players, which featured a rhythm section comprising Jack Bruce and Charlie Watts, among others, as well as a horn section. They toured Europe and released an album on Atlantic Records. He played in Italy with Paul Jones and the Blues Society of Italian bluesman Guido Toffoletti. Family life and death In 1950, Korner married Roberta Melville (died 2021), daughter of art critic Robert Melville. He had a daughter, singer Sappho Gillett Korner (died 2006), and two sons, guitarist Nicholas 'Nico' Korner (died 1989) and sound engineer Damian Korner (died 2008). Alexis Korner died in London from lung cancer on 1 January 1984, at the age of 55. Korner was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2024 in the musical influence category. Album discography (selected UK and other releases) Blues from the Roundhouse 10-inch (1957) – Alexis Korner's Breakdown Group R&B from the Marquee (1962) – Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated Red Hot from Alex (1964) – Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated At the Cavern (1964) – Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated (1965) – Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated Sky High (1966) – Alexis Korner Blues Incorporated I Wonder Who (1967) Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated (re-issue of Sky High) – Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated A New Generation of Blues (1968) Both Sides (1970) – New Church CCS 1st (1970) – CCS Alexis Korner (1971) Bootleg Him! (1972) CCS 2nd (1972) – CCS Accidentally Borne in New Orleans (1972) – with Peter Thorup; Snape Live on Tour in Germany (1973) – with Peter Thorup; Snape The Best Band in the Land (1973) – CCS Alexis Korner (1974) Get Off My Cloud (1975) The Lost Album (1977) Just Easy (1978) The Party Album (1979) – Alexis Korner and Friends Me (1980) Rocket 88 (1981) – Rocket 88 Juvenile Delinquent (1984) Testament (1985) – with Colin Hodgkinson Live in Paris (1988) – with Colin Hodgkinson Bibliography Bob Brunning (1986), Blues: The British Connection, London: Helter Skelter, 2002. Bob Brunning, The Fleetwood Mac Story: Rumours and Lies, Omnibus Press, 2004; foreword by B.B. King Dick Heckstall-Smith (2004), The Safest Place in the World: A Personal History of British Rhythm and Blues, Clear Books. . First Edition: Blowing the Blues – Fifty Years Playing the British Blues Christopher Hjort, Strange Brew: Eric Clapton and the British Blues Boom, 1965–1970, foreword by John Mayall, Jawbone, 2007. Harry Shapiro, Alexis Korner: The Biography, London: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 1997; Discography by Mark Troster. References External links [ Biography] at AllMusic Biography at British Music Experience Alexis Korner page at Radio Rewind BBC Radio 2 radio documentary about Alexis Korner on Vimeo 1928 births 1984 deaths 20th-century British guitarists 20th-century British male singers BBC Radio 1 presenters Blues Incorporated members Blues revival musicians British DJs British blues guitarists British blues singers British male guitarists British male singer-songwriters British radio presenters British rhythm and blues boom musicians CCS (band) members Charisma Records artists Columbia Records artists Deaths from lung cancer in England Decca Records artists English people of Austrian-Jewish descent English people of Greek descent English people of Turkish descent Fontana Records artists Liberty Records artists Musicians from London Polydor Records artists Transatlantic Records artists Warner Records artists

2286

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank%20destroyer

Tank destroyer

A tank destroyer, tank hunter or tank killer is a type of armoured fighting vehicle, predominantly intended for anti-tank duties. They are typically armed with a direct fire artillery gun, also known as a self-propelled anti-tank gun, or missile launcher, also called an anti-tank missile carrier. The vehicles are designed specifically to engage and destroy enemy tanks, often with limited operational capacities. While tanks are designed for front-line combat, combining operational mobility and tactical offensive and defensive capabilities and performing all primary tasks of the armoured troops, the tank destroyer is specifically designed to take on enemy tanks and other armoured fighting vehicles. Many are based on a tracked tank chassis, while others are wheeled. Since World War II, gun-armed powerful tank destroyers have fallen out of favor as armies have favored multirole main battle tanks. However, lightly armoured anti-tank guided missile (ATGM) carriers are commonly used for supplementary long-range anti-tank work. The resurgence of expeditionary warfare in the first two decades of the 21st century has seen the emergence of gun-armed wheeled vehicles, sometimes called "protected gun systems", which may bear a superficial resemblance to tank destroyers, but are employed as direct fire support units typically providing support in low-intensity operations, as was done in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. World War II Dedicated anti-tank vehicles made their first major appearance in the Second World War as combatants developed effective armoured vehicles and tactics. Some were little more than stopgap solutions, mounting an anti-tank gun on a tracked vehicle to give mobility, while others were more sophisticated designs. An example of the development of tank destroyer technology throughout the war are the Marder III and Jagdpanzer 38 vehicle, that were very different in spite of being based on the same chassis: Marder was straightforwardly an anti-tank gun on tracks whereas the Jagdpanzer 38 traded some firepower (its 7.5 cm Pak 39, designed to operate within the confines of a fully armoured fighting compartment, fires the same projectiles from a reduced propellant charge compared to Marder's 7.5 cm Pak 40) for better armour protection and ease of concealment on the battlefield. Except for most American designs, all tank destroyers were turretless vehicles with fixed or casemate superstructures. When a tank destroyer was used against enemy tanks from a defensive position such as by ambush, the lack of a rotating turret was not particularly critical, while the lower silhouette was highly desirable. The turretless design allowed accommodation of a more powerful gun, typically a dedicated anti-tank gun (in lieu of a regular tank's general-purpose main gun that fired both anti-tank and high explosive ammunition) that had a longer barrel than could be mounted in a turreted tank on the same chassis. The lack of a turret increased the vehicle's internal volume, allowing for increased ammunition stowage and crew comfort. Eliminating the turret let the vehicle carry thicker armour, and also let this armour be concentrated in the hull. Sometimes there was no armoured roof (only a weather cover) to keep the overall weight down to the limit that the chassis could bear. The absence of a turret meant that tank destroyers could be manufactured significantly cheaper, faster, and more easily than the tanks on which they were based, and they found particular favor when production resources were lacking. Germany The first German tank destroyers were the Panzerjäger ("Tank Hunters"), which mounted an existing anti-tank gun on a convenient chassis for mobility, usually with just a three-sided gun shield for crew protection. For instance, 202 obsolete Panzer I light tanks were modified by removing the turret and were rebuilt as the Panzerjäger I self-propelled 4.7 cm PaK(t). Similarly, Panzer II tanks were used on the eastern front. Captured Soviet anti-tank guns were mounted on modified Panzer II chassis, producing the Marder II self-propelled anti-tank gun. The most common mounting was a German anti-tank gun on the Czech Panzer 38(t) chassis as the Marder III. The Panzer 38(t) chassis was also used to make the Jagdpanzer 38 casemate style tank destroyer. The Panzerjäger series continued up to the equipped Nashorn. German tank destroyers based on the Panzer III medium tank and later German tanks had more armour than their tank counterparts. One of the more successful German tank destroyers was designed as a self-propelled artillery gun, the Sturmgeschütz III. Based on the Panzer III tank chassis, the Sturmgeschütz III was originally fitted with a short barreled low-velocity howitzer-like gun, and was assigned to the artillery arm for infantry fire support as an assault gun. Later, after encountering Soviet tanks, it was refitted with a comparatively short-barreled high-velocity anti-tank gun, usually with a muzzle brake, enabling it to function as a tank destroyer. The Sturmgeschütz III from its 1938 origin used a new casemate-style superstructure with an integrated design, similar to the later Jagdpanzer vehicle designs' superstructure, to completely enclose the crew. It was employed in infantry support and offensive armoured operations as well as in the defensive anti-tank role. The StuG III assault gun was Germany's most-produced fully tracked armoured fighting vehicle during World War II, and second-most produced German armoured combat vehicle of any type after the Sd.Kfz. 251 half-track. Although the early German Panzerjäger carried more effective weapons than the tanks on which they were based, they were generally lacking in protection for the crew, having thinly armoured open-topped superstructures. The "open-topped" design format of the Panzerjäger vehicles was succeeded by the Jagdpanzer ("hunting tanks"), which mounted the gun in true casemate-style superstructures, completely enclosing the crew compartment in armor that was usually integral to the hull. The first of these Jagdpanzers was the 70-ton Ferdinand (later renamed Elefant), based on the chassis, hulls, and drive systems of ninety-one Porsche VK4501 (P) heavy tanks, mounting a long-barreled 88 mm cannon in an added casemate, more like the earlier Panzerjägers had with their added-on armour shielding for the gun crew, but in the Ferdinand completely enclosing the gun and firing crew in the added casemate, as the later purpose-built Jagdpanzers would. However, the Ferdinand was mechanically unreliable and difficult to maneuver, and once all ninety-one unturreted "Porsche Tiger" hulls/drive systems were converted, no more were built. The German Army had more success with the Jagdpanther. Introduced in mid-1944, the Jagdpanther, of which some 415 examples were produced, was considered the best of the casemate-design Jagdpanzer designs. It featured the same powerful PaK 43 88 mm cannon used on the unwieldy Elefant, now fitted to the chassis of the medium Panther tank, providing greatly improved armour-penetrating capability in a medium-weight vehicle. Facing an increasingly defensive war, the German Army turned to larger and more powerfully armed Jagdpanzer designs, and in July 1944 the first Jagdtiger rolled off the production line; it was the heaviest German armoured fighting vehicle to go into active service. The Jagdtiger was based on the Tiger II heavy tank featured a very large 128 mm PaK 44 cannon and heavy armour protection. Only 88 Jagdtiger vehicles were produced, barely matching the total number of the earlier Ferdinand / Elefant vehicles. They were first deployed to combat units in September 1944. The decision of German armoured vehicle designers to use a casemate-style superstructure for all tank destroyers had the advantage of a reduced silhouette, allowing the crew to more frequently fire from defilade ambush positions. Such designs were also easier and faster to manufacture and offered good crew protection from artillery fire and shell splinters. However, the lack of a rotating turret limited the gun's traverse to a few degrees. This meant that the driver normally had to turn the entire tank onto its target, a much slower process than simply rotating a powered turret. If the vehicle became immobilized due to engine failure or track damage, it could not rotate its gun to counter opposing tanks, making it highly vulnerable to counterfire. This vulnerability was later exploited by opposing tank forces. Even the largest and most powerful of German tank destroyers were found abandoned on the field after a battle, having been immobilized by one or more hits by high explosive (HE) or armour-piercing (AP) shells to the track or front drive sprocket. Italy The most famous Italian tank destroyer of the Second World War was a self-propelled gun. The Semovente da 75/18, based on the M13/40 frame, was developed to support front-line infantry, and therefore had fixed armament: a 75 mm gun in casemate. However, thanks to its low height (185 cm) and the caliber of its gun the 75/18 also had good results in anti-tank combat, fighting against British and American (but not Soviet) units. After the Armistice of 1943, the 75/18 remained in use by German forces. Built on the same frame, the Semovente da 105/25 was equipped with a 105 mm gun and known as "bassotto" (Italian for dachshund) due to its lower height. As manufacturing began in 1943, the 105/25 was used by German forces. A further development was the Semovente da 75/46, which had a longer gun than the 75/18 and inclined armour 100 mm thick, making it similar to Sturmgeschütz III. Only 11 of these were manufactured. Before the Semovente da 75/18, the L40, built on an L6/40 light tank chassis, saw action in Africa and in Russia, but with disappointing results. Japan The Type 1 Ho-Ni I was the first self-propelled gun design of the Imperial Japanese Army. They were meant to be self-propelled artillery and tank destroyers for armoured divisions. The plan was for the Type 1 Ho-Ni I gun tank to form part of a fire support company in each of the tank regiments. The Type 1 Ho-Ni I was developed by using the existing Type 97 Chi-Ha medium tank chassis and engine, and replacing the gun turret with a Type 90 75 mm field gun mounted in an open casemate with frontal and side armour only. They entered service in 1942 and were first deployed in combat at the Battle of Luzon in the Philippines in 1945. Some were used in static entrenched positions. A variant, known as the Type 1 Ho-Ni II mounted a Type 91 105 mm howitzer and had a slightly changed superstructure as far as the side armor with re-positioned observation visors. Production began in 1943, with only 54 completed. The other variant produced was the Type 3 Ho-Ni III, which mounted a Type 3 75 mm tank gun in a completely enclosed armored casemate to address the issue of crew protection in close combat. The welded superstructure had sloped armour and the gun mount had additional stamped armour plate. The total number produced of all three types in the Ho-Ni series were 111 units. Most of the Ho-Ni units were retained within the Japanese home islands to form part of the defenses against the projected American invasion, and did not see combat before the surrender of Japan. The Type 2 Ho-I Gun tank used the Type 1 Chi-He medium tank chassis. It was designed as a self-propelled howitzer, mounting a short barreled Type 99 75 mm gun to provide close-in fire support. For deployment, the gun tank was intended to be used in a fire support company for each of the tank regiments. No Type 2 Ho-I gun tanks are known to have engaged in combat prior to Japan's surrender. The prototype was built in 1942 and 31 units were produced in 1944. The Type 4 Ho-Ro self-propelled artillery used a modified Type 97 chassis. On to this platform, a Type 38 150 mm howitzer was mounted. The main gun could fire Type 88 APHE rounds and HEAT rounds. Given its breech loader, the maximum rate of fire was only 5 rounds per minute. The gun's elevation was restricted to 30 degrees by the construction of the chassis. Other design issues included the fact that although the gun crew was protected by a gun shield with armour thickness of 25 mm at the front, the shield only extended a very short distance on the sides; leaving the rest of the sides and back exposed. They were rushed into service, deployed and saw combat during the Philippines Campaign in the last year of World War II. Remaining units were deployed to Okinawa in ones and twos for island defense during the Battle of Okinawa, but were severely outnumbered by American artillery. Soviet Union As with the Germans of 1943, most of the Soviet designs mounted anti-tank guns, with limited traverse in casemate-style turretless hulls, in a general design format looking much like the Germans' own Jagdpanzer vehicles. The results were smaller, lighter, and simpler to build weapons that could carry larger guns than any contemporary tank, including the King Tiger. The Soviets produced high numbers of the SU-85 and SU-100 self-propelled guns based on the same chassis as the T-34 medium tank; the heavier-duty powertrain and hull of the IS-2 heavy tank were instead used to produce the heavier-hitting -armed ISU-122 and -armed ISU-152, both of which had impressive anti-tank capabilities earning each of them the Russian nickname Zveroboy ("beast killer") for their ability to destroy German Tigers, Panthers and Elefants. The predecessor of the ISU 152 was the SU-152, built on the KV-1s chassis and shared many similarities (including its gun) with the ISU-152. The ISU-152 built as a heavy assault gun, relied on the weight of the shell fired from its M-1937/43 howitzer to defeat tanks. In 1943, the Soviets also shifted all production of light tanks like the T-70 to much simpler and better-armed SU-76 self-propelled guns, which used the same drive train. The SU-76 was originally designed as an anti-tank vehicle, but was soon relegated to the infantry-support role. United States U.S. Army and counterpart British designs were very different in conception. U.S. doctrine was based, in light of the fall of France, on the perceived need to defeat German blitzkrieg tactics, and U.S. units expected to face large numbers of German tanks, attacking on relatively narrow fronts. These were expected to break through a thin screen of anti-tank guns, hence the decision that the main anti-tank units—the Tank Destroyer (TD) battalions—should be concentrated and very mobile. In practice, such German attacks rarely happened. Throughout the war, only one battalion ever fought in an engagement like that originally envisaged (the 601st, at the Battle of El Guettar). The Tank Destroyer Command eventually numbered over 100,000 men and 80 battalions each equipped with 36 self-propelled tank destroyers or towed guns. Only a few shots were expected to be fired from any firing position. Strong reconnaissance elements were provided so that TDs could use pre-arranged firing positions to best advantage. Flanking fire by TDs was emphasized, both to penetrate thinner enemy side armour, and to reduce the likelihood of accurate enemy return fire. All American tank destroyers were officially known by exactly the same collective term used for American self-propelled artillery ordnance, "gun motor carriage". The designs were intended to be very mobile and heavily armed. Most of the tank-hull based designs used special open-topped turrets of a differing design from the original tank it was based on, which was meant to both save weight and to accommodate a larger gun. The earliest expedient design was mounting an 75 mm M1897 field gun in a limited-traverse mount on a M3 Half-track which was designated 75 mm Gun Motor Carriage M3. Another, considerably less successful, early design was the M6 Gun Motor Carriage which mounted the US 37-mm anti-tank gun facing to the rear on the bed of a Dodge 3/4-ton light truck. The M3 was first used against the Japanese in the Philippines and then in the Tunisian campaign of the war in North Africa. Some were supplied to British units who used them within armoured car reconnaissance regiments for fire support. The M6 GMC was unarmoured and the 37mm gun was infective against most enemy tanks by the time it entered service. By far the most common US design, and the first that was fully tracked and turreted (which became the American hallmark of World War II "tank destroyer" design) was the 3in Gun Motor Carriage M10, later supplemented by the 90 mm Gun Motor Carriage M36—both based on the M4 Sherman hull and powertrain—and the 76 mm Gun Motor Carriage M18 (Hellcat), based on a unique hull and powertrain design, with a slight visual resemblance to what was used for the later M24 Chaffee light tank. The M18 came closest to the US ideal; the vehicle was very fast, small, and mounted a gun in a roofless open turret. The M36 Jackson GMC possessed the only American-origin operational gun that could rival the German 8.8 cm Pak 43 anti-tank gun and its tank mounted variant, the 90 mm M3 gun, and the M36 remained in service well after World War II. The only dedicated American casemate hull design fighting vehicle of any type built during the war, that resembled the German and Soviet tank destroyers in hull and general gun mounting design, was the experimental T28 Super Heavy Tank, which mounted a 105 mm T5E1 long-barrel cannon. This gun had a maximum firing range of 12 miles (20 km), and the vehicle was originally designed as a very heavily armoured self-propelled assault gun to breach Germany's Siegfried Line defenses. Of these tank destroyers, only the gun of the M36 proved effective against the frontal armour of Germans' larger armored vehicles at long range. The open top and light armour made these tank destroyers vulnerable to anything greater than small-arms fire. As the number of German tanks encountered by American forces steadily decreased throughout the war, most battalions were split up and assigned to infantry units as supporting arms, fighting as assault guns or being used essentially as tanks. In this sense they were an alternative to the Independent tank battalions that were attached to various Infantry Divisions. The expectation that German tanks would be engaged in mass formation was a failed assumption. In reality, German attacks effectively used combined arms on the ground, fighting cohesively. American tank destroyer battalions comprised three tank destroyer companies supported by nine security sections. The single-purpose tactics of the tank destroyer battalion failed to account for non-tank threats. In the 1950s the goal of providing airborne forces with a parachute-capable self-propelled anti-tank weapon led to the deployment of the M56 Scorpion and M50 Ontos. The concept later led to the M551 Sheridan light tank of the mid-1960s. United Kingdom British tanks in the early years of the war, both infantry tanks and cruiser tanks, were (with the exception of the pre-war Matilda I design) equipped with a gun capable of use against contemporary enemy tanks—the 40 mm Ordnance QF 2 pounder. This was replaced with the 57 mm Ordnance QF 6 pounder when that became available. There was extra impetus given to the development of anti-tank weaponry, which culminated in the 76mm Ordnance QF 17 pounder, widely considered one of the best anti-tank guns of the war. Towed anti-tank guns were the domain of the Royal Artillery and vehicles adapted to mount artillery, including anti-tank self-propelled guns such as the Deacon (6pdr on an armoured wheeled truck chassis) and Archer (17pdr on tracked chassis) and US-supplied vehicles, were their preserve rather than the Royal Armoured Corps. The self-propelled guns that were built in the "tank destroyer" mould came about through the desire to field the QF 17 pounder anti-tank gun and simultaneous lack of suitable standard tanks to carry it. As a result, they were of a somewhat extemporized nature. Mounting the gun on the Valentine tank chassis in a fixed superstructure gave the Archer, looking somewhat like the light-chassis German Marder III in appearance. The 17 pounder was also used to re-equip the US-supplied M10 Tank Destroyer, replacing the American 3-inch gun to produce the 17pdr SP Achilles. In 1942 the General Staff agreed on investigating self-propelled mountings of the 6-pounder, 17-pounder, 3-inch 20cwt guns and the 25-pounder field gun/howitzer on the Matilda II, Valentine, Crusader and Cavalier (Cruiser Mark VII) tank chassis. In October 1942 it was decided to progress using the Valentine chassis with a 17-pdr (which would become Archer) and 25-pdr (which entered service as Bishop). While there was a general move to a general purpose gun that was usable against both tanks and in supporting infantry, there was a need to put the 17 pdr into a tank for use against the enemy's heavy tanks. The Cruiser Mk VIII Challenger was a project to bring a 17 pdr tank into use to support the Cromwell cruiser tank. Delays led to it being outnumbered in use by the Sherman Firefly—but a derivative of Challenger was the more or less open-topped variant Avenger, which was delayed until post war before entering service. A cut-down 17 pdr, the 77mmHV was used to equip the Comet tank in the last year of the war. The closest the British came to developing an armoured tank destroyer in the vein of the German Jagdpanzers or Soviet ISU series was the Churchill 3-inch Gun Carrier—a Churchill tank chassis with a boxy superstructure in place of the turret and mounting a 3-inch anti-aircraft gun. Although a number were ordered and fifty delivered in 1942, they were not put into service as the immediate threat passed. The design was rejected in favor of developing a 17 pounder armed Cromwell tank variant, ultimately leading to the Comet tank. The Tortoise "heavy assault tank", intended for use in breaking through fixed defensive lines, was well armoured and had a very powerful 32-pounder (94 mm) gun, but did not reach service use. By 1944, a number of the Shermans in British use were being converted to Sherman Fireflies by adding the QF 17 pounder gun. Initially this gave each troop (platoon) of Shermans one powerfully armed tank. By war's end—through the production of more Fireflies and the replacement of Shermans by British tanks—about 50% of Shermans in British service were Fireflies. The Sherman Firefly, however, is not considered a tank destroyer since it could still perform the other duties of the regular M4 Sherman, albeit the Firefly was less capable due to the late development of a HE round for the QF 17 pounder. Romania Until 1942, the Romanian tank force was equipped exclusively with obsolete R-1, R-2 and R35 tanks. Having faced big problems against Soviet T-34 and KV-1 tanks on the Eastern Front, the Romanian Army leadership sought for ways to improve its anti-tank capabilities. The initial plan was the creation of a tank comparable in characteristics to the T-34; instead, Romania went for a number of tank destroyers, since they were more adequate for its industry. The Mareșal is probably the best known Romanian AFV from the war; historians Steven Zaloga and Mark Axworthy state that it inspired the design of the later German Hetzer. Standing at only around 1.5 m tall, which would have made it very difficult to hit for its enemies, the Mareșal was a lightly armored, but highly mobile vehicle. It was armed with the Romanian 75 mm Reșița M1943 anti-tank gun, which proved to be among the best of its class during World War II, according to Mark Axworthy. During tests, the Mareșal proved to be superior in many aspects to the StuG III G, against which it competed. Those facts suggest that the Mareșal would have been an effective tank destroyer, had it been deployed into combat. There were, however, also critics of the vehicle, especially among high-ranking Romanian officials. It never saw action because the invading Soviet army had stopped its production. Other Romanian tank destroyers include the TACAM R-2 and TACAM T-60, which were converted from R-2 and T-60 light tanks respectively. Both of them saw action. One TACAM R-2 survives today and is displayed at the National Military Museum in Bucharest. Another conversion was the VDC R-35, Romania's only turreted tank destroyer. Two other proposed tank destroyers existed: the TACAM R-1 and TACAM T-38. Poland Variants of the Polish TKS and TK-3 tankettes up-armed with 20 mm gun (23–26 vehicles) were operationally deployed in the invasion of Poland. They were used as an anti-tank component of the reconnaissance units. There were also 37 mm armed TKS-D (2 experimental vehicles) and 47 mm armed TKD (4 experimental vehicles). It is not certain whether they were used operationally at all. France Due to the quick defeat of France, few French vehicles were built. The Laffly W15 TCC (Chasseur de chars) was an attempt to quickly build a light tank destroyer by mounting a 47 mm SA37 anti-tank gun onto a lightly armoured Laffly W15T artillery tractor. Other French tank destroyers were being developed, including the SOMUA SAu-40, ARL V39 and various ad hoc conversions of the Lorraine 37L. Subsequent developments Missile-based tank destroyers In the face of the Warsaw Pact, a general need for extra firepower was identified. In the late 1960s, West Germany developed the Kanonenjagdpanzer, essentially a modernized World War II Jagdpanzer mounting a gun. As Soviet designs became more heavily armoured, the gun became ineffective and the Kanonenjagdpanzers were retrofitted for different roles or retired. Some provisions were made for the fitting of a 105 mm cannon, and many of the vehicles were modified to fire HOT or TOW missiles in place of a main gun. These upgraded variants remained in service into the 1990s. With the development of flexible anti-tank missiles, which were capable of installation on almost any vehicle in the 1960s, the concept of the tank destroyer has morphed into light vehicles with missiles. With the weight of main battle tanks growing to the forty to seventy-tonne range, airborne forces were unable to deploy reasonable anti-tank forces. The result was a number of attempts to make a light vehicle, including the conventional ASU-85, M56 Scorpion, the recoilless rifle-armed Ontos, and missile-armed Humber Hornet armoured truck and Sheridan light assault vehicle. The recent entries into that category are the 2S25 Sprut-SD, armed with a current-issue 125 mm tank gun that is also capable of launching missiles like the 9M119 Svir, and Israeli-modified Pandur IIs, which is to enter service with the Philippine Army by 2022 armed with an Elbit Turret and a 105 mm gun. Many forces' infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs) carry anti-tank missiles in every infantry platoon, and attack helicopters have also added anti-tank capability to the modern battlefield. But there are still dedicated anti-tank vehicles with very heavy long-range missiles, and ones intended for airborne use. There have also been dedicated anti-tank vehicles built on ordinary armoured personnel carrier or armored car chassis. Examples include the U.S. M901 ITV (Improved TOW Vehicle) and the Norwegian NM142, both on an M113 chassis, several Soviet ATGM launchers based on the BRDM reconnaissance car, the British FV438 Swingfire and FV102 Striker and the German Raketenjagdpanzer series built on the chassis of the HS 30 and Marder IFV. India fielded NAMIS (Nag Missile System) equipped with Nag Missiles. A US Army combined arms battalion has two infantry companies with TOW missile-armed Bradley IFVs and can bring a large concentration of accurate and lethal fire to bear on an attacking enemy unit that uses AFVs. They can be complemented by mobile units of AH-64 Apache helicopters armed with Hellfire antitank missiles. Missile carrying vehicles are often referred to as anti-tank missile carriers instead of tank destroyers. Postwar gun-based tank destroyers Despite the proliferation of ATGMs, some gun-armed tank destroyers remain in use. China has developed the tracked PTZ89 and the wheeled PTL02 tank destroyers. The PTZ89 is armed with a smoothbore cannon while the PTL02, developed by NORINCO for the PLA's new light (rapid reaction) mechanized infantry divisions, carries a one (a version armed with a 105 mm rifled gun is available for export). The PTL02 is built on the 6×6 wheeled chassis of the WZ551 APC. Italy and Spain use the Italian-built Centauro, a wheeled tank destroyer with a cannon. Russia, meanwhile, uses the Russian-built 2S25 Sprut-SD, operating as an amphibious light tank/tank destroyer armed with a cannon. The Sabrah Pandur II is a wheeled tank destroyer variant of the Sabrah Light Tank developed by the Elbit Systems of Israel for the Philippine Army's future combat systems. See also Armoured warfare Self-propelled anti-aircraft weapon Self-propelled artillery Notes References Harry Yeide, (2005) The Tank Killers: A History of America's World War II Tank Destroyer Force. Havertown, PA: Casemate. . External links Tankdestroyer.net Popular Science, April 1940, Tanks Can Be Destroyed article on early US Army concepts for tank destroyers Tank Destroyer List Anti-tank weapons ms:Pemusnah kereta kebal

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armored%20car%20%28military%29

Armored car (military)

A military armored (also spelled armoured) car is a wheeled armored fighting vehicle, historically employed for reconnaissance, internal security, armed escort, and other subordinate battlefield tasks. With the gradual decline of mounted cavalry, armored cars were developed for carrying out duties formerly assigned to light cavalry. Following the invention of the tank, the armored car remained popular due to its faster speed, comparatively simple maintenance and low production cost. It also found favor with several colonial armies as a cheaper weapon for use in underdeveloped regions. During World War II, most armored cars were engineered for reconnaissance and passive observation, while others were devoted to communications tasks. Some equipped with heavier armament could even substitute for tracked combat vehicles in favorable conditions—such as pursuit or flanking maneuvers during the North African campaign. Since World War II the traditional functions of the armored car have been occasionally combined with that of the armoured personnel carrier, resulting in such multipurpose designs as the BTR-40 or the Cadillac Gage Commando. Postwar advances in recoil control technology have also made it possible for a few armored cars, including the B1 Centauro, the Panhard AML, the AMX-10 RC and EE-9 Cascavel, to carry a large cannon capable of threatening many tanks. History Precursors During the Middle Ages, war wagons covered with steel plate, and crewed by men armed with primitive hand cannon, flails and muskets, were used by the Hussite rebels in Bohemia. These were deployed in formations where the horses and oxen were at the centre, and the surrounding wagons were chained together as protection from enemy cavalry. With the invention of the steam engine, Victorian inventors designed prototype self-propelled armored vehicles for use in sieges, although none were deployed in combat. H. G. Wells' short story "The Land Ironclads" provides a fictionalized account of their use. Armed car The Motor Scout was designed and built by British inventor F.R. Simms in 1898. It was the first armed petrol engine-powered vehicle ever built. The vehicle was a De Dion-Bouton quadricycle with a mounted Maxim machine gun on the front bar. An iron shield in front of the car protected the driver. Another early armed car was invented by Royal Page Davidson at Northwestern Military and Naval Academy in 1898 with the Davidson-Duryea gun carriage and the later Davidson Automobile Battery armored car. However, these were not "armored cars" as the term is understood today, as they provided little protection for their crews from enemy fire. First armoured cars At the beginning of the 20th century, the first military armored vehicles were manufactured by adding armor and weapons to existing vehicles. The first armored car was the Simms' Motor War Car, designed by F.R. Simms and built by Vickers, Sons & Maxim of Barrow on a special Coventry-built Daimler chassis with a German-built Daimler motor in 1899. and a single prototype was ordered in April 1899 The prototype was finished in 1902, too late to be used during the Boer War. The vehicle had Vickers armor, thick, and was powered by a four-cylinder Cannstatt Daimler engine, giving it a maximum speed of around . The armament, consisting of two Maxim guns, was carried in two turrets with 360° traverse. It had a crew of four. Simms' Motor War Car was presented at the Crystal Palace, London, in April 1902. Another early armored car of the period was the French Charron, Girardot et Voigt 1902, presented at the Salon de l'Automobile et du cycle in Brussels, on 8 March 1902. The vehicle was equipped with a Hotchkiss machine gun, and with armour for the gunner. One of the first operational armored cars with four wheel (4x4) drive and partly enclosed rotating turret, was the Austro-Daimler Panzerwagen built by Austro-Daimler in 1904. It was armored with thick curved plates over the body (drive space and engine) and had a thick dome-shaped rotating turret that housed one or two machine-guns. It had a four-cylinder engine giving it average cross country performance. Both the driver and co-driver had adjustable seats enabling them to raise them to see out of the roof of the drive compartment as needed. The Spanish Schneider-Brillié was the first armored vehicle to be used in combat, being first used in the Kert Campaign. The vehicle was equipped with two machineguns and built from a bus chassis. An armored car known as the ''Death Special'' was built at the CFI plant in Pueblo and used by the Badlwin-Felts detective agency during the Colorado Coalfield War World War I A great variety of armored cars appeared on both sides during World War I and these were used in various ways. Generally, armored cars were used by more or less independent car commanders. However, sometimes they were used in larger units up to squadron size. The cars were primarily armed with light machine guns, but larger units usually employed a few cars with heavier guns. As air power became a factor, armored cars offered a mobile platform for antiaircraft guns. The first effective use of an armored vehicle in combat was achieved by the Belgian Army in August–September 1914. They had placed Cockerill armour plating and a Hotchkiss machine gun on Minerva touring cars, creating the Minerva Armored Car. Their successes in the early days of the war convinced the Belgian GHQ to create a Corps of Armoured Cars, who would be sent to fight on the Eastern front once the western front immobilized after the Battle of the Yser. The British Royal Naval Air Service dispatched aircraft to Dunkirk to defend the UK from Zeppelins. The officers' cars followed them and these began to be used to rescue downed reconnaissance pilots in the battle areas. They mounted machine guns on them and as these excursions became increasingly dangerous, they improvised boiler plate armoring on the vehicles provided by a local shipbuilder. In London Murray Sueter ordered "fighting cars" based on Rolls-Royce, Talbot and Wolseley chassis. By the time Rolls-Royce Armoured Cars arrived in December 1914, the mobile period on the Western Front was already over. More tactically important was the development of formed units of armored cars, such as the Canadian Automobile Machine Gun Brigade, which was the first fully mechanized unit in the history. The brigade was established on September 2, 1914, in Ottawa, as Automobile Machine Gun Brigade No. 1 by Brigadier-General Raymond Brutinel. The brigade was originally equipped with eight Armoured Autocars mounting two machine guns. By 1918 Brutinel's force consisted of two motor machine gun brigades (each of five gun batteries containing eight weapons apiece). The brigade, and its armored cars, provided yeoman service in many battles, notably at Amiens. The RNAS section became the Royal Naval Armoured Car Division reaching a strength of 20 squadrons before disbanded in 1915. and the armoured cars passing to the army as part of the Machine Gun Corps. Only NO.1 Squadron was retained; it was sent to Russia. As the Western Front turned to trench warfare unsuitable to wheeled vehicles, the armoured cars were moved to other areas. The 2nd Duke of Westminster took No. 2 Squadron of the RNAS to France in March 1915 in time to make a noted contribution to the Second Battle of Ypres, and thereafter the cars with their master were sent to the Middle East to play a part in the British campaign in Palestine and elsewhere The Duke led a motorised convoy including nine armoured cars across the Western Desert in North Africa to rescue the survivors of the sinking of the SS Tara which had been kidnapped and taken to Bir Hakiem. In Africa, Rolls Royce armoured cars were active in German South West Africa and Lanchester Armoured Cars in British East Africa against German forces to the south. Armored cars also saw action on the Eastern Front. From 18 February - 26 March 1915, the German army under General Max von Gallwitz attempted to break through the Russian lines in and around the town of Przasnysz, Poland, (about 110 km / 68 miles north of Warsaw) during the Battle of Przasnysz (Polish: Bitwa przasnyska). Near the end of the battle, the Russians used four Russo-Balt armored cars and a armored car to break through the Germans' lines and force the Germans to retreat. World War II The British Royal Air Force (RAF) in the Middle East was equipped with Rolls-Royce Armoured Cars and Morris tenders. Some of these vehicles were among the last of a consignment of ex-Royal Navy armored cars that had been serving in the Middle East since 1915. In September 1940 a section of the No. 2 Squadron RAF Regiment Company was detached to General Wavell's ground forces during the first offensive against the Italians in Egypt. During the actions in the October of that year the company was employed on convoy escort tasks, airfield defense, fighting reconnaissance patrols and screening operations. During the 1941 Anglo-Iraqi War, some of the units located in the British Mandate of Palestine were sent to Iraq and drove Fordson armored cars. "Fordson" armored cars were Rolls-Royce armored cars which received new chassis from a Fordson truck in Egypt. By the start of the new war, the German army possessed some highly effective reconnaissance vehicles, such as the Schwerer Panzerspähwagen. The Soviet BA-64 was influenced by a captured Leichter Panzerspähwagen before it was first tested in January 1942. In the second half of the war, the American M8 Greyhound and the British Daimler Armoured Cars featured turrets mounting light guns (40 mm or less). As with other wartime armored cars, their reconnaissance roles emphasized greater speed and stealth than a tracked vehicle could provide, so their limited armor, armament and off-road capabilities were seen as acceptable compromises. Military use A military armored car is a type of armored fighting vehicle having wheels (from four to ten large, off-road wheels) instead of tracks, and usually light armor. Armored cars are typically less expensive and on roads have better speed and range than tracked military vehicles. They do however have less mobility as they have less off-road capabilities because of the higher ground pressure. They also have less obstacle climbing capabilities than tracked vehicles. Wheels are more vulnerable to enemy fire than tracks, they have a higher signature and in most cases less armor than comparable tracked vehicles. As a result, they are not intended for heavy fighting; their normal use is for reconnaissance, command, control, and communications, or for use against lightly armed insurgents or rioters. Only some are intended to enter close combat, often accompanying convoys to protect soft-skinned vehicles. Light armored cars, such as the British Ferret are armed with just a machine gun. Heavier vehicles are armed with autocannon or a large caliber gun. The heaviest armored cars, such as the German, World War II era Sd.Kfz. 234 or the modern, US M1128 Mobile Gun System, mount the same guns that arm medium tanks. Armored cars are popular for peacekeeping or internal security duties. Their appearance is less confrontational and threatening than tanks, and their size and maneuverability is said to be more compatible with tight urban spaces designed for wheeled vehicles. However, they do have a larger turning radius compared to tracked vehicles which can turn on the spot and their tires are vulnerable and are less capable in climbing and crushing obstacles. Further, when there is true combat they are easily outgunned and lightly armored. The threatening appearance of a tank is often enough to keep an opponent from attacking, whereas a less threatening vehicle such as an armored car is more likely to be attacked. Many modern forces now have their dedicated armored car designs, to exploit the advantages noted above. Examples would be the M1117 Armored Security Vehicle of the USA or Alvis Saladin of the post-World War II era in the United Kingdom. Alternatively, civilian vehicles may be modified into improvised armored cars in ad hoc fashion. Many militias and irregular forces adapt civilian vehicles into AFVs (armored fighting vehicles) and troop carriers, and in some regional conflicts these "technicals" are the only combat vehicles present. On occasion, even the soldiers of national militaries are forced to adapt their civilian-type vehicles for combat use, often using improvised armor and scrounged weapons. Scout cars In the 1930s, a new sub-class of armored car emerged in the United States, known as the scout car. This was a compact light armored car which was either unarmed or armed only with machine guns for self-defense. Scout cars were designed as purpose-built reconnaissance vehicles for passive observation and intelligence gathering. Armored cars which carried large caliber, turreted weapons systems were not considered scout cars. The concept gained popularity worldwide during World War II and was especially favored in nations where reconnaissance theory emphasized passive observation over combat. Examples of armored cars also classified as scout cars include the Soviet BRDM series, the British Ferret, the Brazilian EE-3 Jararaca, the Hungarian D-442 FÚG, and the American Cadillac Gage Commando Scout. See also Armored bus Armored personnel carrier Armored car (valuables) Armored car (VIP) Armoring: Aramid Bulletproof glass Twaron Vehicle armor Gun truck SWAT vehicle Tankette Technical (vehicle) Notes References Crow, Duncan, and Icks, Robert J., Encyclopedia of Armored Cars, Chatwell Books, Secaucus, NJ, 1976. . Armoured fighting vehicles by type Internal security vehicles Paramilitary vehicles

2288

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-propelled%20anti-aircraft%20weapon

Self-propelled anti-aircraft weapon

An anti-aircraft vehicle, also known as a self-propelled anti-aircraft gun (SPAAG) or self-propelled air defense system (SPAD), is a mobile vehicle with a dedicated anti-aircraft capability. Specific weapon systems used include machine guns, autocannons, larger guns, or surface-to-air missiles, and some mount both guns and longer-ranged missiles (e.g. the Pantsir-S1). Platforms used include both trucks and heavier combat vehicles such as armored personnel carriers and tanks, which add protection from aircraft, artillery, and small arms fire for front line deployment. Anti-aircraft guns are usually mounted in a quickly-traversing turret with a high rate of elevation, for tracking fast-moving aircraft. They are often in dual or quadruple mounts, allowing a high rate of fire. In addition, most anti-aircraft guns can be used in a direct-fire role against surface targets to great effect. Today, surface-to-air missiles (generally mounted on similar turrets) have largely supplanted anti-aircraft guns, but they may return as a cheap way to counter unmanned aerial systems (drones), cruise missiles, and ultralight aircraft. History World War I Anti-aircraft machine guns have long been mounted on trucks, and these were quite common during World War I. A predecessor of the WWII German "88" anti-aircraft gun, the WWI German 77 mm anti-aircraft gun, was truck-mounted and used to great effect against British tanks. The British QF 3 inch 20 cwt was mounted on trucks for use on the Western Front. The British also had a first dedicated anti aircraft weapon, the QF 1-pounder pom-pom. Mounted on a armoured truck titled the Pierce-Arrow armoured AA lorry, which was produced in limited numbers and only seeing service throughout 1915. Towards the end of the war Germany produced three prototype SPAAGs with AA guns mounted on A7V chassis known as the A7V Flakpanzer. Inter-war period Between the two World Wars, the United Kingdom developed the Birch gun, a general-purpose artillery piece on an armoured tracked chassis capable of maintaining formation with their current tanks over terrain. The gun could be elevated for anti-aircraft use. The first tracked SPAAG-design to be manufactured in series was most likely the British/Siamese Vickers Armstrong "Type 76" (per Buddhist year 2476 = 1933 CE), as named by the Royal Siamese Army, a SPAAG based on the chassis of the Dragon, Medium, Mark IV artillery tractor (Vickers Mk.E 6-ton light tank derivative), mounting a revolving Vickers 40 mm QF 2 pounder pom-pom autocannon in an open fighting compartment. About 26 were sold to Siam in 1932 and saw action as infantry support guns and AA guns during the Franco-Thai war (1940-1941) along with 30 Vickers Mk.E Type B 6-ton tanks. Despite being the first tracked SPAAG en masse, the open-top design of the Vickers Type 76 made it outdated even by the early 1930s. The first modern SPAAG to be produced was most likely the Swedish Landsverk L-62 Anti in 1936, featuring a tracked armoured body with a revolving turret, a so-called anti-aircraft tank. It was based on a widened chassis of the Landsverk L-60 light tank and was armed with a Bofors 40 mm Automatic Gun L/60 in an open-top revolving turret. The design was bought by Hungary just prior to the war and Finland ordered a refined model in 1941, known as the Anti II. By the late 1930s, the British had developed a version of the Mk.VI Light Tank armed with four machine guns that were known as Light Tank AA Mk.I, and also a twin 15 mm version based on the Light Tank Mk.V was built. Among early pre-war pioneers of self-propelled AA guns were the Germans. By the time of the war, they fielded the Sd.Kfz. 10/4 and Sd.Kfz. 6/2, cargo half-tracks mounting single 20 mm or 37 mm AA guns (respectively). Later in the war similar German half-tracks mounted quadruple 20 mm weapons. World War II Larger guns followed on larger trucks, but these mountings generally required off-truck setup in order to unlimber the stabilizing legs these guns needed. One exception to this rule was the Italian Cannone da 90/53 which was highly effective when mounted on trucks, a fit known as the "autocannoni da 90/53". The 90/53 was a feared weapon, notably in the anti-tank role, but only a few hundred had been produced by the time of the armistice in 1943. Other nations tended to work on truck chassis. Starting in 1941, the British developed the "en portee" method of mounting an anti-tank gun (initially a 2 pounder) on a truck. This was to prevent the weapon from being damaged by long-distance towing across rough, stony deserts, and it was intended only to be a carrying method, with the gun unloaded for firing. However, crews tended to fire their weapons from their vehicles for the mobility this method provided, with consequent casualties. This undoubtedly inspired their Morris C9/B (officially the "Carrier, SP, 4x4, 40 mm AA"), a Bofors 40 mm AA gun mounted on a chassis derived from the Morris "Quad" Field Artillery Tractor truck. Similar types, based on 3-ton lorries, were produced in Britain, Canada and Australia, and together formed the most numerous self-propelled AA guns in British service. The U.S. Army brought truck-towed Bofors 40 mm AA guns along with truck-mounted units fitted with mechanized turrets when they sailed, first for Great Britain and then onto France. The turrets carried four .50 inch (12.7 mm) machine guns, which were designed to be adjusted to converge at the single point where enemy aircraft were expected to appear at low altitude in conduction of strafing runs directed at large infantry and field artillery units. Interest in mobile AA turned to heavier vehicles with the mass and stability needed to easily train weapons of all sizes. Probably the desire, particularly in German service, for anti-aircraft vehicles to be armoured for their own protection also assisted this trend. The concept of using armored SPAAG (anti-aircraft tanks) en masse was pioneered by Hungary during World War II with the production of the 40M Nimrod, a license-produced version of the previously mentioned late 1930s Landsverk L-62 Anti I SPAAG. Germany followed later with their "Flakpanzer" series. German World War II SPAAGs include the Möbelwagen, Wirbelwind, Ostwind and Kugelblitz. Other forces followed with designs of their own, notably the American M16 created by mounting quadruple M2HB Browning machine guns on a M3 Half-track. The British developed their own SPAAGs throughout the war mounting multiple machine guns and light cannon on various tank and armoured car chassis and by 1943, the Crusader AA tanks, which mounted the Bofors 40 mm gun or two-three Oerlikon 20 mm cannon. Although used during the Normandy landings, by that point German aircraft were contained by the Allies own air forces and they were largely unneeded. Cold War and later The introduction of jet engines and the subsequent rough doubling of aircraft speeds greatly reduced the effectiveness of the SPAAG against attack aircraft. A typical SPAAG round might have a muzzle velocity on the order of and might take as long as two to three seconds to reach a target at its maximum range. An aircraft flying at is moving at a rate of about . This means the aircraft will have moved hundreds of meters during the flight time of the shells, greatly complicating the aiming problem to the point where close passes were essentially impossible to aim using manual gunsights. This speed also allowed the aircraft to rapidly fly out of range of the guns; even if the aircraft passes directly over the SPAAG, it would be within its firing radius for under 30 seconds. SPAAG development continued through the early 1950s with ever-larger guns, improving the range and allowing the engagement to take place at longer distances where the crossing angle was smaller and aiming was easier. Examples including the 40 mm U.S. M42 Duster and the 57 mm Soviet ZSU-57-2. However, both were essentially obsolete before they entered service, and found employment solely in the ground-support role. The M42 was introduced to the Vietnam War to counter an expected North Vietnamese air offensive, but when this failed to materialize it was used as an effective direct-fire weapon. The ZSU-57 found similar use in the Yugoslav Wars, where its high-angle fire was useful in the mountainous terrain. By the late 1950s, the US Army had given up on the SPAAG concept, considering all gun-based weapons to be useless against modern aircraft. This belief was generally held by many forces, and the anti-aircraft role turned almost exclusively to missile systems. The Soviet Union remained an outlier, beginning the development of a new SPAAG in 1957, which emerged as the ZSU-23-4 in 1965. This system included search-and-track radars, fire control, and automatic gun-laying, greatly increasing its effectiveness against modern targets. The ZSU-23 proved very effective when used in concert with SAMs; the presence of SAMs forced aircraft to fly low to avoid their radars, placing them within range of the ZSUs. The success of the ZSU-23 led to a resurgence of SPAAG development. This was also prompted by the introduction of attack helicopters in the 1970s, which could hide behind terrain and then "pop up" for an attack lasting only a few tens of seconds; missiles were ineffective at low altitudes, while the helicopters would often be within range of the guns for a rapid counterattack. Notable among these later systems is the German Gepard, the first western SPAAG to offer performance equal to or better than the ZSU. This system was widely copied in various NATO forces. SPAAG development continues, with many modern examples often combining both guns and short-range missiles. Examples include the Soviet/Russian Tunguska-M1, which supplanted the ZSU-23 in service, the newer versions of the Gepard, the Chinese Type 95 SPAAA, and the British Marksman turret, which can be used on a wide variety of platforms. Some forces, like the US Army and USMC have mostly forgone self-propelled guns in favor of systems with short-range infrared-guided surface-to-air missiles in the AN/TWQ-1 Avenger and M6 Linebacker, which do not require radar to be accurate and are generally more reliable and cost-effective to field, though their ability to provide ground support is more limited. The U.S. Army did use the M163 VADS and developed the prototype design of the M247 Sergeant York. Present day Modern SPAAGs usually have short-range missiles for longer range engagement. The Pantsir system from Russia is primarily a missile battery, although it does have twin cannons as secondary armament. Some examples of modern SPAAGs: Stryker M-SHORAD, US/Canada, 30 mm Skyranger 30, 30 mm Skyranger 35, Swiss/German, 35 mm Flakpanzer Gepard, Germany, 35 mm PGZ-09, China, 35 mm KORKUT, Turkey, 35 mm Luftvärnskanonvagn (lvkv) 9040, Sweden, 40 mm PASARS-16, Serbia, 40 mm K30 Biho, South Korea, 30 mm See also 4M (artillery) Assault gun Flakpanzer, a collective term for German anti-aircraft tanks, particularly those used in World War II. List of anti-aircraft guns Man-portable air-defense system Self-propelled artillery Tank destroyer References Landsverk Self-propelled anti-aircraft weapons Armoured fighting vehicles by type

2296

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrenal%20gland

Adrenal gland

The adrenal glands (also known as suprarenal glands) are endocrine glands that produce a variety of hormones including adrenaline and the steroids aldosterone and cortisol. They are found above the kidneys. Each gland has an outer cortex which produces steroid hormones and an inner medulla. The adrenal cortex itself is divided into three main zones: the zona glomerulosa, the zona fasciculata and the zona reticularis. The adrenal cortex produces three main types of steroid hormones: mineralocorticoids, glucocorticoids, and androgens. Mineralocorticoids (such as aldosterone) produced in the zona glomerulosa help in the regulation of blood pressure and electrolyte balance. The glucocorticoids cortisol and cortisone are synthesized in the zona fasciculata; their functions include the regulation of metabolism and immune system suppression. The innermost layer of the cortex, the zona reticularis, produces androgens that are converted to fully functional sex hormones in the gonads and other target organs. The production of steroid hormones is called steroidogenesis, and involves a number of reactions and processes that take place in cortical cells. The medulla produces the catecholamines, which function to produce a rapid response throughout the body in stress situations. A number of endocrine diseases involve dysfunctions of the adrenal gland. Overproduction of cortisol leads to Cushing's syndrome, whereas insufficient production is associated with Addison's disease. Congenital adrenal hyperplasia is a genetic disease produced by dysregulation of endocrine control mechanisms. A variety of tumors can arise from adrenal tissue and are commonly found in medical imaging when searching for other diseases. Structure The adrenal glands are located on both sides of the body in the retroperitoneum, above and slightly medial to the kidneys. In humans, the right adrenal gland is pyramidal in shape, whereas the left is semilunar or crescent shaped and somewhat larger. The adrenal glands measure approximately 5 cm in length, 3 cm in width, and up to 1 cm in thickness. Their combined weight in an adult human ranges from 7 to 10 grams. The glands are yellowish in colour. The adrenal glands are surrounded by a fatty capsule and lie within the renal fascia, which also surrounds the kidneys. A weak septum (wall) of connective tissue separates the glands from the kidneys. The adrenal glands are directly below the diaphragm, and are attached to the crura of the diaphragm by the renal fascia. Each adrenal gland has two distinct parts, each with a unique function, the outer adrenal cortex and the inner medulla, both of which produce hormones. Adrenal cortex The adrenal cortex is the outer region and also the largest part of an adrenal gland. It is divided into three separate zones: zona glomerulosa, zona fasciculata and zona reticularis. Each zone is responsible for producing specific hormones. The adrenal cortex is the outermost layer of the adrenal gland. Within the cortex are three layers, called "zones". When viewed under a microscope each layer has a distinct appearance, and each has a different function. The adrenal cortex is devoted to production of hormones, namely aldosterone, cortisol, and androgens. Zona glomerulosa The outermost zone of the adrenal cortex is the zona glomerulosa. It lies immediately under the fibrous capsule of the gland. Cells in this layer form oval groups, separated by thin strands of connective tissue from the fibrous capsule of the gland and carry wide capillaries. This layer is the main site for production of aldosterone, a mineralocorticoid, by the action of the enzyme aldosterone synthase. Aldosterone plays an important role in the long-term regulation of blood pressure. Zona fasciculata The zona fasciculata is situated between the zona glomerulosa and zona reticularis. Cells in this layer are responsible for producing glucocorticoids such as cortisol. It is the largest of the three layers, accounting for nearly 80% of the volume of the cortex. In the zona fasciculata, cells are arranged in columns radially oriented towards the medulla. Cells contain numerous lipid droplets, abundant mitochondria and a complex smooth endoplasmic reticulum. Zona reticularis The innermost cortical layer, the zona reticularis, lies directly adjacent to the medulla. It produces androgens, mainly dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA), DHEA sulfate (DHEA-S), and androstenedione (the precursor to testosterone) in humans. Its small cells form irregular cords and clusters, separated by capillaries and connective tissue. The cells contain relatively small quantities of cytoplasm and lipid droplets, and sometimes display brown lipofuscin pigment. Medulla The adrenal medulla is at the centre of each adrenal gland, and is surrounded by the adrenal cortex. The chromaffin cells of the medulla are the body's main source of the catecholamines, such as adrenaline and noradrenaline, released by the medulla. Approximately 20% noradrenaline (norepinephrine) and 80% adrenaline (epinephrine) are secreted here. The adrenal medulla is driven by the sympathetic nervous system via preganglionic fibers originating in the thoracic spinal cord, from vertebrae T5–T11. Because it is innervated by preganglionic nerve fibers, the adrenal medulla can be considered as a specialized sympathetic ganglion. Unlike other sympathetic ganglia, however, the adrenal medulla lacks distinct synapses and releases its secretions directly into the blood. Blood supply The adrenal glands have one of the greatest blood supply rates per gram of tissue of any organ: up to 60 small arteries may enter each gland. Three arteries usually supply each adrenal gland: The superior suprarenal artery, a branch of the inferior phrenic artery The middle suprarenal artery, a direct branch of the abdominal aorta The inferior suprarenal artery, a branch of the renal artery These blood vessels supply a network of small arteries within the capsule of the adrenal glands. Thin strands of the capsule enter the glands, carrying blood to them. Venous blood is drained from the glands by the suprarenal veins, usually one for each gland: The right suprarenal vein drains into the inferior vena cava. The left suprarenal vein drains into the left renal vein or the left inferior phrenic vein. The central adrenomedullary vein, in the adrenal medulla, is an unusual type of blood vessel. Its structure is different from the other veins in that the smooth muscle in its tunica media (the middle layer of the vessel) is arranged in conspicuous, longitudinally oriented bundles. Variability The adrenal glands may not develop at all, or may be fused in the midline behind the aorta. These are associated with other congenital abnormalities, such as failure of the kidneys to develop, or fused kidneys. The gland may develop with a partial or complete absence of the cortex, or may develop in an unusual location. Function The adrenal gland secretes a number of different hormones which are metabolised by enzymes either within the gland or in other parts of the body. These hormones are involved in a number of essential biological functions. Corticosteroids Corticosteroids are a group of steroid hormones produced from the cortex of the adrenal gland, from which they are named. Mineralocorticoids such as aldosterone regulate salt ("mineral") balance and blood pressure Glucocorticoids such as cortisol influence metabolism rates of proteins, fats and sugars ("glucose"). Androgens such as dehydroepiandrosterone. Mineralocorticoids The adrenal gland produces aldosterone, a mineralocorticoid, which is important in the regulation of salt ("mineral") balance and blood volume. In the kidneys, aldosterone acts on the distal convoluted tubules and the collecting ducts by increasing the reabsorption of sodium and the excretion of both potassium and hydrogen ions. Aldosterone is responsible for the reabsorption of about 2% of filtered glomerular filtrate. Sodium retention is also a response of the distal colon and sweat glands to aldosterone receptor stimulation. Angiotensin II and extracellular potassium are the two main regulators of aldosterone production. The amount of sodium present in the body affects the extracellular volume, which in turn influences blood pressure. Therefore, the effects of aldosterone in sodium retention are important for the regulation of blood pressure. Glucocorticoids Cortisol is the main glucocorticoid in humans. In species that do not create cortisol, this role is played by corticosterone instead. Glucocorticoids have many effects on metabolism. As their name suggests, they increase the circulating level of glucose. This is the result of an increase in the mobilization of amino acids from protein and the stimulation of synthesis of glucose from these amino acids in the liver. In addition, they increase the levels of free fatty acids, which cells can use as an alternative to glucose to obtain energy. Glucocorticoids also have effects unrelated to the regulation of blood sugar levels, including the suppression of the immune system and a potent anti-inflammatory effect. Cortisol reduces the capacity of osteoblasts to produce new bone tissue and decreases the absorption of calcium in the gastrointestinal tract. The adrenal gland secretes a basal level of cortisol but can also produce bursts of the hormone in response to adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) from the anterior pituitary. Cortisol is not evenly released during the day – its concentrations in the blood are highest in the early morning and lowest in the evening as a result of the circadian rhythm of ACTH secretion. Cortisone is an inactive product of the action of the enzyme 11β-HSD on cortisol. The reaction catalyzed by 11β-HSD is reversible, which means that it can turn administered cortisone into cortisol, the biologically active hormone. Formation All corticosteroid hormones share cholesterol as a common precursor. Therefore, the first step in steroidogenesis is cholesterol uptake or synthesis. Cells that produce steroid hormones can acquire cholesterol through two paths. The main source is through dietary cholesterol transported via the blood as cholesterol esters within low density lipoproteins (LDL). LDL enters the cells through receptor-mediated endocytosis. The other source of cholesterol is synthesis in the cell's endoplasmic reticulum. Synthesis can compensate when LDL levels are abnormally low. In the lysosome, cholesterol esters are converted to free cholesterol, which is then used for steroidogenesis or stored in the cell. The initial part of conversion of cholesterol into steroid hormones involves a number of enzymes of the cytochrome P450 family that are located in the inner membrane of mitochondria. Transport of cholesterol from the outer to the inner membrane is facilitated by steroidogenic acute regulatory protein and is the rate-limiting step of steroid synthesis. The layers of the adrenal gland differ by function, with each layer having distinct enzymes that produce different hormones from a common precursor. The first enzymatic step in the production of all steroid hormones is cleavage of the cholesterol side chain, a reaction that forms pregnenolone as a product and is catalyzed by the enzyme P450scc, also known as cholesterol desmolase. After the production of pregnenolone, specific enzymes of each cortical layer further modify it. Enzymes involved in this process include both mitochondrial and microsomal P450s and hydroxysteroid dehydrogenases. Usually a number of intermediate steps in which pregnenolone is modified several times are required to form the functional hormones. Enzymes that catalyze reactions in these metabolic pathways are involved in a number of endocrine diseases. For example, the most common form of congenital adrenal hyperplasia develops as a result of deficiency of 21-hydroxylase, an enzyme involved in an intermediate step of cortisol production. Regulation Glucocorticoids are under the regulatory influence of the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis (HPA) axis. Glucocorticoid synthesis is stimulated by adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH), a hormone released into the bloodstream by the anterior pituitary. In turn, production of ACTH is stimulated by the presence of corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH), which is released by neurons of the hypothalamus. ACTH acts on the adrenal cells first by increasing the levels of StAR within the cells, and then of all steroidogenic P450 enzymes. The HPA axis is an example of a negative feedback system, in which cortisol itself acts as a direct inhibitor of both CRH and ACTH synthesis. The HPA axis also interacts with the immune system through increased secretion of ACTH at the presence of certain molecules of the inflammatory response. Mineralocorticoid secretion is regulated mainly by the renin–angiotensin–aldosterone system (RAAS), the concentration of potassium, and to a lesser extent the concentration of ACTH. Sensors of blood pressure in the juxtaglomerular apparatus of the kidneys release the enzyme renin into the blood, which starts a cascade of reactions that lead to formation of angiotensin II. Angiotensin receptors in cells of the zona glomerulosa recognize the substance, and upon binding they stimulate the release of aldosterone. Androgens Cells in zona reticularis of the adrenal glands produce male sex hormones, or androgens, the most important of which is DHEA. In general, these hormones do not have an overall effect in the male body, and are converted to more potent androgens such as testosterone and DHT or to estrogens (female sex hormones) in the gonads, acting in this way as a metabolic intermediate. Catecholamines Primarily referred to in the United States as epinephrine and norepinephrine, adrenaline and noradrenaline are catecholamines, water-soluble compounds that have a structure made of a catechol group and an amine group. The adrenal glands are responsible for most of the adrenaline that circulates in the body, but only for a small amount of circulating noradrenaline. These hormones are released by the adrenal medulla, which contains a dense network of blood vessels. Adrenaline and noradrenaline act by interacting with adrenoreceptors throughout the body, with effects that include an increase in blood pressure and heart rate. Actions of adrenaline and noradrenaline are responsible for the fight or flight response, characterised by a quickening of breathing and heart rate, an increase in blood pressure, and constriction of blood vessels in many parts of the body. Formation Catecholamines are produced in chromaffin cells in the medulla of the adrenal gland, from tyrosine, a non-essential amino acid derived from food or produced from phenylalanine in the liver. The enzyme tyrosine hydroxylase converts tyrosine to L-DOPA in the first step of catecholamine synthesis. L-DOPA is then converted to dopamine before it can be turned into noradrenaline. In the cytosol, noradrenaline is converted to epinephrine by the enzyme phenylethanolamine N-methyltransferase (PNMT) and stored in granules. Glucocorticoids produced in the adrenal cortex stimulate the synthesis of catecholamines by increasing the levels of tyrosine hydroxylase and PNMT. Catecholamine release is stimulated by the activation of the sympathetic nervous system. Splanchnic nerves of the sympathetic nervous system innervate the medulla of the adrenal gland. When activated, it evokes the release of catecholamines from the storage granules by stimulating the opening of calcium channels in the cell membrane. Gene and protein expression The human genome includes approximately 20,000 protein coding genes and 70% of these genes are expressed in the normal adult adrenal glands. Only some 250 genes are more specifically expressed in the adrenal glands compared to other organs and tissues. The adrenal-gland-specific genes with the highest level of expression include members of the cytochrome P450 superfamily of enzymes. Corresponding proteins are expressed in the different compartments of the adrenal gland, such as CYP11A1, HSD3B2 and FDX1 involved in steroid hormone synthesis and expressed in cortical cell layers, and PNMT and DBH involved in noradrenaline and adrenaline synthesis and expressed in the medulla. Development The adrenal glands are composed of two heterogenous types of tissue. In the center is the adrenal medulla, which produces adrenaline and noradrenaline and releases them into the bloodstream, as part of the sympathetic nervous system. Surrounding the medulla is the cortex, which produces a variety of steroid hormones. These tissues come from different embryological precursors and have distinct prenatal development paths. The cortex of the adrenal gland is derived from mesoderm, whereas the medulla is derived from the neural crest, which is of ectodermal origin. The adrenal glands in a newborn baby are much larger as a proportion of the body size than in an adult. For example, at age three months the glands are four times the size of the kidneys. The size of the glands decreases relatively after birth, mainly because of shrinkage of the cortex. The cortex, which almost completely disappears by age 1, develops again from age 4–5. The glands weigh about at birth and develop to an adult weight of about each. In a fetus the glands are first detectable after the sixth week of development. Cortex Adrenal cortex tissue is derived from the intermediate mesoderm. It first appears 33 days after fertilisation, shows steroid hormone production capabilities by the eighth week and undergoes rapid growth during the first trimester of pregnancy. The fetal adrenal cortex is different from its adult counterpart, as it is composed of two distinct zones: the inner "fetal" zone, which carries most of the hormone-producing activity, and the outer "definitive" zone, which is in a proliferative phase. The fetal zone produces large amounts of adrenal androgens (male sex hormones) that are used by the placenta for estrogen biosynthesis. Cortical development of the adrenal gland is regulated mostly by ACTH, a hormone produced by the pituitary gland that stimulates cortisol synthesis. During midgestation, the fetal zone occupies most of the cortical volume and produces 100–200 mg/day of DHEA-S, an androgen and precursor of both androgens and estrogens (female sex hormones). Adrenal hormones, especially glucocorticoids such as cortisol, are essential for prenatal development of organs, particularly for the maturation of the lungs. The adrenal gland decreases in size after birth because of the rapid disappearance of the fetal zone, with a corresponding decrease in androgen secretion. Adrenarche During early childhood androgen synthesis and secretion remain low, but several years before puberty (from 6–8 years of age) changes occur in both anatomical and functional aspects of cortical androgen production that lead to increased secretion of the steroids DHEA and DHEA-S. These changes are part of a process called adrenarche, which has only been described in humans and some other primates. Adrenarche is independent of ACTH or gonadotropins and correlates with a progressive thickening of the zona reticularis layer of the cortex. Functionally, adrenarche provides a source of androgens for the development of axillary and pubic hair before the beginning of puberty. Medulla The adrenal medulla is derived from neural crest cells, which come from the ectoderm layer of the embryo. These cells migrate from their initial position and aggregate in the vicinity of the dorsal aorta, a primitive blood vessel, which activates the differentiation of these cells through the release of proteins known as BMPs. These cells then undergo a second migration from the dorsal aorta to form the adrenal medulla and other organs of the sympathetic nervous system. Cells of the adrenal medulla are called chromaffin cells because they contain granules that stain with chromium salts, a characteristic not present in all sympathetic organs. Glucocorticoids produced in the adrenal cortex were once thought to be responsible for the differentiation of chromaffin cells. More recent research suggests that BMP-4 secreted in adrenal tissue is the main responsible for this, and that glucocorticoids only play a role in the subsequent development of the cells. Clinical significance The normal function of the adrenal gland may be impaired by conditions such as infections, tumors, genetic disorders and autoimmune diseases, or as a side effect of medical therapy. These disorders affect the gland either directly (as with infections or autoimmune diseases) or as a result of the dysregulation of hormone production (as in some types of Cushing's syndrome) leading to an excess or insufficiency of adrenal hormones and the related symptoms. Corticosteroid overproduction Cushing's syndrome Cushing's syndrome is the manifestation of glucocorticoid excess. It can be the result of a prolonged treatment with glucocorticoids or be caused by an underlying disease which produces alterations in the HPA axis or the production of cortisol. Causes can be further classified into ACTH-dependent or ACTH-independent. The most common cause of endogenous Cushing's syndrome is a pituitary adenoma which causes an excessive production of ACTH. The disease produces a wide variety of signs and symptoms which include obesity, diabetes, increased blood pressure, excessive body hair (hirsutism), osteoporosis, depression, and most distinctively, stretch marks in the skin, caused by its progressive thinning. Primary aldosteronism When the zona glomerulosa produces excess aldosterone, the result is primary aldosteronism. Causes for this condition are bilateral hyperplasia (excessive tissue growth) of the glands, or aldosterone-producing adenomas (a condition called Conn's syndrome). Primary aldosteronism produces hypertension and electrolyte imbalance, increasing potassium depletion sodium retention. Adrenal insufficiency Adrenal insufficiency (the deficiency of glucocorticoids) occurs in about 5 in 10,000 in the general population. Diseases classified as primary adrenal insufficiency (including Addison's disease and genetic causes) directly affect the adrenal cortex. If a problem that affects the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis arises outside the gland, it is a secondary adrenal insufficiency. Addison's disease Addison's disease refers to primary hypoadrenalism, which is a deficiency in glucocorticoid and mineralocorticoid production by the adrenal gland. In the Western world, Addison's disease is most commonly an autoimmune condition, in which the body produces antibodies against cells of the adrenal cortex. Worldwide, the disease is more frequently caused by infection, especially from tuberculosis. A distinctive feature of Addison's disease is hyperpigmentation of the skin, which presents with other nonspecific symptoms such as fatigue. A complication seen in untreated Addison's disease and other types of primary adrenal insufficiency is the adrenal crisis, a medical emergency in which low glucocorticoid and mineralocorticoid levels result in hypovolemic shock and symptoms such as vomiting and fever. An adrenal crisis can progressively lead to stupor and coma. The management of adrenal crises includes the application of hydrocortisone injections. Secondary adrenal insufficiency In secondary adrenal insufficiency, a dysfunction of the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis leads to decreased stimulation of the adrenal cortex. Apart from suppression of the axis by glucocorticoid therapy, the most common cause of secondary adrenal insufficiency are tumors that affect the production of adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) by the pituitary gland. This type of adrenal insufficiency usually does not affect the production of mineralocorticoids, which are under regulation of the renin–angiotensin system instead. Congenital adrenal hyperplasia Congenital adrenal hyperplasia is a family of congenital diseases in which mutations of enzymes that produce steroid hormones result in a glucocorticoid deficiency and malfunction of the negative feedback loop of the HPA axis. In the HPA axis, cortisol (a glucocorticoid) inhibits the release of CRH and ACTH, hormones that in turn stimulate corticosteroid synthesis. As cortisol cannot be synthesized, these hormones are released in high quantities and stimulate production of other adrenal steroids instead. The most common form of congenital adrenal hyperplasia is due to 21-hydroxylase deficiency. 21-hydroxylase is necessary for production of both mineralocorticoids and glucocorticoids, but not androgens. Therefore, ACTH stimulation of the adrenal cortex induces the release of excessive amounts of adrenal androgens, which can lead to the development of ambiguous genitalia and secondary sex characteristics. Adrenal tumors Adrenal tumors are commonly found as incidentalomas, unexpected asymptomatic tumors found during medical imaging. They are seen in around 3.4% of CT scans, and in most cases they are benign adenomas. Adrenal carcinomas are very rare, with an incidence of 1 case per million per year. Pheochromocytomas are tumors of the adrenal medulla that arise from chromaffin cells. They can produce a variety of nonspecific symptoms, which include headaches, sweating, anxiety and palpitations. Common signs include hypertension and tachycardia. Surgery, especially adrenal laparoscopy, is the most common treatment for small pheochromocytomas. History Bartolomeo Eustachi, an Italian anatomist, is credited with the first description of the adrenal glands in 1563–4. However, these publications were part of the papal library and did not receive public attention, which was first received with Caspar Bartholin the Elder's illustrations in 1611. The adrenal glands are named for their location relative to the kidneys. The term "adrenal" comes from Latin ad, "near", and ren, "kidney". Similarly, "suprarenal", as termed by Jean Riolan the Younger in 1629, is derived from the Latin supra, "above", and ren, "kidney", as well. The suprarenal nature of the glands was not truly accepted until the 19th century, as anatomists clarified the ductless nature of the glands and their likely secretory role – prior to this, there was some debate as to whether the glands were indeed suprarenal or part of the kidney. One of the most recognized works on the adrenal glands came in 1855 with the publication of On the Constitutional and Local Effects of Disease of the Suprarenal Capsule, by the English physician Thomas Addison. In his monography, Addison described what the French physician George Trousseau would later name Addison's disease, an eponym still used today for a condition of adrenal insufficiency and its related clinical manifestations. In 1894, English physiologists George Oliver and Edward Schafer studied the action of adrenal extracts and observed their pressor effects. In the following decades several physicians experimented with extracts from the adrenal cortex to treat Addison's disease. Edward Calvin Kendall, Philip Hench and Tadeusz Reichstein were then awarded the 1950 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries on the structure and effects of the adrenal hormones. See also Adrenopause Adrenochrome List of distinct cell types in the adult human body References External links Adrenal gland at the Human Protein Atlas Adrenal gland histology – "Adrenal Gland" – "Posterior Abdominal Wall: The Retroperitoneal Fat and Suprarenal Glands" Adrenal Gland, from Colorado State University Adrenaline

2299

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A360media

A360media

A360 Media, LLC (branded a360media), formerly American Media, Inc. (AMI), is an American publisher of magazines, supermarket tabloids, and books based in New York City. Originally affiliated with only the National Enquirer, the media company's holdings expanded considerably in the 1990s and 2000s. In November 2010, American Media filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection due to debts of nearly $1 billion, but has continued to buy and sell magazine brands since then. AMI has been in the news affiliated with accusations of catch and kill operations. On December 12, 2018, the U.S. Attorney's Office reported that AMI admitted to paying $150,000 to Karen McDougal in concert with Donald Trump's presidential campaign for the sole purpose of preventing damaging allegations prior to the 2016 US presidential election. According to its September 2018 non-prosecution agreement with Southern District of New York federal prosecutors, AMI "shall commit no crimes whatsoever" for three years, otherwise "A.M.I. shall thereafter be subject to prosecution for any federal criminal violation of which this office has knowledge." On April 10, 2019, Chatham Asset Management, which controls 80 percent of AMI's stock, forced AMI to sell the National Enquirer. This came after Chatham owner Anthony Melchiorre, who AMI has also relied on for survival, expressed dismay over the tabloid magazine's recent scandals involving hush money assistance to U.S. president Donald Trump's 2016 campaign and blackmail of Jeff Bezos. On April 18, 2019, AMI agreed to sell not only the National Enquirer, but two of its other publications, Globe and National Examiner, to Hudson News Distributors. In August 2020, Chatham Asset Management, AMI's owning holding company, announced it would merge AMI with Accelerate 360, a wholesale distribution company it also owned. As part of the merger, AMI was officially renamed A360 on October 1. In February 2023, A360media agreed to sell the National Enquirer to VVIP Ventures, a joint venture of the digital media company Vinco Ventures and a new company set up for the purchase, Icon Publishing. As of July 7th, 2023 the deal has collapsed as reported by The Wall Street Journal. History The modern American Media came into being after Generoso Pope Jr., longtime owner of the National Enquirer, died in 1988, and his tabloids came under new ownership. American tabloids began consolidating in 1990, when American Media bought Star from Rupert Murdoch. The purchase of Globe Communications (owner of the Globe and the National Examiner) followed nine years later. Roger Altman, through Evercore Partners, bought a controlling stake in American Media in 1999. American Media is not to be confused with American Media Distribution, the international news coverage firm. American Media's former corporate headquarters in Boca Raton, Florida, figured prominently in news headlines in late 2001, after an anthrax attack was perpetrated on the company and other media outlets. Since then the corporate headquarters have moved to New York City at 1 Park Avenue in Manhattan, before moving to the Financial District to the former JP Morgan Chase headquarters at 4 New York Plaza. That building was severely damaged by Hurricane Sandy but reopened in February 2013. AMI continued to expand after it bought Joe Weider's Weider Publications in 2002. Joe Weider continued to manage control of his magazines under AMI's Weider Publications subsidiary until his death in March 2013. American Media also owns Distribution Services, an in-store magazine merchandising company. In fall 2002, it launched the book-publishing imprint, AMI Books. 2010s: Bankruptcy and continued acquisitions In 2009, American Media was taken over by its bondholders to keep it out of bankruptcy. In November 2010, American Media filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection due to nearly $1 billion in debt, and assets of less than $50,000. Its subsidiary, American Media Operations Inc., listed assets of $100 to $500 million and debt of over $1 billion. It exited in December. In May 2014, American Media announced a decision to shift the headquarters of the National Enquirer from Florida, where it had been located since 1971, back to New York City, where it originally began as The New York Enquirer in 1926. In August 2014, American Media was acquired by Chatham Asset Management and Omega Charitable Partnership. In 2015, American Media sold Shape, Natural Health, and Fit Pregnancy to Meredith. In 2016, Pecker revealed to the Toronto Star that AMI now relied on support from Chatham Asset Management and its owner Anthony Melchiorre. The $4 billion hedge fund owns 80 percent of AMI's stock. In March 2017, American Media acquired Us Weekly from Wenner Media for a reported $100 million. Three months later, in June 2017, American Media also acquired Men's Journal from Wenner Media. In June 2018, American Media acquired 13 brands from Bauer Media Group including In Touch Weekly, Life & Style and Closer to add to their celebrity portfolio. They also acquired Bauer Media's kids group including J-14 and Girl's World. In February 2019, American Media acquired TEN's adventure sports properties. In April 2019, the National Enquirer was reported to be up for sale and likely to be sold within days. The company stated that it had shifted its emphasis away from tabloids to its "glossy" magazines such as Us Weekly and Men's Journal. This came following pressure from Chatham owner Anthony Melchiorre, who expressed disapproval of the Enquirer's style of journalism. On April 18, 2019, AMI accepted an offer from Hudson News Distributors head James Cohen and agreed to sell not only the National Enquirer, but also Globe and The Examiner to Hudson News Distributors for $100 million. At the time the sales were announced, AMI was approximately $355 million in debt. In 2022, A360 acquired single issue magazine publisher Centennial Media. Also in 2022, A360 sold Men's Journal and the Adventure Sports Network properties to The Arena Group. Checkbook journalism controversy On April 22, 2024, Pecker acknowledged that the National Enquirer engaged in a practice of checkbook journalism which involved paying sources for stories, and that he "gave a number to the editors that they could not spend more than $10,000" and he had final say over celebrity stories. He also acnowledged that "checkbook journalism" served as part of the editorial philosophy he followed when ran American Media Inc. Pecker stated that he believed that “The only thing that is important is the cover of a magazine.” "Catch-and-kill" scandals related to Donald Trump Allegation about Trump Tower maid In late 2015, AMI paid $30,000 to Dino Sajudin, a doorman at Trump Tower, to obtain the rights to his story in which he alleged Donald Trump had an affair in the 1980s that resulted in the birth of a child. Sajudin in April 2018 identified the woman as Trump's former housekeeper. AMI reporters were given the names of the woman and the alleged child, while Sajudin passed a lie detector test when testifying that he had heard the story from others. Shortly after the payment was made, Pecker ordered the reporters to drop the story. In April 2018, AMI chief content officer Dylan Howard denied the story was "spiked" in a so-called "catch and kill" operation, insisting that AMI did not run the story because Sajudin's story lacked credibility. On August 24, 2018, after AMI had released Sajudin from the contract, CNN obtained a copy of it and published excerpts. The contract instructed Sajudin to provide "information regarding Donald Trump's illegitimate child," but did not contain further specifics of Sajudin's story. In April 2024, Pecker testified in Trump's New York criminal trial how the story was his first "catch-and-kill" target during Trump's campaign, with Sajudin also attempting to claim that the child was a girl. A National Enquirer editor who discovered the allegation originally did not know Sajudin's name, but just as a doorman who had worked at Trump. Cohen was the one who discovered the names of the doorman and the alleged maid. Though Cohen at first claimed the story was not true, the National Enquirer acquired the story for $30,000, which was noticeably higher than the usual $10,000 they paid for stories. Karen McDougal In 2016, AMI paid Playboy model Karen McDougal $150,000 for exclusive rights to her allegations of a ten-month affair with Donald Trump—which she claimed happened in 2006–2007, when he was already married to Melania—but AMI never published the story. AMI publicly acknowledged having made the payment after The Wall Street Journal revealed it days before the 2016 presidential election, but AMI denied that its purpose had been to "kill damaging stories about" Trump; instead, AMI claimed it had paid only for "exclusive life rights to any relationship [McDougal] has had with a then-married man" and "two years' worth of her fitness columns and magazine covers." In March 2018, McDougal filed a lawsuit to invalidate the non-disclosure agreement she had with AMI. A month later, AMI settled with McDougal, allowing her to speak about the alleged affair. In August 2018, it was reported that AMI CEO/chairman David Pecker and AMI chief content officer Dylan Howard were granted witness immunity in exchange for their testimony regarding hush money payments made by Donald Trump's then-personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, in an attempt to influence the 2016 presidential election. On December 12, 2018, the U.S. Attorney's office announced its agreement with AMI. "AMI admitted that it made the $150,000 payment in concert with a candidate's presidential campaign," the press release said, so that Karen McDougal wouldn't "publicize damaging allegations about the candidate before the 2016 presidential election. AMI further admitted that its principal purpose in making the payment was to suppress the woman's story so as to prevent it from influencing the election." As a result of this agreement, AMI did not face prosecution and agreed to provide extensive assistance to prosecutors about the involvement of Trump and other politicians with the company. The same press release also revealed that Michael Cohen had been sentenced to three years in prison for various crimes, including the $150,000 campaign finance violation—the facilitation of the payment to McDougal—to which he pled guilty on August 21, 2018. AMI agreed to pay the Federal Election Commission a $187,500 fine in June 2021. In April 2024, Pecker testified how he, Howard and Cohen conspired to get the National Enquirer to acquire McDougal's story. Pecker stated that after Howard found out about McDougal's allegation, he sent Howard to California to interview her. During the time Howard met with McDougal, he conversed with Cohen about the situation. Ultimately, McDougal agreed to sell her story to the National Enquirer for $150,000. Jeff Bezos blackmail In January 2019, the National Enquirer broke a story about the extramarital affair of Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos with Lauren Sánchez. Bezos began investigating how and why the information had been leaked to the National Enquirer. President Trump has long expressed displeasure with Bezos, and Trump's irritation may have increased due to the Washington Post's critical coverage of the murder (and the subsequent cover-up) of one of its reporters, Jamal Khashoggi. This, Bezos suspects, may have been the political motivation for someone to leak his affair to the tabloid. On February 7, 2019, Bezos shared emails that he had received the previous day in which AMI sought a public statement from him and his lawyer "affirming that they have no knowledge or basis for suggesting that AM's coverage [of the sexual affair] was politically motivated or influenced by political forces, and an agreement that they will cease referring to such a possibility." AMI chief content officer Dylan Howard and his lawyer Jon Fine threatened Bezos, saying that if Bezos did not promptly meet their demands, AMI would publish selfies and sexts sent between Bezos and his girlfriend. Bezos wrote that he would refuse to make this "specific lie" or to otherwise participate in this blackmail bargain that "no real journalists [would] ever propose." "Of course I don't want personal photos published," Bezos added, but he said he chooses to "stand up, roll this log over, and see what crawls out." That same day, The Washington Post published an article on the matter, quoting a former federal prosecutor who speculated that this news could undermine AMI's recent deal with the government. If prosecutors decide they must file new criminal charges against AMI, the government may not be able "to continue to use them [AMI] to assist other ongoing investigations," said Robert Mintz. Lauren Sanchez's brother, Michael Sanchez, an ardent Trump supporter, stated he was told by multiple AMI employees that the Enquirer set out to do "a takedown to make Trump happy" and The Daily Beast reported seeing documents showing that Sanchez believed the Bezos story was run with "President Trump's knowledge and appreciation." Publications Current Animal Tales Closer First for Women Girls' World In Touch J-14 Life & Style Muscle & Fitness Muscle & Fitness Hers OK! (US) Puzzle Fun Quizfest RadarOnline.com Star Us Weekly Woman's World Former Autoworld Weekly Bike Country Music Fit Pregnancy Flex Globe Men's Fitness Men's Journal Nash Country Weekly National Enquirer National Examiner Natural Health Pixie Powder Shape Snowboarder Magazine Soap Opera Digest Soaps in Depth Soap Opera Weekly Stallone Sun Surfer Teen Boss Transworld Skateboarding Weekly World News Divisions AMI Books AMI Entertainment Group Distribution Services, Inc. Dew Tour See also 2017–18 United States political sexual scandals Stormy Daniels–Donald Trump scandal Death of Robert Stevens References External links Tabloid Company, Aiding Trump Campaign, May Have Crossed Line Into Politics Publishing companies established in 1936 Magazine publishing companies of the United States Newspaper companies of the United States Privately held companies based in New York City Companies that filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2010 1936 establishments in New York (state) Publishing companies based in New York City

2304

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint%20Titus

Saint Titus

Titus ( ; ; Títos) was an early Christian missionary and church leader, a companion and disciple of Paul the Apostle, mentioned in several of the Pauline epistles including the Epistle to Titus. He is believed to be a Gentile converted to Christianity by Paul and, according to tradition, he was consecrated as Bishop of the Island of Crete. Titus brought a fundraising letter from Paul to Corinth, to collect for the poor in Jerusalem. According to Jerome, Titus was the amanuensis of this epistle (2 Corinthians). Later, on Crete, Titus appointed presbyters (elders) in every city and remained there into his old age, dying in Gortyna. Life Titus was a Greek, who may have studied Greek philosophy and poetry in his early years. He seems to have been converted by Paul, whereupon he served as Paul's secretary and interpreter. In the year 48 or 49 CE, Titus accompanied Paul to the council held at Jerusalem, on the subject of the Mosaic rites. In the fall of 55 or 56 CE, Paul, as he himself departed from Asia, sent Titus from Ephesus to Corinth, with full commission to remedy the fallout precipitated by Timothy's delivery of 1 Corinthians and Paul's "Painful Visit", particularly a significant personal offense and challenge to Paul's authority by one unnamed individual. During this journey, Titus served as the courier for what is commonly known as the "Severe Letter", a Pauline missive that has been lost but is referred to in 2 Corinthians. After success on this mission, Titus journeyed north and met Paul in Macedonia. There the apostle, overjoyed by Titus' success, wrote 2 Corinthians. Titus then returned to Corinth with a larger entourage, carrying 2 Corinthians with him. Paul joined Titus in Corinth later. From Corinth, Paul then sent Titus to organize the collections of alms for the Christians at Jerusalem. Titus was therefore a troubleshooter, peacemaker, administrator, and missionary. Early church tradition holds that Paul, after his release from his first imprisonment in Rome, stopped at the island of Crete to preach. Due to the needs of other churches, requiring his presence elsewhere, he ordained his disciple Titus as bishop of that island, and left him to finish the work he had started. Chrysostom says that this is an indication of the esteem Paul held for Titus. Paul summoned Titus from Crete to join him at Nicopolis in Epirus. Later, Titus traveled to Dalmatia. The New Testament does not record his death. It has been argued that the name "Titus" in 2 Corinthians and Galatians is nothing more than an informal name used by Timothy, implied already by the fact that even though both are said to be long-term close companions of Paul, they never appear in common scenes. The theory proposes that a number of passages—1 Cor. 4:17, 16.10; 2 Cor. 2:13, 7:6, 13–14, 12:18; and Acts 19.22—all refer to the same journey of a single individual, Titus-Timothy. 2 Timothy seems to dispute this, by claiming that Titus has gone to Dalmatia. The fact that Paul made a point of circumcising Timothy but refused to circumcise Titus would indicate that they are different men, although certain manuscripts of Galatians have been taken (by Marius Victorinus, for example) to indicate that Paul did circumcise Titus. Veneration The feast day of Titus was not included in the Tridentine calendar. When added in 1854, it was assigned to 6 February. In 1969, the Catholic Church assigned the feast to 26 January so as to celebrate the two disciples of Paul, Titus and Timothy, the day after the feast of the Conversion of St. Paul. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America celebrates these two, together with Silas, on the same date while he is honored on the calendars of the Church of England and Episcopal Church (with Timothy) on 26 January. The Eastern Orthodox Church commemorates Titus on 25 August and on 4 January. His relics, now consisting of only his skull, are venerated in the Church of St. Titus, Heraklion, Crete, to which it was returned in 1966 after being removed to Venice during the Turkish occupation. Titus is the patron saint of the United States Army Chaplain Corps. The Corps has established the Order of Titus Award, described by the Department of Defense: See also Epistle of Pseudo-Titus References Seventy disciples 1st-century births 107 deaths People in the Pauline epistles 1st-century bishops in the Roman Empire Christian saints from the New Testament Saints of Roman Crete Military saints Anglican saints

2308

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actinide

Actinide

The actinide () or actinoid () series encompasses at least the 14 metallic chemical elements in the 5f series, with atomic numbers from 89 to 102, actinium through nobelium. (Number 103, lawrencium, is sometimes also included despite being part of the 6d transition series.) The actinide series derives its name from the first element in the series, actinium. The informal chemical symbol An is used in general discussions of actinide chemistry to refer to any actinide. The 1985 IUPAC Red Book recommends that actinoid be used rather than actinide, since the suffix -ide normally indicates a negative ion. However, owing to widespread current use, actinide is still allowed. Since actinoid literally means actinium-like (cf. humanoid or android), it has been argued for semantic reasons that actinium cannot logically be an actinoid, but IUPAC acknowledges its inclusion based on common usage. All the actinides are f-block elements. Lawrencium is sometimes considered one as well, despite being a d-block element and a transition metal. The series mostly corresponds to the filling of the 5f electron shell, although as isolated atoms in the ground state many have anomalous configurations involving the filling of the 6d shell due to interelectronic repulsion. In comparison with the lanthanides, also mostly f-block elements, the actinides show much more variable valence. They all have very large atomic and ionic radii and exhibit an unusually large range of physical properties. While actinium and the late actinides (from curium onwards) behave similarly to the lanthanides, the elements thorium, protactinium, and uranium are much more similar to transition metals in their chemistry, with neptunium, plutonium, and americium occupying an intermediate position. All actinides are radioactive and release energy upon radioactive decay; naturally occurring uranium and thorium, and synthetically produced plutonium are the most abundant actinides on Earth. These have been used in nuclear reactors, and uranium and plutonium are critical elements of nuclear weapons. Uranium and thorium also have diverse current or historical uses, and americium is used in the ionization chambers of most modern smoke detectors. Of the actinides, primordial thorium and uranium occur naturally in substantial quantities. The radioactive decay of uranium produces transient amounts of actinium and protactinium, and atoms of neptunium and plutonium are occasionally produced from transmutation reactions in uranium ores. The other actinides are purely synthetic elements. Nuclear weapons tests have released at least six actinides heavier than plutonium into the environment; analysis of debris from a 1952 hydrogen bomb explosion showed the presence of americium, curium, berkelium, californium, einsteinium and fermium. In presentations of the periodic table, the f-block elements are customarily shown as two additional rows below the main body of the table. This convention is entirely a matter of aesthetics and formatting practicality; a rarely used wide-formatted periodic table inserts the 4f and 5f series in their proper places, as parts of the table's sixth and seventh rows (periods). Actinides Discovery, isolation and synthesis Like the lanthanides, the actinides form a family of elements with similar properties. Within the actinides, there are two overlapping groups: transuranium elements, which follow uranium in the periodic table; and transplutonium elements, which follow plutonium. Compared to the lanthanides, which (except for promethium) are found in nature in appreciable quantities, most actinides are rare. Most do not occur in nature, and of those that do, only thorium and uranium do so in more than trace quantities. The most abundant or easily synthesized actinides are uranium and thorium, followed by plutonium, americium, actinium, protactinium, neptunium, and curium. The existence of transuranium elements was suggested in 1934 by Enrico Fermi, based on his experiments. However, even though four actinides were known by that time, it was not yet understood that they formed a family similar to lanthanides. The prevailing view that dominated early research into transuranics was that they were regular elements in the 7th period, with thorium, protactinium and uranium corresponding to 6th-period hafnium, tantalum and tungsten, respectively. Synthesis of transuranics gradually undermined this point of view. By 1944, an observation that curium failed to exhibit oxidation states above 4 (whereas its supposed 6th period homolog, platinum, can reach oxidation state of 6) prompted Glenn Seaborg to formulate an "actinide hypothesis". Studies of known actinides and discoveries of further transuranic elements provided more data in support of this position, but the phrase "actinide hypothesis" (the implication being that a "hypothesis" is something that has not been decisively proven) remained in active use by scientists through the late 1950s. At present, there are two major methods of producing isotopes of transplutonium elements: (1) irradiation of the lighter elements with neutrons; (2) irradiation with accelerated charged particles. The first method is more important for applications, as only neutron irradiation using nuclear reactors allows the production of sizeable amounts of synthetic actinides; however, it is limited to relatively light elements. The advantage of the second method is that elements heavier than plutonium, as well as neutron-deficient isotopes, can be obtained, which are not formed during neutron irradiation. In 1962–1966, there were attempts in the United States to produce transplutonium isotopes using a series of six underground nuclear explosions. Small samples of rock were extracted from the blast area immediately after the test to study the explosion products, but no isotopes with mass number greater than 257 could be detected, despite predictions that such isotopes would have relatively long half-lives of α-decay. This non-observation was attributed to spontaneous fission owing to the large speed of the products and to other decay channels, such as neutron emission and nuclear fission. From actinium to uranium Uranium and thorium were the first actinides discovered. Uranium was identified in 1789 by the German chemist Martin Heinrich Klaproth in pitchblende ore. He named it after the planet Uranus, which had been discovered eight years earlier. Klaproth was able to precipitate a yellow compound (likely sodium diuranate) by dissolving pitchblende in nitric acid and neutralizing the solution with sodium hydroxide. He then reduced the obtained yellow powder with charcoal, and extracted a black substance that he mistook for metal. Sixty years later, the French scientist Eugène-Melchior Péligot identified it as uranium oxide. He also isolated the first sample of uranium metal by heating uranium tetrachloride with metallic potassium. The atomic mass of uranium was then calculated as 120, but Dmitri Mendeleev in 1872 corrected it to 240 using his periodicity laws. This value was confirmed experimentally in 1882 by K. Zimmerman. Thorium oxide was discovered by Friedrich Wöhler in the mineral thorianite, which was found in Norway (1827). Jöns Jacob Berzelius characterized this material in more detail in 1828. By reduction of thorium tetrachloride with potassium, he isolated the metal and named it thorium after the Norse god of thunder and lightning Thor. The same isolation method was later used by Péligot for uranium. Actinium was discovered in 1899 by André-Louis Debierne, an assistant of Marie Curie, in the pitchblende waste left after removal of radium and polonium. He described the substance (in 1899) as similar to titanium and (in 1900) as similar to thorium. The discovery of actinium by Debierne was however questioned in 1971 and 2000, arguing that Debierne's publications in 1904 contradicted his earlier work of 1899–1900. This view instead credits the 1902 work of Friedrich Oskar Giesel, who discovered a radioactive element named emanium that behaved similarly to lanthanum. The name actinium comes from the , meaning beam or ray. This metal was discovered not by its own radiation but by the radiation of the daughter products. Owing to the close similarity of actinium and lanthanum and low abundance, pure actinium could only be produced in 1950. The term actinide was probably introduced by Victor Goldschmidt in 1937. Protactinium was possibly isolated in 1900 by William Crookes. It was first identified in 1913, when Kasimir Fajans and Oswald Helmuth Göhring encountered the short-lived isotope 234mPa (half-life 1.17 minutes) during their studies of the 238U decay chain. They named the new element brevium (from Latin brevis meaning brief); the name was changed to protoactinium (from Greek πρῶτος + ἀκτίς meaning "first beam element") in 1918 when two groups of scientists, led by the Austrian Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn of Germany and Frederick Soddy and John Arnold Cranston of Great Britain, independently discovered the much longer-lived 231Pa. The name was shortened to protactinium in 1949. This element was little characterized until 1960, when Alfred Maddock and his co-workers in the U.K. isolated 130 grams of protactinium from 60 tonnes of waste left after extraction of uranium from its ore. Neptunium and above Neptunium (named for the planet Neptune, the next planet out from Uranus, after which uranium was named) was discovered by Edwin McMillan and Philip H. Abelson in 1940 in Berkeley, California. They produced the 239Np isotope (half-life 2.4 days) by bombarding uranium with slow neutrons. It was the first transuranium element produced synthetically. Transuranium elements do not occur in sizeable quantities in nature and are commonly synthesized via nuclear reactions conducted with nuclear reactors. For example, under irradiation with reactor neutrons, uranium-238 partially converts to plutonium-239: This synthesis reaction was used by Fermi and his collaborators in their design of the reactors located at the Hanford Site, which produced significant amounts of plutonium-239 for the nuclear weapons of the Manhattan Project and the United States' post-war nuclear arsenal. Actinides with the highest mass numbers are synthesized by bombarding uranium, plutonium, curium and californium with ions of nitrogen, oxygen, carbon, neon or boron in a particle accelerator. Thus nobelium was produced by bombarding uranium-238 with neon-22 as _{92}^{238}U + _{10}^{22}Ne -> _{102}^{256}No + 4_0^1n. The first isotopes of transplutonium elements, americium-241 and curium-242, were synthesized in 1944 by Glenn T. Seaborg, Ralph A. James and Albert Ghiorso. Curium-242 was obtained by bombarding plutonium-239 with 32-MeV α-particles: _{94}^{239}Pu + _2^4He -> _{96}^{242}Cm + _0^1n. The americium-241 and curium-242 isotopes also were produced by irradiating plutonium in a nuclear reactor. The latter element was named after Marie Curie and her husband Pierre who are noted for discovering radium and for their work in radioactivity. Bombarding curium-242 with α-particles resulted in an isotope of californium 245Cf in 1950, and a similar procedure yielded berkelium-243 from americium-241 in 1949. The new elements were named after Berkeley, California, by analogy with its lanthanide homologue terbium, which was named after the village of Ytterby in Sweden. In 1945, B. B. Cunningham obtained the first bulk chemical compound of a transplutonium element, namely americium hydroxide. Over the few years, milligram quantities of americium and microgram amounts of curium were accumulated that allowed production of isotopes of berkelium and californium. Sizeable amounts of these elements were produced in 1958, and the first californium compound (0.3 μg of CfOCl) was obtained in 1960 by B. B. Cunningham and J. C. Wallmann. Einsteinium and fermium were identified in 1952–1953 in the fallout from the "Ivy Mike" nuclear test (1 November 1952), the first successful test of a hydrogen bomb. Instantaneous exposure of uranium-238 to a large neutron flux resulting from the explosion produced heavy isotopes of uranium, including uranium-253 and uranium-255, and their β-decay yielded einsteinium-253 and fermium-255. The discovery of the new elements and the new data on neutron capture were initially kept secret on the orders of the US military until 1955 due to Cold War tensions. Nevertheless, the Berkeley team were able to prepare einsteinium and fermium by civilian means, through the neutron bombardment of plutonium-239, and published this work in 1954 with the disclaimer that it was not the first studies that had been carried out on those elements. The "Ivy Mike" studies were declassified and published in 1955. The first significant (submicrogram) amounts of einsteinium were produced in 1961 by Cunningham and colleagues, but this has not been done for fermium yet. The first isotope of mendelevium, 256Md (half-life 87 min), was synthesized by Albert Ghiorso, Glenn T. Seaborg, Gregory Robert Choppin, Bernard G. Harvey and Stanley Gerald Thompson when they bombarded an 253Es target with alpha particles in the 60-inch cyclotron of Berkeley Radiation Laboratory; this was the first isotope of any element to be synthesized one atom at a time. There were several attempts to obtain isotopes of nobelium by Swedish (1957) and American (1958) groups, but the first reliable result was the synthesis of 256No by the Russian group of Georgy Flyorov in 1965, as acknowledged by the IUPAC in 1992. In their experiments, Flyorov et al. bombarded uranium-238 with neon-22. In 1961, Ghiorso et al. obtained the first isotope of lawrencium by irradiating californium (mostly californium-252) with boron-10 and boron-11 ions. The mass number of this isotope was not clearly established (possibly 258 or 259) at the time. In 1965, 256Lr was synthesized by Flyorov et al. from 243Am and 18O. Thus IUPAC recognized the nuclear physics teams at Dubna and Berkeley as the co-discoverers of lawrencium. Isotopes 33 isotopes of actinium and eight excited isomeric states of some of its nuclides are known, ranging in mass number from 204 to 236. Three isotopes, 225Ac, 227Ac and 228Ac, were found in nature and the others were produced in the laboratory; only the three natural isotopes are used in applications. Actinium-225 is a member of the radioactive neptunium series; it was first discovered in 1947 as a decay product of uranium-233 and it is an α-emitter with a half-life of 10 days. Actinium-225 is less available than actinium-228, but is more promising in radiotracer applications. Actinium-227 (half-life 21.77 years) occurs in all uranium ores, but in small quantities. One gram of uranium (in radioactive equilibrium) contains only 2 gram of 227Ac. Actinium-228 is a member of the radioactive thorium series formed by the decay of 228Ra; it is a β− emitter with a half-life of 6.15 hours. In one tonne of thorium there is 5 gram of 228Ac. It was discovered by Otto Hahn in 1906. There are 32 known isotopes of thorium ranging in mass number from 207 to 238. Of these, the longest-lived is 232Th, whose half-life of means that it still exists in nature as a primordial nuclide. The next longest-lived is 230Th, an intermediate decay product of 238U with a half-life of 75,400 years. Several other thorium isotopes have half-lives over a day; all of these are also transient in the decay chains of 232Th, 235U, and 238U. 28 isotopes of protactinium are known with mass numbers 212–239 as well as three excited isomeric states. Only 231Pa and 234Pa have been found in nature. All the isotopes have short lifetimes, except for protactinium-231 (half-life 32,760 years). The most important isotopes are 231Pa and 233Pa, which is an intermediate product in obtaining uranium-233 and is the most affordable among artificial isotopes of protactinium. 233Pa has convenient half-life and energy of γ-radiation, and thus was used in most studies of protactinium chemistry. Protactinium-233 is a β-emitter with a half-life of 26.97 days. There are 27 known isotopes of uranium, having mass numbers 215–242 (except 220). Three of them, 234U, 235U and 238U, are present in appreciable quantities in nature. Among others, the most important is 233U, which is a final product of transformation of 232Th irradiated by slow neutrons. 233U has a much higher fission efficiency by low-energy (thermal) neutrons, compared e.g. with 235U. Most uranium chemistry studies were carried out on uranium-238 owing to its long half-life of 4.4 years. There are 25 isotopes of neptunium with mass numbers 219–244 (except 221); they are all highly radioactive. The most popular among scientists are long-lived 237Np (t1/2 = 2.20 years) and short-lived 239Np, 238Np (t1/2 ~ 2 days). There are 20 known isotopes of plutonium, having mass numbers 228–247. The most stable isotope of plutonium is 244Pu with half-life of 8.13 years. Eighteen isotopes of americium are known with mass numbers from 229 to 247 (with the exception of 231). The most important are 241Am and 243Am, which are alpha-emitters and also emit soft, but intense γ-rays; both of them can be obtained in an isotopically pure form. Chemical properties of americium were first studied with 241Am, but later shifted to 243Am, which is almost 20 times less radioactive. The disadvantage of 243Am is production of the short-lived daughter isotope 239Np, which has to be considered in the data analysis. Among 19 isotopes of curium, ranging in mass number from 233 to 251, the most accessible are 242Cm and 244Cm; they are α-emitters, but with much shorter lifetime than the americium isotopes. These isotopes emit almost no γ-radiation, but undergo spontaneous fission with the associated emission of neutrons. More long-lived isotopes of curium (245–248Cm, all α-emitters) are formed as a mixture during neutron irradiation of plutonium or americium. Upon short irradiation, this mixture is dominated by 246Cm, and then 248Cm begins to accumulate. Both of these isotopes, especially 248Cm, have a longer half-life (3.48 years) and are much more convenient for carrying out chemical research than 242Cm and 244Cm, but they also have a rather high rate of spontaneous fission. 247Cm has the longest lifetime among isotopes of curium (1.56 years), but is not formed in large quantities because of the strong fission induced by thermal neutrons. Seventeen isotopes of berkelium have been identified with mass numbers 233, 234, 236, 238, and 240–252. Only 249Bk is available in large quantities; it has a relatively short half-life of 330 days and emits mostly soft β-particles, which are inconvenient for detection. Its alpha radiation is rather weak (1.45% with respect to β-radiation), but is sometimes used to detect this isotope. 247Bk is an alpha-emitter with a long half-life of 1,380 years, but it is hard to obtain in appreciable quantities; it is not formed upon neutron irradiation of plutonium because β-decay of curium isotopes with mass number below 248 is not known. (247Cm would actually release energy by β-decaying to 247Bk, but this has never been seen.) The 20 isotopes of californium with mass numbers 237–256 are formed in nuclear reactors; californium-253 is a β-emitter and the rest are α-emitters. The isotopes with even mass numbers (250Cf, 252Cf and 254Cf) have a high rate of spontaneous fission, especially 254Cf of which 99.7% decays by spontaneous fission. Californium-249 has a relatively long half-life (352 years), weak spontaneous fission and strong γ-emission that facilitates its identification. 249Cf is not formed in large quantities in a nuclear reactor because of the slow β-decay of the parent isotope 249Bk and a large cross section of interaction with neutrons, but it can be accumulated in the isotopically pure form as the β-decay product of (pre-selected) 249Bk. Californium produced by reactor-irradiation of plutonium mostly consists of 250Cf and 252Cf, the latter being predominant for large neutron fluences, and its study is hindered by the strong neutron radiation. Among the 18 known isotopes of einsteinium with mass numbers from 240 to 257, the most affordable is 253Es. It is an α-emitter with a half-life of 20.47 days, a relatively weak γ-emission and small spontaneous fission rate as compared with the isotopes of californium. Prolonged neutron irradiation also produces a long-lived isotope 254Es (t1/2 = 275.5 days). Twenty isotopes of fermium are known with mass numbers of 241–260. 254Fm, 255Fm and 256Fm are α-emitters with a short half-life (hours), which can be isolated in significant amounts. 257Fm (t1/2 = 100 days) can accumulate upon prolonged and strong irradiation. All these isotopes are characterized by high rates of spontaneous fission. Among the 17 known isotopes of mendelevium (mass numbers from 244 to 260), the most studied is 256Md, which mainly decays through electron capture (α-radiation is ≈10%) with a half-life of 77 minutes. Another alpha emitter, 258Md, has a half-life of 53 days. Both these isotopes are produced from rare einsteinium (253Es and 255Es respectively), that therefore limits their availability. Long-lived isotopes of nobelium and isotopes of lawrencium (and of heavier elements) have relatively short half-lives. For nobelium, 13 isotopes are known, with mass numbers 249–260 and 262. The chemical properties of nobelium and lawrencium were studied with 255No (t1/2 = 3 min) and 256Lr (t1/2 = 35 s). The longest-lived nobelium isotope, 259No, has a half-life of approximately 1 hour. Lawrencium has 14 known isotopes with mass numbers 251–262, 264, and 266. The most stable of them is 266Lr with a half life of 11 hours. Among all of these, the only isotopes that occur in sufficient quantities in nature to be detected in anything more than traces and have a measurable contribution to the atomic weights of the actinides are the primordial 232Th, 235U, and 238U, and three long-lived decay products of natural uranium, 230Th, 231Pa, and 234U. Natural thorium consists of 0.02(2)% 230Th and 99.98(2)% 232Th; natural protactinium consists of 100% 231Pa; and natural uranium consists of 0.0054(5)% 234U, 0.7204(6)% 235U, and 99.2742(10)% 238U. Formation in nuclear reactors The figure buildup of actinides is a table of nuclides with the number of neutrons on the horizontal axis (isotopes) and the number of protons on the vertical axis (elements). The red dot divides the nuclides in two groups, so the figure is more compact. Each nuclide is represented by a square with the mass number of the element and its half-life. Naturally existing actinide isotopes (Th, U) are marked with a bold border, alpha emitters have a yellow colour, and beta emitters have a blue colour. Pink indicates electron capture (236Np), whereas white stands for a long-lasting metastable state (242Am). The formation of actinide nuclides is primarily characterised by: Neutron capture reactions (n,γ), which are represented in the figure by a short right arrow. The (n,2n) reactions and the less frequently occurring (γ,n) reactions are also taken into account, both of which are marked by a short left arrow. Even more rarely and only triggered by fast neutrons, the (n,3n) reaction occurs, which is represented in the figure with one example, marked by a long left arrow. In addition to these neutron- or gamma-induced nuclear reactions, the radioactive conversion of actinide nuclides also affects the nuclide inventory in a reactor. These decay types are marked in the figure by diagonal arrows. The beta-minus decay, marked with an arrow pointing up-left, plays a major role for the balance of the particle densities of the nuclides. Nuclides decaying by positron emission (beta-plus decay) or electron capture (ϵ) do not occur in a nuclear reactor except as products of knockout reactions; their decays are marked with arrows pointing down-right. Due to the long half-lives of the given nuclides, alpha decay plays almost no role in the formation and decay of the actinides in a power reactor, as the residence time of the nuclear fuel in the reactor core is rather short (a few years). Exceptions are the two relatively short-lived nuclides 242Cm (T1/2 = 163 d) and 236Pu (T1/2 = 2.9 y). Only for these two cases, the α decay is marked on the nuclide map by a long arrow pointing down-left. A few long-lived actinide isotopes, such as 244Pu and 250Cm, cannot be produced in reactors because neutron capture does not happen quickly enough to bypass the short-lived beta-decaying nuclides 243Pu and 249Cm; they can however be generated in nuclear explosions, which have much higher neutron fluxes. Distribution in nature Thorium and uranium are the most abundant actinides in nature with the respective mass concentrations of 16 ppm and 4 ppm. Uranium mostly occurs in the Earth's crust as a mixture of its oxides in the mineral uraninite, which is also called pitchblende because of its black color. There are several dozens of other uranium minerals such as carnotite (KUO2VO4·3H2O) and autunite (Ca(UO2)2(PO4)2·nH2O). The isotopic composition of natural uranium is 238U (relative abundance 99.2742%), 235U (0.7204%) and 234U (0.0054%); of these 238U has the largest half-life of 4.51 years. The worldwide production of uranium in 2009 amounted to 50,572 tonnes, of which 27.3% was mined in Kazakhstan. Other important uranium mining countries are Canada (20.1%), Australia (15.7%), Namibia (9.1%), Russia (7.0%), and Niger (6.4%). The most abundant thorium minerals are thorianite (), thorite () and monazite, (). Most thorium minerals contain uranium and vice versa; and they all have significant fraction of lanthanides. Rich deposits of thorium minerals are located in the United States (440,000 tonnes), Australia and India (~300,000 tonnes each) and Canada (~100,000 tonnes). The abundance of actinium in the Earth's crust is only about 5%. Actinium is mostly present in uranium-containing, but also in other minerals, though in much smaller quantities. The content of actinium in most natural objects corresponds to the isotopic equilibrium of parent isotope 235U, and it is not affected by the weak Ac migration. Protactinium is more abundant (10−12%) in the Earth's crust than actinium. It was discovered in uranium ore in 1913 by Fajans and Göhring. As actinium, the distribution of protactinium follows that of 235U. The half-life of the longest-lived isotope of neptunium, 237Np, is negligible compared to the age of the Earth. Thus neptunium is present in nature in negligible amounts produced as intermediate decay products of other isotopes. Traces of plutonium in uranium minerals were first found in 1942, and the more systematic results on 239Pu are summarized in the table (no other plutonium isotopes could be detected in those samples). The upper limit of abundance of the longest-living isotope of plutonium, 244Pu, is 3%. Plutonium could not be detected in samples of lunar soil. Owing to its scarcity in nature, most plutonium is produced synthetically. Extraction Owing to the low abundance of actinides, their extraction is a complex, multistep process. Fluorides of actinides are usually used because they are insoluble in water and can be easily separated with redox reactions. Fluorides are reduced with calcium, magnesium or barium: Among the actinides, thorium and uranium are the easiest to isolate. Thorium is extracted mostly from monazite: thorium pyrophosphate (ThP2O7) is reacted with nitric acid, and the produced thorium nitrate treated with tributyl phosphate. Rare-earth impurities are separated by increasing the pH in sulfate solution. In another extraction method, monazite is decomposed with a 45% aqueous solution of sodium hydroxide at 140 °C. Mixed metal hydroxides are extracted first, filtered at 80 °C, washed with water and dissolved with concentrated hydrochloric acid. Next, the acidic solution is neutralized with hydroxides to pH = 5.8 that results in precipitation of thorium hydroxide (Th(OH)4) contaminated with ~3% of rare-earth hydroxides; the rest of rare-earth hydroxides remains in solution. Thorium hydroxide is dissolved in an inorganic acid and then purified from the rare earth elements. An efficient method is the dissolution of thorium hydroxide in nitric acid, because the resulting solution can be purified by extraction with organic solvents: Th(OH)4 + 4 HNO3 → Th(NO3)4 + 4 H2O Metallic thorium is separated from the anhydrous oxide, chloride or fluoride by reacting it with calcium in an inert atmosphere: ThO2 + 2 Ca → 2 CaO + Th Sometimes thorium is extracted by electrolysis of a fluoride in a mixture of sodium and potassium chloride at 700–800 °C in a graphite crucible. Highly pure thorium can be extracted from its iodide with the crystal bar process. Uranium is extracted from its ores in various ways. In one method, the ore is burned and then reacted with nitric acid to convert uranium into a dissolved state. Treating the solution with a solution of tributyl phosphate (TBP) in kerosene transforms uranium into an organic form UO2(NO3)2(TBP)2. The insoluble impurities are filtered and the uranium is extracted by reaction with hydroxides as (NH4)2U2O7 or with hydrogen peroxide as UO4·2H2O. When the uranium ore is rich in such minerals as dolomite, magnesite, etc., those minerals consume much acid. In this case, the carbonate method is used for uranium extraction. Its main component is an aqueous solution of sodium carbonate, which converts uranium into a complex [UO2(CO3)3]4−, which is stable in aqueous solutions at low concentrations of hydroxide ions. The advantages of the sodium carbonate method are that the chemicals have low corrosivity (compared to nitrates) and that most non-uranium metals precipitate from the solution. The disadvantage is that tetravalent uranium compounds precipitate as well. Therefore, the uranium ore is treated with sodium carbonate at elevated temperature and under oxygen pressure: 2 UO2 + O2 + 6 → 2 [UO2(CO3)3]4− This equation suggests that the best solvent for the uranyl carbonate processing is a mixture of carbonate with bicarbonate. At high pH, this results in precipitation of diuranate, which is treated with hydrogen in the presence of nickel yielding an insoluble uranium tetracarbonate. Another separation method uses polymeric resins as a polyelectrolyte. Ion exchange processes in the resins result in separation of uranium. Uranium from resins is washed with a solution of ammonium nitrate or nitric acid that yields uranyl nitrate, UO2(NO3)2·6H2O. When heated, it turns into UO3, which is converted to UO2 with hydrogen: UO3 + H2 → UO2 + H2O Reacting uranium dioxide with hydrofluoric acid changes it to uranium tetrafluoride, which yields uranium metal upon reaction with magnesium metal: 4 HF + UO2 → UF4 + 2 H2O To extract plutonium, neutron-irradiated uranium is dissolved in nitric acid, and a reducing agent (FeSO4, or H2O2) is added to the resulting solution. This addition changes the oxidation state of plutonium from +6 to +4, while uranium remains in the form of uranyl nitrate (UO2(NO3)2). The solution is treated with a reducing agent and neutralized with ammonium carbonate to pH = 8 that results in precipitation of Pu4+ compounds. In another method, Pu4+ and are first extracted with tributyl phosphate, then reacted with hydrazine washing out the recovered plutonium. The major difficulty in separation of actinium is the similarity of its properties with those of lanthanum. Thus actinium is either synthesized in nuclear reactions from isotopes of radium or separated using ion-exchange procedures. Properties Actinides have similar properties to lanthanides. Just as the 4f electron shells are filled in the lanthanides, the 5f electron shells are filled in the actinides. Because the 5f, 6d, 7s, and 7p shells are close in energy, many irregular configurations arise; thus, in gas-phase atoms, just as the first 4f electron only appears in cerium, so the first 5f electron appears even later, in protactinium. However, just as lanthanum is the first element to use the 4f shell in compounds, so actinium is the first element to use the 5f shell in compounds. The f-shells complete their filling together, at ytterbium and nobelium. The first experimental evidence for the filling of the 5f shell in actinides was obtained by McMillan and Abelson in 1940. As in lanthanides (see lanthanide contraction), the ionic radius of actinides monotonically decreases with atomic number (see also Aufbau principle). The shift of electron configurations in the gas phase does not always match the chemical behaviour. For example, the early-transition-metal-like prominence of the highest oxidation state, corresponding to removal of all valence electrons, extends up to uranium even though the 5f shells begin filling before that. On the other hand, electron configurations resembling the lanthanide congeners already begin at plutonium, even though lanthanide-like behaviour does not become dominant until the second half of the series begins at curium. The elements between uranium and curium form a transition between these two kinds of behaviour, where higher oxidation states continue to exist, but lose stability with respect to the +3 state. The +2 state becomes more important near the end of the series, and is the most stable oxidation state for nobelium, the last 5f element. Oxidation states rise again only after nobelium, showing that a new series of 6d transition metals has begun: lawrencium shows only the +3 oxidation state, and rutherfordium only the +4 state, making them congeners of lutetium and hafnium in the 5d row. Physical properties Actinides are typical metals. All of them are soft and have a silvery color (but tarnish in air), relatively high density and plasticity. Some of them can be cut with a knife. Their electrical resistivity varies between 15 and 150 μΩ·cm. The hardness of thorium is similar to that of soft steel, so heated pure thorium can be rolled in sheets and pulled into wire. Thorium is nearly half as dense as uranium and plutonium, but is harder than either of them. All actinides are radioactive, paramagnetic, and, with the exception of actinium, have several crystalline phases: plutonium has seven, and uranium, neptunium and californium three. The crystal structures of protactinium, uranium, neptunium and plutonium do not have clear analogs among the lanthanides and are more similar to those of the 3d-transition metals. All actinides are pyrophoric, especially when finely divided, that is, they spontaneously ignite upon reaction with air at room temperature. The melting point of actinides does not have a clear dependence on the number of f-electrons. The unusually low melting point of neptunium and plutonium (~640 °C) is explained by hybridization of 5f and 6d orbitals and the formation of directional bonds in these metals. Chemical properties Like the lanthanides, all actinides are highly reactive with halogens and chalcogens; however, the actinides react more easily. Actinides, especially those with a small number of 5f-electrons, are prone to hybridization. This is explained by the similarity of the electron energies at the 5f, 7s and 6d shells. Most actinides exhibit a larger variety of valence states, and the most stable are +6 for uranium, +5 for protactinium and neptunium, +4 for thorium and plutonium and +3 for actinium and other actinides. Actinium is chemically similar to lanthanum, which is explained by their similar ionic radii and electronic structures. Like lanthanum, actinium almost always has an oxidation state of +3 in compounds, but it is less reactive and has more pronounced basic properties. Among other trivalent actinides Ac3+ is least acidic, i.e. has the weakest tendency to hydrolyze in aqueous solutions. Thorium is rather active chemically. Owing to lack of electrons on 6d and 5f orbitals, tetravalent thorium compounds are colorless. At pH < 3, solutions of thorium salts are dominated by the cations [Th(H2O)8]4+. The Th4+ ion is relatively large, and depending on the coordination number can have a radius between 0.95 and 1.14 Å. As a result, thorium salts have a weak tendency to hydrolyse. The distinctive ability of thorium salts is their high solubility both in water and polar organic solvents. Protactinium exhibits two valence states; the +5 is stable, and the +4 state easily oxidizes to protactinium(V). Thus tetravalent protactinium in solutions is obtained by the action of strong reducing agents in a hydrogen atmosphere. Tetravalent protactinium is chemically similar to uranium(IV) and thorium(IV). Fluorides, phosphates, hypophosphates, iodates and phenylarsonates of protactinium(IV) are insoluble in water and dilute acids. Protactinium forms soluble carbonates. The hydrolytic properties of pentavalent protactinium are close to those of tantalum(V) and niobium(V). The complex chemical behavior of protactinium is a consequence of the start of the filling of the 5f shell in this element. Uranium has a valence from 3 to 6, the last being most stable. In the hexavalent state, uranium is very similar to the group 6 elements. Many compounds of uranium(IV) and uranium(VI) are non-stoichiometric, i.e. have variable composition. For example, the actual chemical formula of uranium dioxide is UO2+x, where x varies between −0.4 and 0.32. Uranium(VI) compounds are weak oxidants. Most of them contain the linear "uranyl" group, . Between 4 and 6 ligands can be accommodated in an equatorial plane perpendicular to the uranyl group. The uranyl group acts as a hard acid and forms stronger complexes with oxygen-donor ligands than with nitrogen-donor ligands. and are also the common form of Np and Pu in the +6 oxidation state. Uranium(IV) compounds exhibit reducing properties, e.g., they are easily oxidized by atmospheric oxygen. Uranium(III) is a very strong reducing agent. Owing to the presence of d-shell, uranium (as well as many other actinides) forms organometallic compounds, such as UIII(C5H5)3 and UIV(C5H5)4. Neptunium has valence states from 3 to 7, which can be simultaneously observed in solutions. The most stable state in solution is +5, but the valence +4 is preferred in solid neptunium compounds. Neptunium metal is very reactive. Ions of neptunium are prone to hydrolysis and formation of coordination compounds. Plutonium also exhibits valence states between 3 and 7 inclusive, and thus is chemically similar to neptunium and uranium. It is highly reactive, and quickly forms an oxide film in air. Plutonium reacts with hydrogen even at temperatures as low as 25–50 °C; it also easily forms halides and intermetallic compounds. Hydrolysis reactions of plutonium ions of different oxidation states are quite diverse. Plutonium(V) can enter polymerization reactions. The largest chemical diversity among actinides is observed in americium, which can have valence between 2 and 6. Divalent americium is obtained only in dry compounds and non-aqueous solutions (acetonitrile). Oxidation states +3, +5 and +6 are typical for aqueous solutions, but also in the solid state. Tetravalent americium forms stable solid compounds (dioxide, fluoride and hydroxide) as well as complexes in aqueous solutions. It was reported that in alkaline solution americium can be oxidized to the heptavalent state, but these data proved erroneous. The most stable valence of americium is 3 in aqueous solution and 3 or 4 in solid compounds. Valence 3 is dominant in all subsequent elements up to lawrencium (with the exception of nobelium). Curium can be tetravalent in solids (fluoride, dioxide). Berkelium, along with a valence of +3, also shows the valence of +4, more stable than that of curium; the valence 4 is observed in solid fluoride and dioxide. The stability of Bk4+ in aqueous solution is close to that of Ce4+. Only valence 3 was observed for californium, einsteinium and fermium. The divalent state is proven for mendelevium and nobelium, and in nobelium it is more stable than the trivalent state. Lawrencium shows valence 3 both in solutions and solids. The redox potential \mathit E_\frac{M^4+}{AnO2^2+} increases from −0.32 V in uranium, through 0.34 V (Np) and 1.04 V (Pu) to 1.34 V in americium revealing the increasing reduction ability of the An4+ ion from americium to uranium. All actinides form AnH3 hydrides of black color with salt-like properties. Actinides also produce carbides with the general formula of AnC or AnC2 (U2C3 for uranium) as well as sulfides An2S3 and AnS2. Compounds Oxides and hydroxides An – actinide **Depending on the isotopes Some actinides can exist in several oxide forms such as An2O3, AnO2, An2O5 and AnO3. For all actinides, oxides AnO3 are amphoteric and An2O3, AnO2 and An2O5 are basic, they easily react with water, forming bases: An2O3 + 3 H2O → 2 An(OH)3. These bases are poorly soluble in water and by their activity are close to the hydroxides of rare-earth metals. Np(OH)3 has not yet been synthesized, Pu(OH)3 has a blue color while Am(OH)3 is pink and Cm(OH)3 is colorless. Bk(OH)3 and Cf(OH)3 are also known, as are tetravalent hydroxides for Np, Pu and Am and pentavalent for Np and Am. The strongest base is of actinium. All compounds of actinium are colorless, except for black actinium sulfide (Ac2S3). Dioxides of tetravalent actinides crystallize in the cubic system, same as in calcium fluoride. Thorium reacting with oxygen exclusively forms the dioxide: Th{} + O2 ->[\ce{1000^\circ C}] \overbrace{ThO2}^{Thorium~dioxide} Thorium dioxide is a refractory material with the highest melting point among any known oxide (3390 °C). Adding 0.8–1% ThO2 to tungsten stabilizes its structure, so the doped filaments have better mechanical stability to vibrations. To dissolve ThO2 in acids, it is heated to 500–600 °C; heating above 600 °C produces a very resistant to acids and other reagents form of ThO2. Small addition of fluoride ions catalyses dissolution of thorium dioxide in acids. Two protactinium oxides have been obtained: PaO2 (black) and Pa2O5 (white); the former is isomorphic with ThO2 and the latter is easier to obtain. Both oxides are basic, and Pa(OH)5 is a weak, poorly soluble base. Decomposition of certain salts of uranium, for example UO2(NO3)·6H2O in air at 400 °C, yields orange or yellow UO3. This oxide is amphoteric and forms several hydroxides, the most stable being uranyl hydroxide UO2(OH)2. Reaction of uranium(VI) oxide with hydrogen results in uranium dioxide, which is similar in its properties with ThO2. This oxide is also basic and corresponds to the uranium hydroxide U(OH)4. Plutonium, neptunium and americium form two basic oxides: An2O3 and AnO2. Neptunium trioxide is unstable; thus, only Np3O8 could be obtained so far. However, the oxides of plutonium and neptunium with the chemical formula AnO2 and An2O3 are well characterized. Salts *An – actinide **Depending on the isotopes Actinides easily react with halogens forming salts with the formulas MX3 and MX4 (X = halogen). So the first berkelium compound, BkCl3, was synthesized in 1962 with an amount of 3 nanograms. Like the halogens of rare earth elements, actinide chlorides, bromides, and iodides are water-soluble, and fluorides are insoluble. Uranium easily yields a colorless hexafluoride, which sublimates at a temperature of 56.5 °C; because of its volatility, it is used in the separation of uranium isotopes with gas centrifuge or gaseous diffusion. Actinide hexafluorides have properties close to anhydrides. They are very sensitive to moisture and hydrolyze forming AnO2F2. The pentachloride and black hexachloride of uranium were synthesized, but they are both unstable. Action of acids on actinides yields salts, and if the acids are non-oxidizing then the actinide in the salt is in low-valence state: U + 2 H2SO4 → U(SO4)2 + 2 H2 2 Pu + 6 HCl → 2 PuCl3 + 3 H2 However, in these reactions the regenerating hydrogen can react with the metal, forming the corresponding hydride. Uranium reacts with acids and water much more easily than thorium. Actinide salts can also be obtained by dissolving the corresponding hydroxides in acids. Nitrates, chlorides, sulfates and perchlorates of actinides are water-soluble. When crystallizing from aqueous solutions, these salts form hydrates, such as Th(NO3)4·6H2O, Th(SO4)2·9H2O and Pu2(SO4)3·7H2O. Salts of high-valence actinides easily hydrolyze. So, colorless sulfate, chloride, perchlorate and nitrate of thorium transform into basic salts with formulas Th(OH)2SO4 and Th(OH)3NO3. The solubility and insolubility of trivalent and tetravalent actinides is like that of lanthanide salts. So phosphates, fluorides, oxalates, iodates and carbonates of actinides are weakly soluble in water; they precipitate as hydrates, such as ThF4·3H2O and Th(CrO4)2·3H2O. Actinides with oxidation state +6, except for the AnO22+-type cations, form [AnO4]2−, [An2O7]2− and other complex anions. For example, uranium, neptunium and plutonium form salts of the Na2UO4 (uranate) and (NH4)2U2O7 (diuranate) types. In comparison with lanthanides, actinides more easily form coordination compounds, and this ability increases with the actinide valence. Trivalent actinides do not form fluoride coordination compounds, whereas tetravalent thorium forms K2ThF6, KThF5, and even K5ThF9 complexes. Thorium also forms the corresponding sulfates (for example Na2SO4·Th(SO4)2·5H2O), nitrates and thiocyanates. Salts with the general formula An2Th(NO3)6·nH2O are of coordination nature, with the coordination number of thorium equal to 12. Even easier is to produce complex salts of pentavalent and hexavalent actinides. The most stable coordination compounds of actinides – tetravalent thorium and uranium – are obtained in reactions with diketones, e.g. acetylacetone. Applications While actinides have some established daily-life applications, such as in smoke detectors (americium) and gas mantles (thorium), they are mostly used in nuclear weapons and as fuel in nuclear reactors. The last two areas exploit the property of actinides to release enormous energy in nuclear reactions, which under certain conditions may become self-sustaining chain reactions. The most important isotope for nuclear power applications is uranium-235. It is used in the thermal reactor, and its concentration in natural uranium does not exceed 0.72%. This isotope strongly absorbs thermal neutrons releasing much energy. One fission act of 1 gram of 235U converts into about 1 MW·day. Of importance, is that emits more neutrons than it absorbs; upon reaching the critical mass, enters into a self-sustaining chain reaction. Typically, uranium nucleus is divided into two fragments with the release of 2–3 neutrons, for example: + ⟶ + + 3 Other promising actinide isotopes for nuclear power are thorium-232 and its product from the thorium fuel cycle, uranium-233. Emission of neutrons during the fission of uranium is important not only for maintaining the nuclear chain reaction, but also for the synthesis of the heavier actinides. Uranium-239 converts via β-decay into plutonium-239, which, like uranium-235, is capable of spontaneous fission. The world's first nuclear reactors were built not for energy, but for producing plutonium-239 for nuclear weapons. About half of produced thorium is used as the light-emitting material of gas mantles. Thorium is also added into multicomponent alloys of magnesium and zinc. Mg-Th alloys are light and strong, but also have high melting point and ductility and thus are widely used in the aviation industry and in the production of missiles. Thorium also has good electron emission properties, with long lifetime and low potential barrier for the emission. The relative content of thorium and uranium isotopes is widely used to estimate the age of various objects, including stars (see radiometric dating). The major application of plutonium has been in nuclear weapons, where the isotope plutonium-239 was a key component due to its ease of fission and availability. Plutonium-based designs allow reducing the critical mass to about a third of that for uranium-235. The "Fat Man"-type plutonium bombs produced during the Manhattan Project used explosive compression of plutonium to obtain significantly higher densities than normal, combined with a central neutron source to begin the reaction and increase efficiency. Thus only 6.2 kg of plutonium was needed for an explosive yield equivalent to 20 kilotons of TNT. (See also Nuclear weapon design.) Hypothetically, as little as 4 kg of plutonium—and maybe even less—could be used to make a single atomic bomb using very sophisticated assembly designs. Plutonium-238 is potentially more efficient isotope for nuclear reactors, since it has smaller critical mass than uranium-235, but it continues to release much thermal energy (0.56 W/g) by decay even when the fission chain reaction is stopped by control rods. Its application is limited by its high price (about US$1000/g). This isotope has been used in thermopiles and water distillation systems of some space satellites and stations. The Galileo and Apollo spacecraft (e.g. Apollo 14) had heaters powered by kilogram quantities of plutonium-238 oxide; this heat is also transformed into electricity with thermopiles. The decay of plutonium-238 produces relatively harmless alpha particles and is not accompanied by gamma rays. Therefore, this isotope (~160 mg) is used as the energy source in heart pacemakers where it lasts about 5 times longer than conventional batteries. Actinium-227 is used as a neutron source. Its high specific energy (14.5 W/g) and the possibility of obtaining significant quantities of thermally stable compounds are attractive for use in long-lasting thermoelectric generators for remote use. 228Ac is used as an indicator of radioactivity in chemical research, as it emits high-energy electrons (2.18 MeV) that can be easily detected. 228Ac-228Ra mixtures are widely used as an intense gamma-source in industry and medicine. Development of self-glowing actinide-doped materials with durable crystalline matrices is a new area of actinide utilization as the addition of alpha-emitting radionuclides to some glasses and crystals may confer luminescence. Toxicity Radioactive substances can harm human health via (i) local skin contamination, (ii) internal exposure due to ingestion of radioactive isotopes, and (iii) external overexposure by β-activity and γ-radiation. Together with radium and transuranium elements, actinium is one of the most dangerous radioactive poisons with high specific α-activity. The most important feature of actinium is its ability to accumulate and remain in the surface layer of skeletons. At the initial stage of poisoning, actinium accumulates in the liver. Another danger of actinium is that it undergoes radioactive decay faster than being excreted. Adsorption from the digestive tract is much smaller (~0.05%) for actinium than radium. Protactinium in the body tends to accumulate in the kidneys and bones. The maximum safe dose of protactinium in the human body is 0.03 μCi that corresponds to 0.5 micrograms of 231Pa. This isotope, which might be present in the air as aerosol, is 2.5 times more toxic than hydrocyanic acid. Plutonium, when entering the body through air, food or blood (e.g. a wound), mostly settles in the lungs, liver and bones with only about 10% going to other organs, and remains there for decades. The long residence time of plutonium in the body is partly explained by its poor solubility in water. Some isotopes of plutonium emit ionizing α-radiation, which damages the surrounding cells. The median lethal dose (LD50) for 30 days in dogs after intravenous injection of plutonium is 0.32 milligram per kg of body mass, and thus the lethal dose for humans is approximately 22 mg for a person weighing 70 kg; the amount for respiratory exposure should be approximately four times greater. Another estimate assumes that plutonium is 50 times less toxic than radium, and thus permissible content of plutonium in the body should be 5 μg or 0.3 μCi. Such amount is nearly invisible under microscope. After trials on animals, this maximum permissible dose was reduced to 0.65 μg or 0.04 μCi. Studies on animals also revealed that the most dangerous plutonium exposure route is through inhalation, after which 5–25% of inhaled substances is retained in the body. Depending on the particle size and solubility of the plutonium compounds, plutonium is localized either in the lungs or in the lymphatic system, or is absorbed in the blood and then transported to the liver and bones. Contamination via food is the least likely way. In this case, only about 0.05% of soluble and 0.01% of insoluble compounds of plutonium absorbs into blood, and the rest is excreted. Exposure of damaged skin to plutonium would retain nearly 100% of it. Using actinides in nuclear fuel, sealed radioactive sources or advanced materials such as self-glowing crystals has many potential benefits. However, a serious concern is the extremely high radiotoxicity of actinides and their migration in the environment. Use of chemically unstable forms of actinides in MOX and sealed radioactive sources is not appropriate by modern safety standards. There is a challenge to develop stable and durable actinide-bearing materials, which provide safe storage, use and final disposal. A key need is application of actinide solid solutions in durable crystalline host phases. Nuclear properties See also Actinides in the environment Lanthanides Major actinides Minor actinides Transuranics Notes References Bibliography External links Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory image of historic periodic table by Seaborg showing actinide series for the first time Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Uncovering the Secrets of the Actinides Los Alamos National Laboratory, Actinide Research Quarterly Periodic table

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton%20Diabelli

Anton Diabelli

Anton (or Antonio) Diabelli (5 September 17818 April 1858) was an Austrian music publisher, editor and composer. Best known in his time as a publisher, he is most familiar today as the composer of the waltz on which Ludwig van Beethoven wrote his set of thirty-three Diabelli Variations. Early life Diabelli was born in Mattsee in Austria, then in the Archbishopric of Salzburg. A musical child, he sang in the boys' choir at Salzburg Cathedral where he is believed to have taken music lessons with Michael Haydn. By the age of 19 Diabelli had already composed several important compositions including six masses. Diabelli was trained to enter the priesthood and in 1800 joined the monastery at Raitenhaslach, Bavaria. He remained there until 1803, when Bavaria closed all its monasteries. Career In 1803 Diabelli moved to Vienna and began teaching piano and guitar and found work as a proofreader for a music publisher. During this period he learned the music publishing business while continuing to compose. In 1809 he composed his comic opera, Adam in der Klemme. In 1817 he started a music publishing business and in 1818 he formed a partnership with Pietro Cappi to create the music publishing firm of Cappi & Diabelli. Cappi & Diabelli became well known by arranging popular pieces so they could be played by amateurs at home. A master of promotion, Diabelli selected widely-accessible music such as famous opera tune arrangements, dance music and popular new comic theatre songs. The firm soon established a reputation in more serious music circles by championing the works of Franz Schubert. Diabelli recognized the composer's potential and became the first to publish Schubert's work with "Erlkönig" in 1821. Diabelli's firm continued to publish Schubert's work until 1823 when an argument between Cappi and Schubert terminated their business. The following year Diabelli and Cappi parted ways, Diabelli launching a new publishing house, Diabelli & Co., in 1824. Following Schubert's early death in 1828 Diabelli purchased a large portion of the composer's massive musical estate from Schubert's brother Ferdinand. As Schubert had hundreds of unpublished works, Diabelli's firm was able to publish "new" Schubert works for more than 30 years after the composer's death. Diabelli's publishing house expanded throughout his life, before he retired in 1851, leaving it under the control of Carl Anton Spina. When Diabelli died in 1858 Spina changed the firm’s name to “C.A. Spina Vormals Diabelli” and published much music by Johann Strauss II and Josef Strauss. In 1872 the firm was taken over by Friedrich Schreiber and in 1876 it merged with the firm of August Cranz who bought the company in 1879 and ran it under his name. Diabelli died in Vienna at the age of 76. Compositions Diabelli composed a number of well-known Classical works, including an operetta called Adam in der Klemme, several masses, songs and numerous piano and classical guitar pieces. Numerically his guitar pieces form the largest part of his works. His pieces for piano four hands are popular. Diabelli's composition Pleasures of Youth: Six Sonatinas is a collection of six sonatinas depicting a struggle between unknown opposing forces. This is suggested by the sharp and frequent change in dynamics from forte to piano. When forte is indicated the pianist is meant to evoke a sense of wickedness, thus depicting the antagonist. In contrast the markings of piano represent the protagonist. Diabelli Variations The composition for which Diabelli is now best known was actually written as part of an adventuring story. In 1819, as a promotional idea, he decided to try to publish a volume of variations on a "patriotic" waltz he had penned expressly for this purpose, with one variation by every important Austrian composer living at the time, as well as several significant non-Austrians. The combined contributions would be published in an anthology called Vaterländischer Künstlerverein. Fifty-one composers responded with pieces, including Beethoven, Schubert, Archduke Rudolph of Austria, Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart (jun.), Moritz, Prince of Dietrichstein, Heinrich Eduard Josef Baron von Lannoy, Ignaz Franz Baron von Mosel, Carl Czerny, Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Ignaz Moscheles, Simon Sechter, and the eight-year-old Franz Liszt (although it seems Liszt was not invited personally, but his teacher Czerny arranged for him to be involved). Czerny was also enlisted to write a coda. Beethoven, however, instead of providing just one variation, provided 33, and his formed Part I of Vaterländischer Künstlerverein. They constitute what is generally regarded as one of the greatest of Beethoven's piano pieces and as the greatest set of variations of their time, and are generally known simply as the Diabelli Variations, Op. 120. The other 50 variations were published as Part II of Vaterländischer Künstlerverein. Cultural references A sonatina of Diabelli's, presumably Sonatina in F major, Op. 168, No. 1 (I: Moderato cantabile), provides the title and a motif for the French novella Moderato Cantabile by Marguerite Duras. See also Romantic guitar References Published music and further reading Anton Diabelli's guitar works – a thematic catalogue with an introduction; Doctoral Thesis by Jukka Savijoki (Sibelius Academy; 1996) Anton Diabelli's Guitar Works: A Thematic Catalogue by Jukka Savijoki (Editions Orphée) Rischel & Birket-Smith's Collection of guitar music Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Denmark Boije Collection The Music Library of Sweden www.karadar.com/Dictionary/diabelli.html Free scores at the Mutopia Project External links 1781 births 1858 deaths 19th-century classical composers 19th-century male musicians Austrian opera composers Austrian people of Italian descent Austrian Romantic composers Composers for piano Composers for the classical guitar Austrian male opera composers Sheet music publishers (people) People from Salzburg-Umgebung District

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anita%20Hill

Anita Hill

Anita Faye Hill (born July 30, 1956) is an American lawyer, educator and author. She is a professor of social policy, law, and women's studies at Brandeis University and a faculty member of the university's Heller School for Social Policy and Management. She became a national figure in 1991 when she accused U.S. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, her supervisor at the United States Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, of sexual harassment. Early life and education Anita Hill was born to a family of farmers in Lone Tree, Oklahoma, the youngest of Albert and Erma Hill's 13 children. Her family came from Arkansas, where her maternal grandfather Henry Eliot and all of her great-grandparents had been born into slavery. Hill was raised in the Baptist faith. Hill graduated from Morris High School, Oklahoma in 1973, where she was class valedictorian. Hill received her bachelor's degree in psychology in 1977 from Oklahoma State University. In 1980, she earned her Juris Doctor from Yale Law School in New Haven, Connecticut. Early career Hill was admitted to the District of Columbia Bar in 1980 and began her law career as an associate with the Washington, D.C. firm of Wald, Harkrader & Ross. In 1981, she became an attorney-adviser to Clarence Thomas, who was then the Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights. When Thomas became chairman of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in 1982, Hill served as his assistant, leaving the job in 1983. Hill then became an assistant professor at the Evangelical Christian O. W. Coburn School of Law at Oral Roberts University where she taught from 1983 to 1986. In 1986, she joined the faculty at the University of Oklahoma College of Law where she taught commercial law and contracts. In 1989, she became the first tenured African American professor at OU. She left the university in 1996 due to ongoing calls for her resignation that began after her 1991 testimony. In 1998, she became a visiting scholar at Brandeis University and, in 2015, a university professor at the school. Allegations of sexual harassment against Clarence Thomas In 1991, President George H. W. Bush nominated Clarence Thomas, a federal circuit judge, to succeed retiring Associate Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. Senate hearings on his confirmation were initially completed with Thomas's good character being presented as a primary qualification for the high court because he had only been a judge for slightly more than one year. There had been little organized opposition to Thomas's nomination, and his confirmation seemed assured until a report of a private interview of Hill by the FBI was leaked to the press. The hearings were then reopened, and Hill was called to publicly testify. Hill said on October 11, 1991, in televised hearings that Thomas had sexually harassed her while he was her supervisor at the Department of Education and the EEOC. When questioned on why she followed Thomas to the second job after he had already allegedly harassed her, she said working in a reputable position within the civil rights field had been her ambition. The position was appealing enough to inhibit her from going back into private practice with her previous firm. She said that she only realized later in her life that the choice had represented poor judgment on her part, but that "at that time, it appeared that the sexual overtures... had ended." According to Hill, Thomas asked her out socially many times during her two years of employment as his assistant, and after she declined his requests, he used work situations to discuss sexual subjects and push advances. "He spoke about... such matters as women having sex with animals and films showing group sex or rape scenes," she said, adding that on several occasions Thomas graphically described "his own sexual prowess" and the details of his anatomy. Hill also recounted an instance in which Thomas examined a can of Coke on his desk and asked, "Who has put pubic hair on my Coke?" During the hearing, Republican Senator Orrin Hatch implied that "Hill was working in tandem with 'slick lawyers' and interest groups bent on destroying Thomas's chances to join the court." Thomas said he had considered Hill a friend whom he had helped at every turn, so when accusations of harassment came from her they were particularly hurtful and he said, "I lost the belief that if I did my best, all would work out." Four female witnesses waited in the wings to support Hill's credibility, but they were not called, due to what the Los Angeles Times described as a private, compromise deal between Republicans and the Senate Judiciary Committee chair, Democrat Joe Biden. Hill agreed to take a polygraph test. While senators and other authorities observed that polygraph results cannot be relied upon and are inadmissible in courts, Hill's results did support her statements. Thomas did not take a polygraph test. He made a vehement and complete denial, saying that he was being subjected to a "high-tech lynching for uppity blacks" by white liberals who were seeking to block a black conservative from taking a seat on the Supreme Court. After extensive debate, the United States Senate confirmed Thomas to the Supreme Court by a vote of 52–48, the narrowest margin since the 19th century. Members questioned Hill's credibility after the timeline of her events came into question. They mentioned the time delay of ten years between the alleged behavior by Thomas and Hill's accusations, and observed that Hill had followed Thomas to a second job and later had personal contacts with Thomas, including giving him a ride to an airport—behavior which they said would be inexplicable if Hill's allegations were true. Hill countered that she had come forward because she felt an obligation to share information on the character and actions of a person who was being considered for the Supreme Court. She testified that after leaving the EEOC, she had had two "inconsequential" phone conversations with Thomas, and had seen him personally on two occasions, once to get a job reference and the second time when he made a public appearance in Oklahoma where she was teaching. Doubts about the veracity of Hill's 1991 testimony persisted among conservatives long after Thomas took his seat on the Court. They were furthered by right-wing magazine American Spectator writer David Brock in his 1993 book The Real Anita Hill, though he later recanted the claims he had made which he described in his book as "character assassination," and apologized to Hill. After interviewing a number of women who alleged that Thomas had frequently subjected them to sexually explicit remarks, The Wall Street Journal reporters Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson wrote, Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas, a book that concluded that Thomas had lied during his confirmation process. Richard Lacayo in his 1994 review of the book for Time magazine remarked, however, that "Their book doesn't quite nail that conclusion." In 2007, Kevin , a co-author of another book on Thomas, remarked that what happened between Thomas and Hill was "ultimately unknowable" by others, but that it was clear that "one of them lied, period." Writing in 2007, Neil Lewis of The New York Times remarked that, "To this day, each side in the epic he-said, she-said dispute has its unmovable believers." In 2007, Thomas published his autobiography, My Grandfather's Son, in which he revisited the controversy, calling Hill his "most traitorous adversary", and writing that pro-choice liberals, who feared he would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade if he were seated on the Supreme Court, used the scandal against him. He described Hill as touchy and apt to overreact, and her work at the EEOC as mediocre. He acknowledged that three other former EEOC employees had backed Hill's story, but said they had all left the agency on bad terms. He also wrote that Hill "was a left-winger who'd never expressed any religious sentiments whatsoever ... and the only reason why she'd held a job in the Reagan administration was because I'd given it to her." Hill denied the accusations in an op-ed in The New York Times saying she would not "stand by silently and allow [Justice Thomas], in his anger, to reinvent me." In October 2010, Thomas's wife Virginia, a conservative activist, left a voicemail at Hill's office asking that Hill apologize for her 1991 testimony. Hill initially believed the call was a hoax and referred the matter to the Brandeis University campus police who alerted the FBI. After being informed that the call was indeed from Virginia Thomas, Hill told the media that she did not believe the message was meant to be conciliatory and said, "I testified truthfully about my experience and I stand by that testimony." Virginia Thomas responded that the call had been intended as an "olive branch". Effects Shortly after the Thomas confirmation hearings, President George H. W. Bush dropped his opposition to a bill that gave harassment victims the right to seek federal damage awards, back pay, and reinstatement, and the law was passed by Congress. One year later, harassment complaints filed with the EEOC were up 50 percent and public opinion had shifted in Hill's favor. Private companies also started training programs to deter sexual harassment. When journalist Cinny Kennard asked Hill in 1991 if she would testify against Thomas all over again, Hill answered, "I'm not sure if I could have lived with myself if I had answered those questions any differently." The manner in which the Senate Judiciary Committee challenged and dismissed Hill's accusations of sexual harassment angered female politicians and lawyers. According to D.C. Congressional Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, Hill's treatment by the panel was a contributing factor to the large number of women elected to Congress in 1992. "Women clearly went to the polls with the notion in mind that you had to have more women in Congress," she said. In their anthology, All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave, editors Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott, and Barbara Smith described black feminists mobilizing "a remarkable national response to the Anita Hill–Clarence Thomas controversy. In 1992, a feminist group began a nationwide fundraising campaign and then obtained matching state funds to endow a professorship at the University of Oklahoma College of Law in honor of Hill. Conservative Oklahoma state legislators reacted by demanding Hill's resignation from the university, then introducing a bill to prohibit the university from accepting donations from out-of-state residents, and finally attempting to pass legislation to close down the law school. Elmer Zinn Million, a local activist, compared Hill to Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of President Kennedy. Certain officials at the university attempted to revoke Hill's tenure. After five years of pressure, Hill resigned. The University of Oklahoma Law School defunded the Anita F. Hill professorship in May 1999, without the position having ever been filled. On April 25, 2019, the presidential campaign team for Joe Biden for the 2020 United States presidential election disclosed that he had called Hill to express "his regret for what she endured" in his role as the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, presiding over the Thomas confirmation hearings. Hill said the call from Biden left her feeling "deeply unsatisfied". On June 13, 2019, Hill clarified that she did not consider Biden's actions disqualifying, and would be open to voting for him. In May 2020, Hill argued that sexual assault allegations made against Donald Trump as well as the sexual assault allegation against Biden should be investigated and their results "made available to the public." On September 5, 2020, it was reported that Hill had vowed to vote for Biden and to work with him on gender issues. Continued work and advocacy Hill continued to teach at the University of Oklahoma, though she spent two years as a visiting professor in California. She resigned her post in October 1996 and finished her final semester of teaching there. In her final semester, she taught a law school seminar on civil rights. An endowed chair was created in her name, but was later defunded without ever having been filled. Hill accepted a position as a visiting scholar at the Institute for the Study of Social Change at University of California, Berkeley in January 1997, but soon joined the faculty of Brandeis University—first at the Women's Studies Program, later moving to the Heller School for Social Policy and Management. In 2011, she also took a counsel position with the Civil Rights & Employment Practice group of the plaintiffs' law firm Cohen Milstein. Over the years, Hill has provided commentary on gender and race issues on national television programs, including 60 Minutes, Face the Nation, and Meet the Press. She has been a speaker on the topic of commercial law as well as race and women's rights. She is also the author of articles that have been published in The New York Times and Newsweek and has contributed to many scholarly and legal publications in the areas of international commercial law, bankruptcy, and civil rights. In 1995, Hill co-edited Race, Gender and Power in America: The Legacy of the Hill-Thomas Hearings with Emma Coleman Jordan. In 1997 Hill published her autobiography, Speaking Truth to Power, in which she chronicled her role in the Clarence Thomas confirmation controversy and wrote that creating a better society had been a motivating force in her life. She contributed the piece "The Nature of the Beast: Sexual Harassment" to the 2003 anthology Sisterhood Is Forever: The Women's Anthology for a New Millennium, edited by Robin Morgan. In 2011, Hill published her second book, Reimagining Equality: Stories of Gender, Race, and Finding Home, which focuses on the sub-prime lending crisis that resulted in the foreclosure of many homes owned by African-Americans. She calls for a new understanding about the importance of a home and its place in the American Dream. On March 26, 2015, the Brandeis Board of Trustees unanimously voted to recognize Hill with a promotion to Private University Professor of Social Policy, Law, and Women's Studies. On December 16, 2017, the Commission on Sexual Harassment and Advancing Equality in the Workplace was formed, selecting Hill to lead its charge against sexual harassment in the entertainment industry. The new initiative was spearheaded by co-chair of the Nike Foundation Maria Eitel, venture capitalist Freada Kapor Klein, Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy and talent attorney Nina Shaw. The report found not only a saddening prevalence of continued bias but also stark differences in how varying demographics perceived discrimination and harassment. In September 2018, Hill wrote an op-ed in The New York Times regarding sexual assault allegations made by Christine Blasey Ford during the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination. On November 8, 2018, Anita Hill spoke at the USC Dornsife's event, "From Social Movement to Social Impact: Putting an End to Sexual Harassment in the Workplace". Writings In 1994, Hill wrote a tribute to Thurgood Marshall, the first African American Supreme Court Justice who preceded Clarence Thomas, titled "A Tribute to Thurgood Marshall: A Man Who Broke with Tradition on Issues of Race and Gender". She outlined Marshall's contributions to the principles of equality as a judge and how his work has affected the lives of African Americans, specifically African American women. On October 20, 1998, Hill published the book Speaking Truth to Power. Throughout much of the book she gives details on her side of the sexual harassment controversy, and her professional relationship with Clarence Thomas. Aside from that, she also provides a glimpse of what her personal life was like all the way from her childhood days growing up in Oklahoma to her position as a law professor. Hill became a proponent for women's rights and feminism. This can be seen through the chapter she wrote in the 2007 book Women and leadership: the state of play and strategies for change. She wrote about women judges and why, in her opinion, they play such a large role in balancing the judicial system. She argues that since women and men have different life experiences, ways of thinking, and histories, both are needed for a balanced court system. She writes that in order for the best law system to be created in the United States, all people need the ability to be represented. In 2011, Hill's second book, Reimagining Equality: Stories of Gender, Race, and Finding Home was published. She discusses the relationship between the home and the American Dream. She also exposes the inequalities within gender and race and home ownership. She argues that inclusive democracy is more important than debates about legal rights. She uses her own history and history of other African American women such as Nannie Helen Burroughs, in order to strengthen her argument for reimagining equality altogether. On September 28, 2021, Hill published the book Believing: Our Thirty-Year Journey to End Gender Violence. Awards and recognition Hill received the American Bar Association's Commission on Women in the Profession's "Women of Achievement" award in 1992. In 2005, Hill was selected as a Fletcher Foundation Fellow. In 2008 she was awarded the Louis P. and Evelyn Smith First Amendment Award by the Ford Hall Forum. She also serves on the board of trustees for Southern Vermont College in Bennington, Vermont. Her opening statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1991 is listed as in American Rhetoric's Top 100 Speeches of the 20th Century (listed by rank). She was inducted into the Oklahoma Women's Hall of Fame in 1993. On January 7, 2017, Hill was inducted as an honorary member of Zeta Phi Beta sorority at their National Executive Board Meeting in Dallas, Texas. The Wing's Washington, D.C. location has a phone booth dedicated to Hill. Minor planet 6486 Anitahill, discovered by Eleanor Helin, is named in her honor. The official naming citation was published by the Minor Planet Center on November 8, 2019 (). Honorary doctorates 2001: Simmons University 2001: Dillard University 2003: Smith College 2007: Lasell University 2008: Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts 2013: Mount Ida College 2017: Emerson College 2018: Wesleyan University 2019: Lesley University 2022: Mount Holyoke College In popular culture In 1991, the television sitcom Designing Women built its episode "The Strange Case of Clarence and Anita" around the hearings on the Clarence Thomas nomination. The following season in the episode "The Odyssey", the characters imagined what would happen if new president Bill Clinton nominated Anita Hill to the Supreme Court to sit next to Clarence Thomas. Hill is referenced in the 1992 Sonic Youth song "Youth Against Fascism." Her case also inspired the 1994 Law & Order episode "Virtue", about a young lawyer who feels pressured to sleep with her supervisor at her law firm. In the 1996 television film, Hostile Advances: The Kerry Ellison Story, Anita Hill's testimony is being watched at the bar by main character Kerry Ellison. The film is a true story about a landmark sexual harassment case. Anita Hill is mentioned in The X-Files episode "Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man", which aired November 17, 1996. In the 1996 film Jerry Maguire, after Tom Cruise's character makes a pass at his employee (played by Renee Zellweger), he apologizes with, "I feel like Clarence Thomas." In 1999, Ernest Dickerson directed Strange Justice, a film based on the Anita Hill–Clarence Thomas controversy. Anita Hill is interviewed – unrelated to the Clarence Thomas case – about the film The Tin Drum in the documentary Banned in Oklahoma (2004), included in The Criterion Collection DVD of the film (2004). Hill's testimony is briefly shown in the 2005 film North Country about the first class action lawsuit surrounding sexual harassment. Hill was the subject of the 2013 documentary film Anita by director Freida Lee Mock, which chronicles her experience during the Clarence Thomas scandal. The actor Kerry Washington portrayed Hill in the 2016 HBO film Confirmation. In 2018, entertainer John Oliver interviewed Hill on his television program Last Week Tonight during which Hill answered various questions and concerns about workplace sexual harassment in the present day. Hill has been interviewed by Stephen Colbert on The Late Show twice, once in 2018 and again in 2021. See also Clarence Thomas Supreme Court nomination Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination Christine Blasey Ford References External links Faculty profile at Brandeis University Audio lecture: Anita Hill discusses Reimagining Equality: Stories of Gender, Race, and Finding Home on October 4, 2011, on Forum Network. An Outline of the Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas Controversy at Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media African American women speak out on Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas The complete transcripts of the Clarence Thomas--Anita Hill hearings : October 11,12,13, 1991 1956 births Living people 20th-century African-American academics 20th-century American academics 21st-century African-American academics 21st-century American academics 20th-century American lawyers 20th-century American women lawyers 20th-century American non-fiction writers 21st-century American non-fiction writers 20th-century African-American women writers 20th-century African-American writers 20th-century American women writers 21st-century African-American women writers 21st-century African-American writers 21st-century American women writers African-American lawyers American women lawyers American legal scholars African-American legal scholars American women legal scholars Equal Employment Opportunity Commission members Sexual harassment in the United States American feminists African-American feminists American women non-fiction writers American autobiographers American women autobiographers American political writers American political women Brandeis University faculty University of Oklahoma faculty Oklahoma State University faculty Oral Roberts University faculty Yale Law School alumni Oklahoma State University alumni People from Okmulgee County, Oklahoma Lawyers from Washington, D.C. Writers from Oklahoma Clarence Thomas 20th-century African-American lawyers

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August%2010

August 10

Events Pre-1600 654 – Pope Eugene I elected to succeed Martinus I. 955 – Battle of Lechfeld: Otto I, Holy Roman Emperor defeats the Magyars, ending 50 years of Magyar invasion of the West. 991 – Battle of Maldon: The English, led by Byrhtnoth, Ealdorman of Essex, are defeated by a band of inland-raiding Vikings near Maldon, Essex. 1030 – The Battle of Azaz ends with a humiliating retreat of the Byzantine emperor, Romanos III Argyros, against the Mirdasid rulers of Aleppo. The retreat degenerates into a rout, in which Romanos himself barely escapes capture. 1270 – Yekuno Amlak takes the imperial throne of Ethiopia, restoring the Solomonic dynasty to power after a 100-year Zagwe interregnum. 1316 – The Second Battle of Athenry takes place near Athenry during the Bruce campaign in Ireland. 1346 – Jaume Ferrer sets out from Majorca for the "River of Gold", the Senegal River. 1512 – The naval Battle of Saint-Mathieu, during the War of the League of Cambrai, sees the simultaneous destruction of the Breton ship La Cordelière and the English ship The Regent. 1519 – Ferdinand Magellan's five ships set sail from Seville to circumnavigate the globe. The Basque second-in-command Juan Sebastián Elcano will complete the expedition after Magellan's death in the Philippines. 1557 – Battle of St. Quentin: Spanish victory over the French in the Italian War of 1551–59. 1585 – The Treaty of Nonsuch signed by Elizabeth I of England and the Dutch Rebels. 1601–1900 1628 – The Swedish warship Vasa sinks on her maiden voyage off Stockholm. 1641 – The Treaty of London between England and Scotland, ending the Bishops' Wars, is signed. 1680 – The Pueblo Revolt begins in New Mexico. 1741 – King Marthanda Varma of Travancore defeats the Dutch East India Company at the Battle of Colachel, effectively bringing about the end of the Dutch colonial rule in India. 1755 – Under the direction of Charles Lawrence, the British begin to forcibly deport the Acadians from Nova Scotia to the Thirteen Colonies and France. 1792 – French Revolution: Storming of the Tuileries Palace: Louis XVI of France is arrested and taken into custody as his Swiss Guards are massacred by the Parisian mob. 1808 – Finnish War: Swedish forces led by General von Döbeln defeat Russian forces led by General Šepelev in the Battle of Kauhajoki. 1856 – The Last Island hurricane strikes Louisiana, resulting in over 200 deaths. 1861 – American Civil War: Battle of Wilson's Creek: A mixed force of Confederate, Missouri State Guard, and Arkansas State troops defeat outnumbered attacking Union forces in the southwestern part of the state. 1864 – After Uruguay's governing Blanco Party refuses Brazil's demands, José Antônio Saraiva announces that the Brazilian military will begin reprisals, beginning the Uruguayan War. 1901–present 1901 – The U.S. Steel recognition strike by the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers begins. 1904 – Russo-Japanese War: The Battle of the Yellow Sea between the Russian and Japanese battleship fleets takes place. 1905 – Russo-Japanese War: Peace negotiations begin in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. 1913 – Second Balkan War: Delegates from Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Montenegro, and Greece sign the Treaty of Bucharest, ending the war. 1920 – World War I: Ottoman sultan Mehmed VI's representatives sign the Treaty of Sèvres that divides up the Ottoman Empire between the Allies. 1937 – Spanish Civil War: The Regional Defence Council of Aragon is dissolved by the Second Spanish Republic. 1944 – World War II: The Battle of Guam comes to an effective end. 1944 – World War II: The Battle of Narva ends with a defensive German victory. 1945 – The Japanese government announced that a message had been sent to the Allies accepting the terms of the Potsdam Declaration provided that it "does not comprise any demand that prejudices the prerogatives of the Emperor as sovereign ruler." 1948 – Candid Camera makes its television debut after being on radio for a year as The Candid Microphone. 1949 – An amendment to the National Security Act of 1947 enhances the authority of the United States Secretary of Defense over the Army, Navy and Air Force, and replaces the National Military Establishment with the Department of Defense. 1953 – First Indochina War: The French Union withdraws its forces from Operation Camargue against the Viet Minh in central Vietnam. 1954 – At Massena, New York, the groundbreaking ceremony for the Saint Lawrence Seaway is held. 1961 – Vietnam War: The U.S. Army begins Operation Ranch Hand, spraying an estimated of defoliants and herbicides over rural areas of South Vietnam in an attempt to deprive the Viet Cong of food and vegetation cover. 1966 – The Heron Road Bridge collapses while being built, killing nine workers in the deadliest construction accident in both Ottawa and Ontario. 1969 – A day after murdering Sharon Tate and four others, members of Charles Manson's cult kill Leno and Rosemary LaBianca. 1971 – The Society for American Baseball Research is founded in Cooperstown, New York. 1977 – In Yonkers, New York, 24-year-old postal employee David Berkowitz ("Son of Sam") is arrested for a series of killings in the New York City area over the period of one year. 1978 – Three members of the Ulrich family are killed in an accident. This leads to the Ford Pinto litigation. 1981 – Murder of Adam Walsh: The head of John Walsh's son is found. This inspires the creation of the television series America's Most Wanted and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. 1988 – Japanese American internment: U.S. President Ronald Reagan signs the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, providing $20,000 payments to Japanese Americans who were either interned in or relocated by the United States during World War II. 1990 – The Magellan space probe reaches Venus. 1993 – Two earthquakes affect New Zealand. A 7.0 shock (intensity VI (Strong)) in the South Island was followed nine hours later by a 6.4 event (intensity VII (Very strong)) in the North Island. 1995 – Oklahoma City bombing: Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols are indicted for the bombing. Michael Fortier pleads guilty in a plea-bargain for his testimony. 1997 – Sixteen people are killed when Formosa Airlines Flight 7601 crashes near Beigan Airport in the Matsu Islands of Taiwan. 1998 – HRH Prince Al-Muhtadee Billah is proclaimed the crown prince of Brunei with a Royal Proclamation. 1999 – Los Angeles Jewish Community Center shooting. 2001 – The 2001 Angola train attack occurred, causing 252 deaths. 2001 – Space Shuttle program: The Space Shuttle Discovery is launched on STS-105 to the International Space Station, carrying the astronauts of Expedition 3 to replace the crew of Expedition 2. 2003 – The Okinawa Urban Monorail is opened in Naha, Okinawa. 2009 – Twenty people are killed in Handlová, Trenčín Region, in the deadliest mining disaster in Slovakia's history. 2012 – The Marikana massacre begins near Rustenburg, South Africa, resulting in the deaths of 47 people. 2014 – Forty people are killed when Sepahan Airlines Flight 5915 crashes at Tehran's Mehrabad International Airport. 2018 – Horizon Air employee Richard Russell hijacks and performs an unauthorized takeoff on a Horizon Air Bombardier Dash 8 Q400 plane at Seattle–Tacoma International Airport in Washington, flying it for more than an hour before crashing the plane and killing himself on Ketron Island in Puget Sound. 2018 – An anti-government rally turns into a riot when members of the Romanian Gendarmerie attack the 100,000 people protesting in front of the Victoria Palace, leading to 452 recorded injuries. The authorities alleged that the crowd was infiltrated by hooligans who began attacking law enforcement agents. 2019 – Thirty-two are killed and one million are evacuated as Typhoon Lekima makes landfall in Zhejiang, China. Earlier it had caused flooding in the Philippines. 2019 – Philip Manshaus shoots his stepsister and attacks a mosque in the Bærum mosque shooting. 2020 – Derecho in Iowa becomes the most costly thunderstorm disaster in U.S. history. Births Pre-1600 941 – Lê Hoàn, Vietnamese emperor (d. 1005) 1267 – James II of Aragon (d. 1327) 1296 – John of Bohemia (d. 1346) 1360 – Francesco Zabarella, Italian cardinal (d. 1417) 1397 – Albert II of Germany (d. 1439) 1439 – Anne of York, Duchess of Exeter, Duchess of York (d. 1476) 1449 – Bona of Savoy, Duchess of Savoy (d. 1503) 1466 – Francesco II Gonzaga, Marquess of Mantua (d. 1519) 1489 – Jacob Sturm von Sturmeck, German lawyer and politician (d. 1553) 1520 – Madeleine of Valois (d. 1537) 1528 – Eric II, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg (d. 1584) 1547 – Francis II, Duke of Saxe-Lauenburg (d. 1619) 1560 – Hieronymus Praetorius, German organist and composer (d. 1629) 1601–1900 1602 – Gilles de Roberval, French mathematician and academic (d. 1675) 1645 – Eusebio Kino, Italian priest and missionary (d. 1711) 1734 – Naungdawgyi, Burmese king (d. 1763) 1737 – Anton Losenko, Russian painter and academic (d. 1773) 1740 – Samuel Arnold, English organist and composer (d. 1802) 1744 – Alexandrine Le Normant d'Étiolles, daughter of Madame de Pompadour (d. 1754) 1755 – Narayan Rao, fifth Peshwa of the Maratha Empire (d. 1773) 1782 – Vicente Guerrero, Mexican insurgent leader and President of Mexico (d. 1831) 1805 – Ferenc Toldy, German-Hungarian historian and critic (d. 1875) 1809 – John Kirk Townsend, American ornithologist and explorer (d. 1851) 1810 – Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, Italian soldier and politician, 1st Prime Minister of Italy (d. 1861) 1814 – Henri Nestlé, German businessman, founded Nestlé (d. 1890) 1814 – John C. Pemberton, United States soldier and Confederate general (d. 1881) 1821 – Jay Cooke, American financier, founded Jay Cooke & Company (d. 1905) 1823 – Hugh Stowell Brown, English minister and reformer (d. 1886) 1825 – István Türr, Hungarian soldier, architect, and engineer, co-designed the Corinth Canal (d. 1908) 1827 – Lovro Toman, Slovenian lawyer and politician (d. 1870) 1839 – Aleksandr Stoletov, Russian physicist and academic (d. 1896) 1845 – Abai Qunanbaiuli, Kazakh poet, composer, and philosopher (d. 1904) 1848 – William Harnett, Irish-American painter and educator (d. 1892) 1856 – William Willett, English inventor, founded British Summer Time (d. 1915) 1860 – Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande, Indian singer and musicologist (d. 1936) 1865 – Alexander Glazunov, Russian composer, conductor, and educator (d. 1936) 1868 – Hugo Eckener, German pilot and businessman (d. 1954) 1869 – Laurence Binyon, English poet, playwright, and scholar (d. 1943) 1870 – Trần Tế Xương, Vietnamese poet and satirist (d. 1907) 1872 – William Manuel Johnson, American bassist (d. 1972) 1874 – Herbert Hoover, American engineer and politician, 31st President of the United States (d. 1964) 1874 – Antanas Smetona, Lithuanian jurist and politician, President of Lithuania (d. 1944) 1877 – Frank Marshall, American chess player and author (d. 1944) 1878 – Alfred Döblin, Polish-German physician and author (d. 1957) 1880 – Robert L. Thornton, American businessman and politician, Mayor of Dallas (d. 1964) 1884 – Panait Istrati, Romanian journalist and author (d. 1935) 1888 – Prince Christopher of Greece and Denmark (d. 1940) 1889 – Charles Darrow, American game designer, created Monopoly (d. 1967) 1889 – Zofia Kossak-Szczucka, Polish writer and member of the WW II Polish Resistance (d. 1968) 1890 – Angus Lewis Macdonald, Canadian lawyer and politician, 12th Premier of Nova Scotia (d. 1954) 1894 – V. V. Giri, Indian lawyer and politician, 4th President of India (d. 1980) 1895 – Hammy Love, Australian cricketer (d. 1969) 1897 – John W. Galbreath, American businessman and philanthropist, founded Darby Dan Farm (d. 1988) 1897 – Jack Haley, American actor and singer (d. 1979) 1900 – Arthur Porritt, Baron Porritt, New Zealand physician and politician, 11th Governor-General of New Zealand (d. 1994) 1901–present 1902 – Norma Shearer, Canadian-American actress (d. 1983) 1902 – Curt Siodmak, German-English author and screenwriter (d. 2000) 1902 – Arne Tiselius, Swedish biochemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1971) 1903 – Ward Moore, American author (d. 1978) 1905 – Era Bell Thompson, American journalist and author (d. 1986) 1907 – Su Yu, Chinese general and politician (d. 1984) 1908 – Rica Erickson, Australian botanist, historian, and author (d. 2009) 1908 – Billy Gonsalves, American soccer player (d. 1977) 1909 – Leo Fender, American businessman, founded Fender Musical Instruments Corporation (d. 1991) 1909 – Richard J. Hughes, American politician, 45th Governor of New Jersey, and Chief Justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court (d. 1992) 1910 – Guy Mairesse, French racing driver (d. 1954) 1911 – Leonidas Andrianopoulos, Greek footballer (d. 2011) 1911 – A. N. Sherwin-White, English historian and author (d. 1993) 1912 – Jorge Amado, Brazilian novelist and poet (d. 2001) 1913 – Noah Beery Jr., American actor (d. 1994) 1913 – Kalevi Kotkas, Estonian-Finnish high jumper and discus thrower (d. 1983) 1913 – Wolfgang Paul, German physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1993) 1914 – Jeff Corey, American actor and director (d. 2002) 1914 – Carlos Menditeguy, Argentinian racing driver and polo player (d. 1973) 1914 – Ray Smith, English cricketer (d. 1996) 1918 – Eugene P. Wilkinson, American admiral (d. 2013) 1920 – Red Holzman, American basketball player and coach (d. 1998) 1922 – Al Alberts, American pop singer and composer (d. 2009) 1923 – Bill Doolittle, American football player and coach (d. 2014) 1923 – Rhonda Fleming, American actress (d. 2020) 1923 – Fred Ridgway, English cricketer and footballer (d. 2015) 1923 – SM Sultan, Bangladeshi painter and illustrator (d. 1994) 1924 – Nancy Buckingham, English author (d. 2022) 1924 – Martha Hyer, American actress (d. 2014) 1924 – Jean-François Lyotard, French philosopher, sociologist, and literary theorist (d. 1998) 1925 – George Cooper, English general (d. 2020) 1926 – Marie-Claire Alain, French organist and educator (d. 2013) 1926 – Carol Ruth Vander Velde, American mathematician (d. 1972) 1927 – Jimmy Martin, American singer and guitarist (d. 2005) 1927 – Vernon Washington, American actor (d. 1988) 1928 – Jimmy Dean, American singer, actor, and businessman, founded the Jimmy Dean Food Company (d. 2010) 1928 – Eddie Fisher, American singer and actor (d. 2010) 1928 – Gerino Gerini, Italian racing driver (d. 2013) 1928 – Gus Mercurio, American-Australian actor (d. 2010) 1930 – Barry Unsworth, English-Italian author and academic (d. 2012) 1931 – Dolores Alexander, American journalist and activist (d. 2008) 1931 – Tom Laughlin, American actor, director, producer, and screenwriter (d. 2013) 1932 – Alexander Goehr, English composer and academic 1932 – Gaudencio Rosales, Filipino cardinal 1933 – Doyle Brunson, American poker player (d. 2023) 1933 – Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, Baroness Butler-Sloss, English lawyer and judge 1933 – Rocky Colavito, American baseball player and sportscaster 1933 – Keith Duckworth, English engineer, founded Cosworth (d. 2005) 1934 – Tevfik Kış, Turkish wrestler and trainer (d. 2019) 1935 – Ian Stewart, Baron Stewartby, English politician, Minister of State for the Armed Forces (d. 2018) 1935 – Ad van Luyn, Dutch bishop 1936 – Malene Schwartz, Danish actress 1937 – Anatoly Sobchak, Russian scholar and politician, Mayor of Saint Petersburg (d. 2000) 1938 – Tony Ross, English author and illustrator 1939 – Kate O'Mara, English actress (d. 2014) 1939 – Charlie Rose, American lawyer and politician (d. 2012) 1940 – Bobby Hatfield, American singer-songwriter (d. 2003) 1940 – Sid Waddell, English sportscaster (d. 2012) 1941 – Anita Lonsbrough, English swimmer and journalist 1941 – Susan Dorothea White, Australian painter and sculptor 1942 – Speedy Duncan, American football player (d. 2021) 1942 – Betsey Johnson, American fashion designer 1942 – Michael Pepper, English physicist and engineer 1943 – Louise Forestier, Canadian singer-songwriter and actress 1943 – Jimmy Griffin, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 2005) 1943 – Michael Mantler, American trumpet player and composer 1943 – Shafqat Rana, Indian-Pakistani cricketer 1943 – Ronnie Spector, American singer-songwriter (d. 2022) 1947 – Ian Anderson, Scottish-English singer-songwriter and guitarist 1947 – Anwar Ibrahim, Malaysian academic and politician, 10th Prime Minister of Malaysia 1947 – John Spencer, English rugby player and manager 1947 – Alan Ward, English cricketer 1948 – Nick Stringer, English actor 1950 – Patti Austin, American singer-songwriter 1951 – Juan Manuel Santos, Colombian businessman and politician, 59th President of Colombia 1952 – Daniel Hugh Kelly, American actor 1952 – Diane Venora, American actress 1954 – Peter Endrulat, German footballer 1954 – Rick Overton, American screenwriter, actor and comedian 1955 – Thomas Kidd, American illustrator 1955 – Jim Mees, American set designer (d. 2013) 1955 – Mel Tiangco, Filipino journalist and talk show host 1956 – Dianne Fromholtz, Australian tennis player 1956 – José Luis Montes, Spanish footballer and manager (d. 2013) 1956 – Fred Ottman, American wrestler 1956 – Charlie Peacock, American singer-songwriter, pianist, and producer 1956 – Perween Warsi, Indian-English businesswoman 1957 – Fred Ho, American saxophonist, composer, and playwright (d. 2014) 1957 – Andres Põime, Estonian architect 1957 – Aqeel Abbas Jafari, Pakistani writer, poet, architect and chief editor Urdu Dictionary Board 1958 – Michael Dokes, American boxer (d. 2012) 1958 – Jack Richards, English cricketer, coach, and manager 1958 – Rosie Winterton, English nurse and politician, Shadow Leader of the House of Commons 1959 – Rosanna Arquette, American actress, director, and producer 1959 – Albert Owen, Welsh sailor and politician 1959 – Mark Price, English drummer 1959 – Florent Vollant, Canadian singer-songwriter 1960 – Antonio Banderas, Spanish actor and producer 1960 – Annely Ojastu, Estonian sprinter and long jumper 1960 – Kenny Perry, American golfer 1961 – Jon Farriss, Australian drummer, songwriter, and producer 1962 – Suzanne Collins, American author and screenwriter 1962 – Julia Fordham, English singer-songwriter 1963 – Phoolan Devi, Indian lawyer and politician (d. 2001) 1963 – Anton Janssen, Dutch footballer and coach 1963 – Andrew Sullivan, English-American journalist and author 1963 – Henrik Fisker, Danish automotive designer and businessman 1964 – Aaron Hall, American singer-songwriter 1964 – Kåre Kolve, Norwegian saxophonist and composer 1964 – Hiro Takahashi, Japanese singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 2005) 1965 – Claudia Christian, American actress, singer, writer, and director 1965 – Pat Pitney, American university leader and sport shooter 1965 – Mike E. Smith, American jockey and sportscaster 1965 – John Starks, American basketball player and coach 1966 – Charlie Dimmock, English gardener and television host 1966 – Hansi Kürsch, German singer-songwriter and bass player 1966 – Hossam Hassan, Egyptian footballer and manager 1967 – Philippe Albert, Belgian footballer and sportscaster 1967 – Riddick Bowe, American boxer 1967 – Todd Nichols, American singer-songwriter and guitarist 1967 – Reinout Scholte, Dutch cricketer 1968 – Michael Bivins, American singer and producer 1968 – Greg Hawgood, Canadian ice hockey player and coach 1969 – Emily Symons, Australian actress 1969 – Brian Drummond, Canadian voice actor 1970 – Doug Flach, American tennis player 1970 – Bret Hedican, American ice hockey player and sportscaster 1970 – Brendon Julian, New Zealand-Australian cricketer and journalist 1970 – Steve Mautone, Australian footballer and coach 1971 – Sal Fasano, American baseball player and coach 1971 – Stephan Groth, Danish singer-songwriter 1971 – Roy Keane, Irish footballer and manager 1971 – Mario Kindelán, Cuban boxer 1971 – Paul Newlove, English rugby player 1971 – Kevin Randleman, American mixed martial artist and wrestler (d. 2016) 1971 – Justin Theroux, American actor 1972 – Dilana, South African singer-songwriter and actress 1972 – Lawrence Dallaglio, English rugby player and sportscaster 1972 – Angie Harmon, American model and actress 1972 – Christofer Johnsson, Swedish singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer 1973 – Lisa Raymond, American tennis player 1973 – Javier Zanetti, Argentinian footballer 1974 – Haifaa al-Mansour, Saudi Arabian director and producer 1974 – Luis Marín, Costa Rican footballer and manager 1974 – Rachel Simmons, American scholar and author 1974 – David Sommeil, French footballer 1975 – İlhan Mansız, Turkish footballer and figure skater 1976 – Roadkill, American wrestler 1976 – Ian Murray, Scottish businessman and politician, Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland 1977 – Danny Griffin, Irish footballer 1977 – Matt Morgan, English comedian, actor, and radio host 1978 – Danny Allsopp, Australian footballer 1978 – Marcus Fizer, American basketball player 1978 – Chris Read, English cricketer 1979 – Dinusha Fernando, Sri Lankan cricketer 1979 – JoAnna Garcia Swisher, American actress 1979 – Ted Geoghegan, American author, screenwriter, and producer 1979 – Brandon Lyon, American baseball player 1979 – Rémy Martin, French rugby player 1979 – Matjaž Perc, Slovene physicist 1979 – Yannick Schroeder, French racing driver 1980 – Wade Barrett, English boxer, wrestler, and actor 1980 – Aaron Staton, American actor 1981 – Taufik Hidayat, Indonesian badminton player 1982 – John Alvbåge, Swedish footballer 1982 – Josh Anderson, American baseball player 1982 – Julia Melim, Brazilian actress 1982 – Shaun Murphy, English snooker player 1983 – Kyle Brown, American soccer player 1983 – C. B. Dollaway, American mixed martial artist 1983 – Héctor Faubel, Spanish motorcycle racer 1983 – Alexander Perezhogin, Russian ice hockey player 1983 – Mathieu Roy, Canadian ice hockey player 1984 – Ryan Eggold, American actor and composer 1984 – Mokomichi Hayami, Japanese model and actor 1984 – Jigar Naik, English cricketer 1985 – Enrico Cortese, Italian footballer 1985 – Roy O'Donovan, Irish footballer 1985 – Kakuryū Rikisaburō, Mongolian sumo wrestler 1985 – Julia Skripnik, Estonian tennis player 1986 – Andrea Hlaváčková, Czech tennis player 1987 – Jim Bakkum, Dutch singer and actor 1987 – Ari Boyland, New Zealand actor and singer 1989 – Sam Gagner, Canadian ice hockey player 1989 – Ben Sahar, Israeli footballer 1989 – Brenton Thwaites, Australian actor 1990 – Cruze Ah-Nau, Australian rugby player 1990 – Lee Sung-kyung, South Korean model, actress, and singer 1990 – Lucas Till, American actor 1991 – Dagný Brynjarsdóttir, Icelandic footballer 1991 – Marcus Foligno, American-Canadian ice hockey player 1991 – Nikos Korovesis, Greek footballer 1991 – Chris Tremain, Australian cricketer 1992 – Archie Bradley, American baseball player 1992 – Oliver Rowland, English racing driver 1993 – Andre Drummond, American basketball player 1994 – Bernardo Silva, Portuguese footballer 1995 – Dalvin Cook, American football player 1996 – Lauren Tait, Scottish netball player 1997 – Kylie Jenner, American television personality and businesswoman 1997 – Luca Marini, Italian motorcycle rider 1999 – Ja Morant, American basketball player 1999 – Ritomo Miyata, Japanese racing driver 2000 – Sophia Smith, American soccer player 2000 – Jüri Vips, Estonian racing driver Deaths Pre-1600 258 – Lawrence of Rome, Spanish-Italian deacon and saint (b. 225) 794 – Fastrada, Frankish noblewoman (b. 765) 796 – Eanbald, archbishop of York 847 – Al-Wathiq, Abbasid caliph (b. 816) 955 – Bulcsú, Hungarian tribal chieftain (horka) 955 – Conrad ('the Red'), duke of Lorraine 1241 – Eleanor, Fair Maid of Brittany (b. 1184) 1250 – Eric IV of Denmark (b. 1216) 1284 – Tekuder, Khan of the Mongol Ilkhanate 1316 – Felim mac Aedh Ua Conchobair, King of Connacht 1322 – John of La Verna, Italian ascetic (b. 1259) 1410 – Louis II, Duke of Bourbon (b. 1337) 1535 – Ippolito de' Medici, Italian cardinal (b. 1509) 1536 – Francis III, Duke of Brittany, Dauphin of France, Brother of Henry II (b. 1518) 1601–1900 1653 – Maarten Tromp, Dutch admiral (b. 1598) 1655 – Alfonso de la Cueva, 1st Marquis of Bedmar, Spanish cardinal and diplomat (b. 1572) 1660 – Esmé Stewart, 2nd Duke of Richmond (b. 1649) 1723 – Guillaume Dubois, French cardinal and politician, French Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs (b. 1656) 1759 – Ferdinand VI of Spain (b. 1713) 1784 – Allan Ramsay, Scottish-English painter (b. 1713) 1796 – Ignaz Anton von Indermauer, Austrian nobleman and government official (b. 1759) 1802 – Franz Aepinus, German-Russian philosopher and academic (b. 1724) 1806 – Michael Haydn, Austrian composer and educator (b. 1737) 1839 – Sir John St Aubyn, 5th Baronet, English lawyer and politician (b. 1758) 1862 – Hon'inbō Shūsaku, Japanese Go player (b. 1829) 1875 – Karl Andree, German geographer and journalist (b. 1808) 1889 – Arthur Böttcher, German pathologist and anatomist (b. 1831) 1890 – John Boyle O'Reilly, Irish-born poet, journalist and fiction writer (b. 1844) 1896 – Otto Lilienthal, German pilot and engineer (b. 1848) 1901–present 1904 – Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau, French lawyer and politician, 68th Prime Minister of France (b. 1846) 1913 – Johannes Linnankoski, Finnish author (b. 1869) 1915 – Henry Moseley, English physicist and engineer (b. 1887) 1916 – John J. Loud, American inventor (b. 1844) 1918 – Erich Löwenhardt, German lieutenant and pilot (b. 1897) 1920 – Ádám Politzer, Hungarian-Austrian physician and academic (b. 1835) 1922 – Reginald Dunne, Irish Republican, executed for the killing of Sir Henry Wilson 1922 – Joseph O'Sullivan, Irish Republican, executed for the killing of Sir Henry Wilson 1929 – Pierre Fatou, French mathematician and astronomer (b. 1878) 1929 – Aletta Jacobs, Dutch physician (b. 1854) 1932 – Rin Tin Tin, American acting dog (b. 1918) 1933 – Alf Morgans, Welsh-Australian politician, 4th Premier of Western Australia (b. 1850) 1945 – Robert H. Goddard, American physicist and engineer (b. 1882) 1948 – Kan'ichi Asakawa, Japanese-American historian, author, and academic (b. 1873) 1948 – Andrew Brown, Scottish footballer and coach (b. 1870) 1948 – Montague Summers, English clergyman and author (b. 1880) 1949 – Homer Burton Adkins, American chemist (b. 1892) 1954 – Robert Adair, American-born British actor (b. 1900) 1958 – Frank Demaree, American baseball player and manager (b. 1910) 1960 – Hamide Ayşe Sultan, Ottoman princess (b. 1887) 1961 – Julia Peterkin, American author (b. 1880) 1963 – Estes Kefauver, American lawyer and politician (b. 1903) 1963 – Ernst Wetter, Swiss lawyer and jurist (b. 1877) 1969 – János Kodolányi, Hungarian author (b. 1899) 1976 – Bert Oldfield, Australian cricketer (b. 1894) 1979 – Dick Foran, American actor and singer (b. 1910) 1979 – Walter Gerlach, German physicist and academic (b. 1889) 1980 – Yahya Khan, Pakistani general and politician, 3rd President of Pakistan (b. 1917) 1982 – Anderson Bigode Herzer, Brazilian author and poet (b. 1962) 1985 – Nate Barragar, American football player and sergeant (b. 1906) 1987 – Georgios Athanasiadis-Novas, Greek lawyer and politician, 163rd Prime Minister of Greece (b. 1893) 1991 – Lưu Trọng Lư, Vietnamese poet and playwright (b. 1912) 1993 – Euronymous, Norwegian singer, guitarist, and producer (b. 1968) 1997 – Jean-Claude Lauzon, Canadian director and screenwriter (b. 1953) 1997 – Conlon Nancarrow, American-Mexican pianist and composer (b. 1912) 1999 – Jennifer Paterson, English chef and television presenter (b. 1928) 1999 – Baldev Upadhyaya, Indian historian, scholar, and critic (b. 1899) 2000 – Gilbert Parkhouse, Welsh cricketer and rugby player (b. 1925) 2001 – Lou Boudreau, American baseball player and manager (b. 1917) 2002 – Michael Houser, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1962) 2002 – Kristen Nygaard, Norwegian computer scientist and politician (b. 1926) 2007 – Henry Cabot Lodge Bohler, American lieutenant and pilot (b. 1925) 2007 – James E. Faust, American lawyer and religious leader (b. 1920) 2007 – Jean Rédélé, French race car driver and pilot, founded Alpine (b. 1922) 2007 – Tony Wilson, English journalist, producer, and manager, co-founded Factory Records (b. 1950) 2008 – Isaac Hayes, American singer-songwriter, pianist, producer, and actor (b. 1942) 2010 – Markus Liebherr, German-Swiss businessman (b. 1948) 2010 – Adam Stansfield, English footballer (b. 1978) 2010 – David L. Wolper, American director and producer (b. 1928) 2011 – Billy Grammer, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1925) 2012 – Philippe Bugalski, French race car driver (b. 1963) 2012 – Ioan Dicezare, Romanian general and pilot (b. 1916) 2012 – Irving Fein, American producer and manager (b. 1911) 2012 – William W. Momyer, American general and pilot (b. 1916) 2012 – Carlo Rambaldi, Italian special effects artist (b. 1925) 2013 – William P. Clark Jr., American judge and politician, 12th United States National Security Advisor (b. 1931) 2013 – Jonathan Dawson, Australian historian and academic (b. 1941) 2013 – Eydie Gormé, American singer and actress (b. 1928) 2013 – David C. Jones, American general (b. 1921) 2013 – Jody Payne, American singer and guitarist (b. 1936) 2013 – Amy Wallace, American author (b. 1955) 2014 – Jim Command, American baseball player and scout (b. 1928) 2014 – Dotty Lynch, American journalist and academic (b. 1945) 2014 – Kathleen Ollerenshaw, English mathematician, astronomer, and politician, Lord Mayor of Manchester (b. 1912) 2014 – Bob Wiesler, American baseball player (b. 1930) 2015 – Buddy Baker, American race car driver and sportscaster (b. 1941) 2015 – Endre Czeizel, Hungarian physician, geneticist, and academic (b. 1935) 2015 – Knut Osnes, Norwegian footballer and coach (b. 1922) 2015 – Eriek Verpale, Belgian author and poet (b. 1952) 2017 – Ruth Pfau, German-Pakistani doctor and nun (b. 1929) 2019 – Jeffrey Epstein, American financier (b. 1953) 2021 – Tony Esposito, Canadian-American ice hockey player (b. 1943) 2022 – Vesa-Matti Loiri, Finnish actor, musician and comedian (b. 1945) Holidays and observances Argentine Air Force Day (Argentina) Christian feast day: Bessus Blane (Roman Catholic Church) Geraint of Dumnonia Lawrence of Rome Nicola Saggio Nuestra Señora del Buen Suceso de Parañaque, Patroness of Parañaque, Philippines August 10 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics) Declaration of Independence of Quito, proclaimed independence from Spain on August 10, 1809. Independence was finally attained on May 24, 1822, at the Battle of Pichincha. (Ecuador) International Biodiesel Day National Veterans Day (Indonesia) World Lion Day References External links Days of the year August

2319

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antipope%20Victor%20IV

Antipope Victor IV

Two antipopes used the regnal name Victor IV: Antipope Victor IV (1138) Antipope Victor IV (1159–1164) (1095–1164)

2322

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio%20signal%20processing

Audio signal processing

Audio signal processing is a subfield of signal processing that is concerned with the electronic manipulation of audio signals. Audio signals are electronic representations of sound waves—longitudinal waves which travel through air, consisting of compressions and rarefactions. The energy contained in audio signals or sound power level is typically measured in decibels. As audio signals may be represented in either digital or analog format, processing may occur in either domain. Analog processors operate directly on the electrical signal, while digital processors operate mathematically on its digital representation. History The motivation for audio signal processing began at the beginning of the 20th century with inventions like the telephone, phonograph, and radio that allowed for the transmission and storage of audio signals. Audio processing was necessary for early radio broadcasting, as there were many problems with studio-to-transmitter links. The theory of signal processing and its application to audio was largely developed at Bell Labs in the mid 20th century. Claude Shannon and Harry Nyquist's early work on communication theory, sampling theory and pulse-code modulation (PCM) laid the foundations for the field. In 1957, Max Mathews became the first person to synthesize audio from a computer, giving birth to computer music. Major developments in digital audio coding and audio data compression include differential pulse-code modulation (DPCM) by C. Chapin Cutler at Bell Labs in 1950, linear predictive coding (LPC) by Fumitada Itakura (Nagoya University) and Shuzo Saito (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone) in 1966, adaptive DPCM (ADPCM) by P. Cummiskey, Nikil S. Jayant and James L. Flanagan at Bell Labs in 1973, discrete cosine transform (DCT) coding by Nasir Ahmed, T. Natarajan and K. R. Rao in 1974, and modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT) coding by J. P. Princen, A. W. Johnson and A. B. Bradley at the University of Surrey in 1987. LPC is the basis for perceptual coding and is widely used in speech coding, while MDCT coding is widely used in modern audio coding formats such as MP3 and Advanced Audio Coding (AAC). Types Analog An analog audio signal is a continuous signal represented by an electrical voltage or current that is analogous to the sound waves in the air. Analog signal processing then involves physically altering the continuous signal by changing the voltage or current or charge via electrical circuits. Historically, before the advent of widespread digital technology, analog was the only method by which to manipulate a signal. Since that time, as computers and software have become more capable and affordable, digital signal processing has become the method of choice. However, in music applications, analog technology is often still desirable as it often produces nonlinear responses that are difficult to replicate with digital filters. Digital A digital representation expresses the audio waveform as a sequence of symbols, usually binary numbers. This permits signal processing using digital circuits such as digital signal processors, microprocessors and general-purpose computers. Most modern audio systems use a digital approach as the techniques of digital signal processing are much more powerful and efficient than analog domain signal processing. Applications Processing methods and application areas include storage, data compression, music information retrieval, speech processing, localization, acoustic detection, transmission, noise cancellation, acoustic fingerprinting, sound recognition, synthesis, and enhancement (e.g. equalization, filtering, level compression, echo and reverb removal or addition, etc.). Audio broadcasting Audio signal processing is used when broadcasting audio signals in order to enhance their fidelity or optimize for bandwidth or latency. In this domain, the most important audio processing takes place just before the transmitter. The audio processor here must prevent or minimize overmodulation, compensate for non-linear transmitters (a potential issue with medium wave and shortwave broadcasting), and adjust overall loudness to the desired level. Active noise control Active noise control is a technique designed to reduce unwanted sound. By creating a signal that is identical to the unwanted noise but with the opposite polarity, the two signals cancel out due to destructive interference. Audio synthesis Audio synthesis is the electronic generation of audio signals. A musical instrument that accomplishes this is called a synthesizer. Synthesizers can either imitate sounds or generate new ones. Audio synthesis is also used to generate human speech using speech synthesis. Audio effects Audio effects alter the sound of a musical instrument or other audio source. Common effects include distortion, often used with electric guitar in electric blues and rock music; dynamic effects such as volume pedals and compressors, which affect loudness; filters such as wah-wah pedals and graphic equalizers, which modify frequency ranges; modulation effects, such as chorus, flangers and phasers; pitch effects such as pitch shifters; and time effects, such as reverb and delay, which create echoing sounds and emulate the sound of different spaces. Musicians, audio engineers and record producers use effects units during live performances or in the studio, typically with electric guitar, bass guitar, electronic keyboard or electric piano. While effects are most frequently used with electric or electronic instruments, they can be used with any audio source, such as acoustic instruments, drums, and vocals. Computer audition See also Sound card Sound effect References Further reading Audio electronics Signal processing

2323

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s%20law

Amdahl's law

In computer architecture, Amdahl's law (or Amdahl's argument) is a formula which gives the theoretical speedup in latency of the execution of a task at fixed workload that can be expected of a system whose resources are improved. It states that "the overall performance improvement gained by optimizing a single part of a system is limited by the fraction of time that the improved part is actually used". It is named after computer scientist Gene Amdahl, and was presented at the American Federation of Information Processing Societies (AFIPS) Spring Joint Computer Conference in 1967. Amdahl's law is often used in parallel computing to predict the theoretical speedup when using multiple processors. For example, if a program needs 20 hours to complete using a single thread, but a one-hour portion of the program cannot be parallelized, therefore only the remaining 19 hours' () execution time can be parallelized, then regardless of how many threads are devoted to a parallelized execution of this program, the minimum execution time is always more than 1 hour. Hence, the theoretical speedup is less than 20 times the single thread performance, . Definition Amdahl's law can be formulated in the following way: where Slatency is the theoretical speedup of the execution of the whole task; s is the speedup of the part of the task that benefits from improved system resources; p is the proportion of execution time that the part benefiting from improved resources originally occupied. Furthermore, shows that the theoretical speedup of the execution of the whole task increases with the improvement of the resources of the system and that regardless of the magnitude of the improvement, the theoretical speedup is always limited by the part of the task that cannot benefit from the improvement. Amdahl's law applies only to the cases where the problem size is fixed. In practice, as more computing resources become available, they tend to get used on larger problems (larger datasets), and the time spent in the parallelizable part often grows much faster than the inherently serial work. In this case, Gustafson's law gives a less pessimistic and more realistic assessment of the parallel performance. Derivation A task executed by a system whose resources are improved compared to an initial similar system can be split up into two parts: a part that does not benefit from the improvement of the resources of the system; a part that benefits from the improvement of the resources of the system. An example is a computer program that processes files. A part of that program may scan the directory of the disk and create a list of files internally in memory. After that, another part of the program passes each file to a separate thread for processing. The part that scans the directory and creates the file list cannot be sped up on a parallel computer, but the part that processes the files can. The execution time of the whole task before the improvement of the resources of the system is denoted as . It includes the execution time of the part that would not benefit from the improvement of the resources and the execution time of the one that would benefit from it. The fraction of the execution time of the task that would benefit from the improvement of the resources is denoted by . The one concerning the part that would not benefit from it is therefore . Then: It is the execution of the part that benefits from the improvement of the resources that is accelerated by the factor after the improvement of the resources. Consequently, the execution time of the part that does not benefit from it remains the same, while the part that benefits from it becomes: The theoretical execution time of the whole task after the improvement of the resources is then: Amdahl's law gives the theoretical speedup in latency of the execution of the whole task at fixed workload , which yields Parallel programs If 30% of the execution time may be the subject of a speedup, p will be 0.3; if the improvement makes the affected part twice as fast, s will be 2. Amdahl's law states that the overall speedup of applying the improvement will be: For example, assume that we are given a serial task which is split into four consecutive parts, whose percentages of execution time are , , , and respectively. Then we are told that the 1st part is not sped up, so , while the 2nd part is sped up 5 times, so , the 3rd part is sped up 20 times, so , and the 4th part is sped up 1.6 times, so . By using Amdahl's law, the overall speedup is Notice how the 5 times and 20 times speedup on the 2nd and 3rd parts respectively don't have much effect on the overall speedup when the 4th part (48% of the execution time) is accelerated by only 1.6 times. Serial programs [[File:Optimizing-different-parts.svg|thumb|400px|Assume that a task has two independent parts, A and B. Part B takes roughly 25% of the time of the whole computation. By working very hard, one may be able to make this part 5 times faster, but this reduces the time of the whole computation only slightly. In contrast, one may need to perform less work to make part A perform twice as fast. This will make the computation much faster than by optimizing part B, even though part B'''s speedup is greater in terms of the ratio, (5 times versus 2 times).]] For example, with a serial program in two parts A and B for which and , if part B is made to run 5 times faster, that is and , then if part A is made to run 2 times faster, that is and , then Therefore, making part A to run 2 times faster is better than making part B to run 5 times faster. The percentage improvement in speed can be calculated as Improving part A by a factor of 2 will increase overall program speed by a factor of 1.60, which makes it 37.5% faster than the original computation. However, improving part B by a factor of 5, which presumably requires more effort, will achieve an overall speedup factor of 1.25 only, which makes it 20% faster. Optimizing the sequential part of parallel programs If the non-parallelizable part is optimized by a factor of , then It follows from Amdahl's law that the speedup due to parallelism is given by When , we have , meaning that the speedup is measured with respect to the execution time after the non-parallelizable part is optimized. When , If , and , then: Transforming sequential parts of parallel programs into parallelizable Next, we consider the case wherein the non-parallelizable part is reduced by a factor of , and the parallelizable part is correspondingly increased. Then It follows from Amdahl's law that the speedup due to parallelism is given by Relation to the law of diminishing returns Amdahl's law is often conflated with the law of diminishing returns, whereas only a special case of applying Amdahl's law demonstrates law of diminishing returns. If one picks optimally (in terms of the achieved speedup) what is to be improved, then one will see monotonically decreasing improvements as one improves. If, however, one picks non-optimally, after improving a sub-optimal component and moving on to improve a more optimal component, one can see an increase in the return. Note that it is often rational to improve a system in an order that is "non-optimal" in this sense, given that some improvements are more difficult or require larger development time than others. Amdahl's law does represent the law of diminishing returns if one is considering what sort of return one gets by adding more processors to a machine, if one is running a fixed-size computation that will use all available processors to their capacity. Each new processor added to the system will add less usable power than the previous one. Each time one doubles the number of processors the speedup ratio will diminish, as the total throughput heads toward the limit of 1/(1 − p''). This analysis neglects other potential bottlenecks such as memory bandwidth and I/O bandwidth. If these resources do not scale with the number of processors, then merely adding processors provides even lower returns. An implication of Amdahl's law is that to speed up real applications which have both serial and parallel portions, heterogeneous computing techniques are required. There are novel speedup and energy consumption models based on a more general representation of heterogeneity, referred to as the normal form heterogeneity, that support a wide range of heterogeneous many-core architectures. These modelling methods aim to predict system power efficiency and performance ranges, and facilitates research and development at the hardware and system software levels. See also Gustafson's law Universal Law of Computational Scalability Analysis of parallel algorithms Critical path method Moore's law References Further reading External links . Amdahl discusses his graduate work at the University of Wisconsin and his design of WISC. Discusses his role in the design of several computers for IBM including the STRETCH, IBM 701, and IBM 704. He discusses his work with Nathaniel Rochester and IBM's management of the design process. Mentions work with Ramo-Wooldridge, Aeronutronic, and Computer Sciences Corporation "Amdahl's Law" by Joel F. Klein, Wolfram Demonstrations Project (2007) Amdahl's Law in the Multicore Era (July 2008) Analysis of parallel algorithms Computer architecture statements

2326

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April%2027

April 27

Events Pre-1600 247 – Philip the Arab marks the millennium of Rome with a celebration of the ludi saeculares. 395 – Emperor Arcadius marries Aelia Eudoxia, daughter of the Frankish general Flavius Bauto. She becomes one of the more powerful Roman empresses of Late Antiquity. 711 – Islamic conquest of Hispania: Moorish troops led by Tariq ibn Ziyad land at Gibraltar to begin their invasion of the Iberian Peninsula (Al-Andalus). 1296 – First War of Scottish Independence: John Balliol's Scottish army is defeated by an English army commanded by John de Warenne, 6th Earl of Surrey at the Battle of Dunbar. 1509 – Pope Julius II places the Italian state of Venice under interdict. 1521 – Battle of Mactan: Explorer Ferdinand Magellan is killed by natives in the Philippines led by chief Lapulapu. 1539 – Official founding of the city of Bogotá, New Granada (nowadays Colombia), by Nikolaus Federmann and Sebastián de Belalcázar. 1565 – Cebu is established becoming the first Spanish settlement in the Philippines. 1595 – The relics of Saint Sava are incinerated in Belgrade on the Vračar plateau by Ottoman Grand Vizier Sinan Pasha; the site of the incineration is now the location of the Church of Saint Sava, one of the largest Orthodox churches in the world 1601–1900 1650 – The Battle of Carbisdale: A Royalist army from Orkney invades mainland Scotland but is defeated by a Covenanter army. 1667 – Blind and impoverished, John Milton sells Paradise Lost to a printer for £10, so that it could be entered into the Stationers' Register. 1805 – First Barbary War: United States Marines and Berbers attack the Tripolitan city of Derna (The "shores of Tripoli" part of the Marines' Hymn). 1813 – War of 1812: American troops capture York, the capital of Upper Canada, in the Battle of York. 1861 – American President Abraham Lincoln suspends the writ of habeas corpus. 1901–present 1906 – The State Duma of the Russian Empire meets for the first time. 1909 – Sultan of Ottoman Empire Abdul Hamid II is overthrown, and is succeeded by his brother, Mehmed V. 1911 – The Second Canton Uprising took place in Guangzhou, Qing China but was suppressed. 1927 – Carabineros de Chile (Chilean national police force and gendarmerie) are created. 1936 – The United Auto Workers (UAW) gains autonomy from the American Federation of Labor. 1941 – World War II: German troops enter Athens. 1945 – World War II: The last German formations withdraw from Finland to Norway. The Lapland War and thus, World War II in Finland, comes to an end and the Raising the Flag on the Three-Country Cairn photograph is taken. 1945 – World War II: Benito Mussolini is arrested by Italian partisans in Dongo, while attempting escape disguised as a German soldier. 1953 – Operation Moolah offers $50,000 to any pilot who defects with a fully mission-capable Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-15 to South Korea. The first pilot was to receive $100,000. 1967 – Expo 67 officially opens in Montreal, Quebec, Canada with a large opening ceremony broadcast around the world. It opens to the public the next day. 1974 – 109 people are killed in a plane crash near Pulkovo Airport. 1976 – Thirty-seven people are killed when American Airlines Flight 625 crashes at Cyril E. King Airport in Saint Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands. 1978 – John Ehrlichman, a former aide to U.S. President Richard Nixon, is released from the Federal Correctional Institution, Safford, Arizona, after serving 18 months for Watergate-related crimes. 1978 – The Saur Revolution begins in Afghanistan, ending the following morning with the murder of Afghan President Mohammed Daoud Khan and the establishment of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. 1978 – Willow Island disaster: In the deadliest construction accident in United States history, 51 construction workers are killed when a cooling tower under construction collapses at the Pleasants Power Station in Willow Island, West Virginia. 1986 – The city of Pripyat and surrounding areas are evacuated due to the Chernobyl disaster. 1987 – The U.S. Department of Justice bars Austrian President Kurt Waldheim (and his wife, Elisabeth, who had also been a Nazi) from entering the US, charging that he had aided in the deportations and executions of thousands of Jews and others as a German Army officer during World War II. 1989 – The April 27 demonstrations, student-led protests responding to the April 26 Editorial, during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. 1992 – The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, comprising Serbia and Montenegro, is proclaimed. 1992 – Betty Boothroyd becomes the first woman to be elected Speaker of the British House of Commons in its 700-year history. 1992 – The Russian Federation and 12 other former Soviet republics become members of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. 1993 – Most of the Zambia national football team lose their lives in a plane crash off Libreville, Gabon en route to Dakar, Senegal to play a 1994 FIFA World Cup qualifying match against Senegal. 1994 – South African general election: The first democratic general election in South Africa, in which black citizens could vote. The Interim Constitution comes into force. 2005 – Airbus A380 aircraft has its maiden test flight. 2006 – Construction begins on the Freedom Tower (later renamed One World Trade Center) in New York City. 2007 – Estonian authorities remove the Bronze Soldier, a Soviet Red Army war memorial in Tallinn, amid political controversy with Russia. 2007 – Israeli archaeologists discover the tomb of Herod the Great south of Jerusalem. 2011 – The 2011 Super Outbreak devastates parts of the Southeastern United States, especially the states of Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and Tennessee. Two hundred five tornadoes touched down on April 27 alone, killing more than 300 and injuring hundreds more. 2012 – At least four explosions hit the Ukrainian city of Dnipropetrovsk with at least 27 people injured. 2018 – The Panmunjom Declaration is signed between North and South Korea, officially declaring their intentions to end the Korean conflict. 2024 – The worst day of the tornado outbreak sequence of April 25–28, 2024, with 42 tornadoes, including one confirmed EF4 tornado, and two confirmed EF3 tornadoes, which killed 4 people in total. Births Pre-1600 85 BC – Decimus Junius Brutus Albinus, Roman politician and general (d. 43 BC) 1468 – Frederick Jagiellon, Primate of Poland (d. 1503) 1564 – Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland (d. 1632) 1556 – François Béroalde de Verville, French writer (d. 1626) 1593 – Mumtaz Mahal, Mughal empress buried at the Taj Mahal (d. 1631) 1601–1900 1650 – Charlotte Amalie of Hesse-Kassel, Queen Consort of Denmark (1670-1699) (d. 1714) 1654 – Charles Blount, English deist and philosopher (d. 1693) 1701 – Charles Emmanuel III of Sardinia (d. 1773) 1718 – Thomas Lewis, Irish-born American surveyor and lawyer (d. 1790) 1748 – Adamantios Korais, Greek-French philosopher and scholar (d. 1833) 1755 – Marc-Antoine Parseval, French mathematician and theorist (d. 1836) 1759 – Mary Wollstonecraft, English philosopher, historian, and novelist (d. 1797) 1788 – Charles Robert Cockerell, English architect, archaeologist, and writer (d. 1863) 1791 – Samuel Morse, American painter and inventor, co-invented the Morse code (d. 1872) 1812 – William W. Snow, American lawyer and politician (d. 1886) 1812 – Friedrich von Flotow, German composer (d. 1883) 1820 – Herbert Spencer, English biologist, anthropologist, sociologist, and philosopher (d. 1903) 1822 – Ulysses S. Grant, American general and politician, 18th President of the United States (d. 1885) 1840 – Edward Whymper, English-French mountaineer, explorer, author, and illustrator (d. 1911) 1848 – Otto, King of Bavaria (d. 1916) 1850 – Hans Hartwig von Beseler, German general and politician (d. 1921) 1853 – Jules Lemaître, French playwright and critic (d. 1914) 1857 – Theodor Kittelsen, Norwegian painter and illustrator (d. 1914) 1861 – William Arms Fisher, American composer and music historian (d. 1948) 1866 – Maurice Raoul-Duval, French polo player (d. 1916) 1875 – Frederick Fane, Irish-born, English cricketer (d. 1960) 1880 – Mihkel Lüdig, Estonian organist, composer, and conductor (d. 1958) 1882 – Jessie Redmon Fauset, American author and poet (d. 1961) 1887 – Warren Wood, American golfer (d. 1926) 1888 – Florence La Badie, Canadian actress (d. 1917) 1891 – Sergei Prokofiev, Russian pianist, composer, and conductor (d. 1953) 1893 – Draža Mihailović, Serbian general (d. 1946) 1893 – Allen Sothoron, American baseball player, coach, and manager (d. 1939) 1894 – George Petty, American painter and illustrator (d. 1975) 1894 – Nicolas Slonimsky, Russian pianist, composer, and conductor (d. 1995) 1896 – Rogers Hornsby, American baseball player, coach, and manager (d. 1963) 1896 – William Hudson, New Zealand-Australian engineer (d. 1978) 1896 – Wallace Carothers, American chemist and inventor of nylon (d. 1937) 1898 – Ludwig Bemelmans, Italian-American author and illustrator (d. 1962) 1899 – Walter Lantz, American animator, producer, screenwriter, and actor (d. 1994) 1900 – August Koern, Estonian politician and diplomat, Estonian Minister of Foreign Affairs in exile (d. 1989) 1901–present 1902 – Tiemoko Garan Kouyaté, Malian educator and activist (d. 1942) 1904 – Cecil Day-Lewis, Anglo-Irish poet and author (d. 1972) 1904 – Nikos Zachariadis, Greek politician (d. 1973) 1905 – John Kuck, American javelin thrower and shot putter (d. 1986) 1906 – Yiorgos Theotokas, Greek author and playwright (d. 1966) 1909 – Lim Bo Seng, Chinese businessman, resistance fighter of Force 136 and war hero of Singapore (d. 1944) 1910 – Chiang Ching-kuo, Chinese politician, 3rd President of the Republic of China (d. 1988) 1911 – Bruno Beger, German anthropologist and ethnologist (d. 2009) 1911 – Chris Berger, Dutch sprinter and footballer (d. 1965) 1912 – Jacques de Bourbon-Busset, French author and politician (d. 2001) 1912 – Zohra Sehgal, Indian actress, dancer, and choreographer (d. 2014) 1913 – Philip Abelson, American physicist and author (d. 2004) 1913 – Irving Adler, American mathematician, author, and academic (d. 2012) 1913 – Luz Long, German long jumper and soldier (d. 1943) 1916 – Robert Hugh McWilliams, Jr., American sergeant, lawyer, and judge (d. 2013) 1916 – Enos Slaughter, American baseball player and manager (d. 2002) 1917 – Roman Matsov, Estonian violinist, pianist, and conductor (d. 2001) 1918 – Sten Rudholm, Swedish lawyer and jurist (d. 2008) 1920 – Guido Cantelli, Italian conductor (d. 1956) 1920 – Mark Krasnosel'skii, Ukrainian mathematician and academic (d. 1997) 1920 – James Robert Mann, American colonel, lawyer, and politician (d. 2010) 1920 – Edwin Morgan, Scottish poet and translator (d. 2010) 1921 – Robert Dhéry, French actor, director, and screenwriter (d. 2004) 1922 – Jack Klugman, American actor (d. 2012) 1922 – Sheila Scott, English nurse and pilot (d. 1988) 1923 – Betty Mae Tiger Jumper, Seminole chief (d. 2011) 1924 – Vernon B. Romney, American lawyer and politician, 14th Attorney General of Utah (d. 2013) 1925 – Derek Chinnery, English broadcaster (d. 2015) 1926 – Tim LaHaye, American minister, activist, and author (d. 2016) 1926 – Basil A. Paterson, American lawyer and politician, 59th Secretary of State of New York (d. 2014) 1926 – Alan Reynolds, English painter and educator (d. 2014) 1927 – Coretta Scott King, African-American activist and author (d. 2006) 1927 – Joe Moakley, American soldier, lawyer, and politician (d. 2001) 1929 – Nina Ponomaryova, Russian discus thrower and coach (d. 2016) 1931 – Igor Oistrakh, Ukrainian violinist and educator (d. 2021) 1932 – Anouk Aimée, French actress 1932 – Pik Botha, South African lawyer, politician, and diplomat, 8th South African Ambassador to the United States (d. 2018) 1932 – Casey Kasem, American disc jockey, radio celebrity, and voice actor; co-created American Top 40 (d. 2014) 1932 – Chuck Knox, American football coach (d. 2018) 1932 – Derek Minter, English motorcycle racer (d. 2015) 1932 – Gian-Carlo Rota, Italian-American mathematician and philosopher (d. 1999) 1933 – Peter Imbert, Baron Imbert, English police officer and politician, Lord Lieutenant for Greater London (d. 2017) 1935 – Theodoros Angelopoulos, Greek director, producer, and screenwriter (d. 2012) 1935 – Ron Morris, American pole vaulter and coach 1936 – Geoffrey Shovelton, English singer and illustrator (d. 2016) 1937 – Sandy Dennis, American actress (d. 1992) 1937 – Robin Eames, Irish Anglican archbishop 1937 – Richard Perham, English biologist and academic (d. 2015) 1938 – Earl Anthony, American bowler and sportscaster (d. 2001) 1938 – Alain Caron, Canadian ice hockey player (d. 1986) 1939 – Judy Carne, English actress and comedian (d. 2015) 1939 – Stanisław Dziwisz, Polish cardinal 1941 – Fethullah Gülen, Turkish preacher and theologian 1941 – Dilip Kumar Chakrabarti, Indian archaeologist 1941 – Lee Roy Jordan, American football player 1942 – Ruth Glick, American author 1942 – Jim Keltner, American drummer 1943 – Helmut Marko, Austrian race car driver and manager 1944 – Michael Fish, English meteorologist and journalist 1944 – Cuba Gooding Sr., American singer (d. 2017) 1944 – Herb Pedersen, American singer-songwriter and guitarist 1945 – Martin Chivers, English footballer and manager 1945 – Terry Willesee, Australian journalist and television host 1945 – August Wilson, American author and playwright (d. 2005) 1946 – Franz Roth, German footballer 1947 – G. K. Butterfield, African-American soldier, lawyer, and politician 1947 – Nick Greiner, Hungarian-Australian politician, 37th Premier of New South Wales 1947 – Pete Ham, Welsh singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 1975) 1947 – Keith Magnuson, Canadian ice hockey player and coach (d. 2003) 1947 – Ann Peebles, American soul singer-songwriter 1948 – Frank Abagnale Jr., American security consultant and criminal 1948 – Josef Hickersberger, Austrian footballer, coach, and manager 1948 – Kate Pierson, American singer-songwriter and bass player 1950 – Jaime Fresnedi, Filipino politician 1951 – Ace Frehley, American guitarist and songwriter 1952 – Larry Elder, American lawyer and talk show host 1952 – George Gervin, American basketball player 1952 – Ari Vatanen, Finnish race car driver and politician 1953 – Arielle Dombasle, French-American actress and model 1954 – Frank Bainimarama, Fijian commander and politician, 8th Prime Minister of Fiji 1954 – Herman Edwards, American football player, coach, and sportscaster 1954 – Mark Holden, Australian singer, actor, and lawyer 1955 – Eric Schmidt, American engineer and businessman 1956 – Bryan Harvey, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 2006) 1957 – Willie Upshaw, American baseball player and manager 1959 – Sheena Easton, Scottish-American singer-songwriter, actress, and producer 1959 – Marco Pirroni, English singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer 1960 – Mike Krushelnyski, Canadian ice hockey player and coach 1961 – Andrew Schlafly, American lawyer and activist, founded Conservapedia 1962 – Ángel Comizzo, Argentinian footballer and manager 1962 – Seppo Räty, Finnish javelin thrower and coach 1962 – Im Sang-soo, South Korean director and screenwriter 1962 – Andrew Selous, English soldier and politician 1963 – Russell T Davies, Welsh screenwriter and producer 1965 – Anna Chancellor, English actress 1966 – Yoshihiro Togashi, Japanese illustrator 1967 – Willem-Alexander, King of the Netherlands 1967 – Tommy Smith, Scottish saxophonist, composer, and educator 1967 – Erik Thomson, Scottish-New Zealand actor 1967 – Jason Whitlock, American football player and journalist 1968 – Dana Milbank, American journalist and author 1969 – Cory Booker, African-American lawyer and politician 1969 – Darcey Bussell, English ballerina 1972 – Nigel Barker, English photographer and author 1973 – Sharlee D'Angelo, Swedish bass player and songwriter 1973 – Sébastien Lareau, Canadian tennis player 1974 – Frank Catalanotto, American baseball player 1975 – Chris Carpenter, American baseball player 1975 – Pedro Feliz, Dominican baseball player 1975 – Kazuyoshi Funaki, Japanese ski jumper 1976 – Isobel Campbell, Scottish singer-songwriter and cellist 1976 – Sally Hawkins, English actress 1976 – Walter Pandiani, Uruguayan footballer 1979 – Vladimir Kozlov, Ukrainian actor and wrestler 1980 – Sybille Bammer, Austrian tennis player 1980 – Christian Lara, Ecuadorian footballer 1983 – Ari Graynor, American actress and producer 1984 – Pierre-Marc Bouchard, Canadian ice hockey player 1984 – Patrick Stump, American musician, singer, and songwriter 1985 – Meselech Melkamu, Ethiopian runner 1986 – Jenna Coleman, English actress 1986 – Dinara Safina, Russian tennis player 1987 – Taylor Chorney, American ice hockey player 1987 – William Moseley, English actor 1987 – Wang Feifei, Chinese singer and actress 1988 – Lizzo, American singer and rapper 1988 – Semyon Varlamov, Russian ice hockey player 1989 – Lars Bender, German footballer 1989 – Sven Bender, German footballer 1990 – Austin Dillon, American race car driver 1991 – Lara Gut, Swiss skier 1992 – Keenan Allen, American football player 1994 – Corey Seager, American baseball player 1995 – Nick Kyrgios, Australian tennis player 1998 – Cristian Romero, Argentine footballer 2003 – Xavier Worthy, American football player Deaths Pre-1600 630 – Ardashir III of Persia (b. 621) 1160 – Rudolf I, Count of Bregenz (b. 1081) 1272 – Zita, Italian saint (b. 1212) 1321 – Nicolò Albertini, Italian cardinal statesman (b. c. 1250) 1353 – Simeon of Moscow, Grand Prince of Moscow and Vladimir 1403 – Maria of Bosnia, Countess of Helfenstein (b. 1335) 1404 – Philip II, Duke of Burgundy (b. 1342) 1463 – Isidore of Kiev (b. 1385) 1521 – Ferdinand Magellan, Portuguese sailor and explorer (b. 1480) 1599 – Maeda Toshiie, Japanese general (b. 1538) 1601–1900 1605 – Pope Leo XI (b. 1535) 1607 – Edward Cromwell, 3rd Baron Cromwell, Governor of Lecale (b. 1560) 1613 – Robert Abercromby, Scottish priest and missionary (b. 1532) 1656 – Jan van Goyen, Dutch painter and illustrator (b. 1596) 1694 – John George IV, Elector of Saxony (b. 1668) 1695 – John Trenchard, English politician, Secretary of State for the Northern Department (b. 1640) 1702 – Jean Bart, French admiral (b. 1651) 1782 – William Talbot, 1st Earl Talbot, English politician, Lord Steward of the Household (b. 1710) 1813 – Zebulon Pike, American general and explorer (b. 1779) 1873 – William Macready, English actor and manager (b. 1793) 1882 – Ralph Waldo Emerson, American poet and philosopher (b. 1803) 1893 – John Ballance, Irish-born New Zealand journalist and politician, 14th Prime Minister of New Zealand (b. 1839) 1896 – Henry Parkes, English-Australian businessman and politician, 7th Premier of New South Wales (b. 1815) 1901–present 1915 – John Labatt, Canadian businessman (b. 1838) 1915 – Alexander Scriabin, Russian pianist and composer (b. 1872) 1932 – Hart Crane, American poet (b. 1899) 1936 – Karl Pearson, English mathematician and academic (b. 1857) 1937 – Antonio Gramsci, Italian sociologist, linguist, and politician (b. 1891) 1938 – Edmund Husserl, Czech mathematician and philosopher (b. 1859) 1949 – Benjamin Faunce, American druggist and businessman (b. 1873) 1952 – Guido Castelnuovo, Italian mathematician and statistician (b. 1865) 1961 – Roy Del Ruth, American director, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1893) 1962 – A. K. Fazlul Huq, Bangladeshi-Pakistani lawyer and politician, Pakistani Minister of the Interior (b. 1873) 1965 – Edward R. Murrow, American journalist (b. 1908) 1967 – William Douglas Cook, New Zealand farmer, founded the Eastwoodhill Arboretum (b. 1884) 1969 – René Barrientos, Bolivian soldier, pilot, and politician, 55th President of Bolivia (b. 1919) 1970 – Arthur Shields, Irish rebel and actor (b. 1896) 1972 – Kwame Nkrumah, Ghanaian politician, 1st President of Ghana (b. 1909) 1973 – Carlos Menditeguy, Argentinian race car driver and polo player (b. 1914) 1977 – Stanley Adams, American actor and screenwriter (b. 1915) 1988 – Fred Bear, American hunter and author (b. 1902) 1989 – Konosuke Matsushita, Japanese businessman, founded Panasonic (b. 1894) 1992 – Olivier Messiaen, French organist and composer (b. 1908) 1992 – Gerard K. O'Neill, American physicist and astronomer (b. 1927) 1995 – Katherine DeMille, Canadian-American actress (b. 1911) 1995 – Willem Frederik Hermans, Dutch author, poet, and playwright (b. 1921) 1996 – William Colby, American diplomat, 10th Director of Central Intelligence (b. 1920) 1996 – Gilles Grangier, French director and screenwriter (b. 1911) 1998 – John Bassett, Canadian journalist and politician (b. 1915) 1998 – Carlos Castaneda, Peruvian-American anthropologist and author (b. 1925) 1998 – Anne Desclos, French journalist and author (b. 1907) 1998 – Browning Ross, American runner and soldier (b. 1924) 1999 – Al Hirt, American trumpet player and bandleader (b. 1922) 1999 – Dale C. Thomson, Canadian historian, author, and academic (b. 1923) 1999 – Cyril Washbrook, English cricketer (b. 1914) 2002 – George Alec Effinger, American author (b. 1947) 2002 – Ruth Handler, American inventor and businesswoman, created the Barbie doll (b. 1916) 2005 – Red Horner, Canadian ice hockey player (b. 1909) 2006 – Julia Thorne, American author (b. 1944) 2007 – Mstislav Rostropovich, Russian cellist and conductor (b. 1927) 2009 – Frankie Manning, American dancer and choreographer (b. 1914) 2009 – Woo Seung-yeon, South Korean model and actress (b. 1983) 2009 – Feroz Khan (actor), Indian Actor, Film Director & Producer (b. 1939) 2011 – Marian Mercer, American actress and singer (b. 1935) 2012 – Daniel E. Boatwright, American soldier and politician (b. 1930) 2012 – Bill Skowron, American baseball player (b. 1930) 2013 – Aída Bortnik, Argentinian screenwriter (b. 1938) 2013 – Lorraine Copeland, Scottish archaeologist (b. 1921) 2013 – Antonio Díaz Jurado, Spanish footballer (b. 1969) 2013 – Jérôme Louis Heldring, Dutch journalist and author (b. 1917) 2013 – Aloysius Jin Luxian, Chinese bishop (b. 1916) 2013 – Mutula Kilonzo, Kenyan lawyer and politician, Kenyan Minister of Justice (b. 1948) 2014 – Yigal Arnon, Israeli lawyer (b. 1929) 2014 – Vujadin Boškov, Serbian footballer, coach, and manager (b. 1931) 2014 – Daniel Colchico, American football player and coach (b. 1935) 2014 – Harry Firth, Australian race car driver and manager (b. 1918) 2015 – Gene Fullmer, American boxer (b. 1931) 2015 – Verne Gagne, American football player, wrestler, and trainer (b. 1926) 2015 – Alexander Rich, American biologist, biophysicist, and academic (b. 1924) 2017 – Vinod Khanna, Indian actor, producer and politician (b. 1946) 2017 – Sadanoyama Shinmatsu, Japanese sumo wrestler (b. 1938) 2021 – Manoj Das, Indian writer (b. 1934) 2022 – Liao Guoxun, Chinese politician (b. 1963) 2023 – Jerry Springer, American politician and actor (b. 1944) 2024 – C. J. Sansom, British author (b. 1952) Holidays and observances Christian feast days: Anthimus of Nicomedia Assicus Floribert of Liège John of Constantinople Liberalis of Treviso Pollio Virgin of Montserrat Zita Origen Adamantius April 27 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics) Day of Russian Parliamentarism (Russia) Day of the Uprising Against the Occupying Forces (Slovenia) Flag Day (Moldova) Freedom Day (South Africa) Independence Day, celebrates the independence of Sierra Leone from United Kingdom in 1961. Independence Day, celebrates the independence of Togo from France in 1960. King's Day (Netherlands, Aruba, Curaçao, Sint Maarten) (celebrated on April 26 if April 27 falls on a Sunday) National Veterans' Day (Finland) References External links BBC: On This Day Historical Events on April 27 Days of the year April

2329

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfonso%20Leng

Alfonso Leng

Alfonso Leng Haygus (11 February 1884 – 11 November 1974) was a post-romantic composer of classical music. He was born in Santiago, Chile. He wrote the first important symphonic work in Chilean tradition, "La Muerte de Alcino", a symphonic poem inspired by the novel of Pedro Prado. He composed many art songs in different languages and important piano pieces, like the five "Doloras" (1914), which he later orchestrated and are normally played in concerts in Chile and Latin America. He won the National Art Prize in 1957. Leng was also an accomplished dentist in Santiago. As a dentist, he was the main founder of the dentistry faculty of the University of Chile, and he was eventually elected as the first dean. Leng was the nephew of composer Carmela Mackenna. References 1884 births 1974 deaths Chilean classical composers Chilean male composers Chilean dentists Musicians from Santiago Academic staff of the University of Chile Chilean people of Chinese descent 20th-century Chilean musicians 20th-century classical composers 20th-century male musicians Chilean male classical composers 20th-century dentists 20th-century Chilean male artists

2330

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbe%20number

Abbe number

In optics and lens design, the Abbe number, also known as the V-number or constringence of a transparent material, is an approximate measure of the material's dispersion (change of refractive index versus wavelength), with high values of V indicating low dispersion. It is named after Ernst Abbe (1840–1905), the German physicist who defined it. The term V-number should not be confused with the normalized frequency in fibers. The Abbe number, of a material is defined as , where and are the refractive indices of the material at the wavelengths of the Fraunhofer's C, d, and F spectral lines (656.3 nm, 587.56 nm, and 486.1 nm respectively). This formulation only applies to the human vision. Outside this range requires the use of different spectral lines. For non-visible spectral lines the term "V-number" is more commonly used. The more general formulation defined as, , where and are the refractive indices of the material at three different wavelengths. The shortest wavelength's index is , and the longest's is . Abbe numbers are used to classify glass and other optical materials in terms of their chromaticity. For example, the higher dispersion flint glasses have relatively small Abbe numbers whereas the lower dispersion crown glasses have larger Abbe numbers. Values of range from below 25 for very dense flint glasses, around 34 for polycarbonate plastics, up to 65 for common crown glasses, and 75 to 85 for some fluorite and phosphate crown glasses. Abbe numbers are used in the design of achromatic lenses, as their reciprocal is proportional to dispersion (slope of refractive index versus wavelength) in the wavelength region where the human eye is most sensitive (see graph). For different wavelength regions, or for higher precision in characterizing a system's chromaticity (such as in the design of apochromats), the full dispersion relation (refractive index as a function of wavelength) is used. Abbe diagram An Abbe diagram, also called 'the glass veil', is produced by plotting the Abbe number of a material versus its refractive index Glasses can then be categorised and selected according to their positions on the diagram. This can be a letter-number code, as used in the Schott Glass catalogue, or a 6 digit glass code. Glasses' Abbe numbers, along with their mean refractive indices, are used in the calculation of the required refractive powers of the elements of achromatic lenses in order to cancel chromatic aberration to first order. These two parameters which enter into the equations for design of achromatic doublets are exactly what is plotted on an Abbe diagram. Due to the difficulty and inconvenience in producing sodium and hydrogen lines, alternate definitions of the Abbe number are often substituted (ISO 7944). For example, rather than the standard definition given above, that uses the refractive index variation between the F and C hydrogen lines, one alternative measure using the subscript "e" for mercury's e line compared to cadmium's F′ and C′ lines is This alternate takes the difference between cadmium's blue (C′) and red (F′) refractive indices at wavelengths 480.0 nm and 643.8 nm, relative to for mercury's e line at 546.073 nm, all of which are close by, and somewhat easier to produce than the C, F, and e lines. Other definitions can similarly be employed; the following table lists standard wavelengths at which is commonly determined, including the standard subscripts used. Derivation Starting from the Lensmaker's equation we obtain the thin lens equation by dropping a small term that accounts for lens thickness, : when The change of refractive power between the two wavelengths and is given by where and are the short and long wavelengths' refractive indexes, respectively, and below, is for the center. The power difference can be expressed relative to the power at the center wavelength () by multiplying and dividing by and regrouping, get The relative change is inversely proportional to See also Abbe prism Abbe refractometer Calculation of glass properties, including Abbe number Glass code Sellmeier equation, more comprehensive and physically based modeling of dispersion References External links Abbe graph and data for 356 glasses from Ohara, Hoya, and Schott Dimensionless numbers Optical quantities Glass physics

2331

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACN

ACN

ACN may refer to: Accenture, professional services company, listed on the NYSE as ACN Achang language, a Tibeto-Burman language of China Achnasheen railway station, UK, National Rail code Acineta, a genus of orchid ACN Inc., multi-level marketing company providing telecommunications and other services Action Congress of Nigeria, political party of Nigeria Africa Cup of Nations, biennial football tournament Hockey Africa Cup of Nations, biennial field hockey tournament Men's Hockey Africa Cup of Nations Women's Hockey Africa Cup of Nations Agencia Carabobeña de Noticias, news agency, Valencia, Venezuela Agència Catalana de Notícies, news agency, Barcelona, Spain Agenzia per la Cybersicurezza Nazionale, Italian cybersecurity agency, Rome, Italy Aid to the Church in Need, Catholic charity in Königstein im Taunus, Germany Aircraft Classification Number, pavement load of an aircraft Algebraic chess notation, the standard notation for recording chess games American Collectibles Network, former name for Jewelry Television, US Andean Community of Nations, free trade area Anglican Communion Network, network of Anglican and Episcopalian dioceses and parishes ante Christum natum, seldom-used Latin equivalent of BC Architecture for Control Networks, network protocol for theatrical control Atlantis Cable News, fictional news channel on The Newsroom (American TV series) Australian Company Number, unique identifier for companies registered in Australia Ciudad Acuña International Airport, an airport in Ciudad Acuña, Mexico Chemistry Acetonitrile, CH3CN Acrylonitrile, CH2CHCN

2332

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AD%20%28disambiguation%29

AD (disambiguation)

AD (Anno Domini) is a designation used to label years following 1 BC in the Julian and Gregorian calendars. Ad (advertisement) is a form of marketing communication. AD, A.D. or Ad may also refer to: Art, entertainment, and media Film and television A.D. (film), a 2010 animated zombie horror film A.D. (miniseries), a 1985 television miniseries set in ancient Rome A.D. The Bible Continues, a 2015 biblical drama television miniseries Arrested Development, an American television sitcom Attarintiki Daredi, 2013 Indian film by Trivikram Srinivas Audio description, a service for visually impaired audience on some TV programs Music AD (band), a Christian rock band A.D. (album), by Solace Publications AD (poem), by Kenneth Fearing A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, a nonfiction graphic novel about Hurricane Katrina Algemeen Dagblad, a Dutch newspaper Architectural Digest, an interior design and landscaping magazine Other art, entertainment, and media Audio description track, a narration track for visually impaired consumers of visual media Brands and enterprises Alexander Dennis, a British bus manufacturer Akcionersko društvo (aкционерско друштво), a Macedonian name for a type of company Aktsionerno drujestvo (акционерно дружество), a Bulgarian name for a type of company akcionarsko društvo (aкционарско друштво), a Serbian name for a type of company Analog Devices, a semiconductor company Military Accidental discharge, a mechanical failure of a firearm causing it to fire Active duty, a status of full duty or service, usually in the armed forces Air defense, an anti-aircraft weaponry and systems Air Department, part of the British Admiralty A US Navy hull classification symbol: Destroyer tender (AD) AD Skyraider, former name of the Douglas A-1 Skyraider, a Navy attack aircraft Organizations Action Directe, a French far-left militant group Democratic Action (Venezuela) (), a social democratic and center-left political party Democratic Alliance (Portugal, 1979) (), a former centre-right political alliance Democratic Alternative (Malta) (), a green political party People Ad (name), a given name, and a list of people with the name ‘Ad, great-grandson of Shem, son of Noah Anthony Davis (born 1993), American basketball player A. D. Loganathan (1888–1949), officer of the Indian National Army A. D. Whitfield (born 1943), American football player A. D. Winans (born 1936), American poet, essayist, short story writer and publisher A.D., nickname of Adrian Peterson (born 1985), American football player Places AD, ISO 3166-1 country for Andorra Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates AD, herbarium code for the State Herbarium of South Australia Andhra Pradesh, a state in southern India (HASC code) Professions Art director, for a magazine or newspaper Assistant director, a film or television crew member Athletic director, the administrator of an athletics program Science and technology Biology and medicine Addison's disease, an endocrine disorder Adenovirus, viruses of the family Adenoviridae Alzheimer's disease, a neurodegenerative disease Anaerobic digestion, processes by which microorganisms break down biodegradable material Anti-diarrheal, medication which provides symptomatic relief for diarrhea Approximate digestibility, an index measure of the digestibility of animal feed Atopic dermatitis, form of skin inflammation Atypical depression, a type of depression Autosomal dominant, a classification of genetic traits Autonomic dysreflexia, a potential medical emergency Chemistry Adamantyl, abbreviated "Ad" in organic chemistry Sharpless asymmetric dihydroxylation, a type of organic chemical reaction Computing .ad, the top level domain for Andorra Administrative distance, a metric in routing Active Directory, software for the management of Microsoft Windows domains Administrative domain, a computer networking facility Analog-to-digital converter, a type of electronic circuit Automatic differentiation, a set of computer programming techniques to speedily compute derivatives AD16, the hexadecimal number equal to decimal number 173 Mathematics Adjoint representation of a Lie group, abbreviated "Ad" in mathematics Axiom of determinacy, a set theory axiom Physics Antiproton Decelerator, a device at the CERN physics laboratory Autodynamics, a physics theory Other uses in science and technology Active disassembly, a technology supporting the cost-effective deconstruction of complex materials Transportation AD, IATA code for: Air Paradise, a defunct Indonesian airline Azul Brazilian Airlines Airworthiness Directive, an aircraft maintenance requirement notice Other uses ʿĀd, an ancient Arab tribe, mentioned in the Quran Aggregate demand, in macroeconomics Anno Diocletiani, an alternative year numbering system United States Academic Decathlon, a high school academic competition See also Anno Domini (disambiguation) BC (disambiguation) Domino (disambiguation) Dominus (disambiguation)

2333

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ablative%20case

Ablative case

In grammar, the ablative case (pronounced ; sometimes abbreviated ) is a grammatical case for nouns, pronouns, and adjectives in the grammars of various languages; it is sometimes used to express motion away from something, among other uses. The word "ablative" derives from the Latin , the (suppletive) perfect, passive participle of auferre "to carry away". The ablative case is found in several language families, such as Indo-European (e.g., Sanskrit, Latin, Albanian, Armenian, Punjabi), Turkic (e.g., Turkish, Turkmen, Azerbaijani, Uzbek, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tatar), Tungusic (e.g., Manchu, Evenki), Uralic (e.g., Hungarian), and the Dravidian languages. There is no ablative case in modern Germanic languages such as German and English. There was an ablative case in the early stages of Ancient Greek, but it quickly fell into disuse by the classical period. Indo-European languages Latin The ablative case in Latin () appears in various grammatical constructions, including following various prepositions, in an ablative absolute clause, and adverbially. The Latin ablative case was derived from three Proto-Indo-European cases: ablative (from), instrumental (with), and locative (in/at). Greek In Ancient Greek, there was an ablative case ( ) which was used in the Homeric, pre-Mycenaean, and Mycenean periods. It fell into disuse during the classical period and thereafter with some of its functions taken by the genitive and others by the dative. The genitive case with the prepositions and is an example. German German does not have an ablative case but, exceptionally, Latin ablative case-forms were used from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century after some prepositions, for example after in : ablative of the Latin loanword . Grammarians at that time, Justus Georg Schottel, Kaspar von Stieler, Johann Balthasar von Antesperg and Johann Christoph Gottsched, listed an ablative case (as the sixth case after nominative, genitive, dative, accusative and vocative) for German words. They arbitrarily considered the dative case after some prepositions to be an ablative, as in and , while they considered the dative case after other prepositions or without a preposition, as in , to be a dative. Albanian The ablative case is found in Albanian; it is the fifth case, . Sanskrit In Sanskrit, the ablative case is the fifth case () and has a similar function to that in Latin. Sanskrit nouns in the ablative often refer to a subject "out of" which or "from" whom something (an action, an object) has arisen or occurred: . It is also used for nouns in several other senses, as for actions occurring "because of" or "without" a certain noun, indicating distance or direction. When it appears with a comparative adjective, ( ), the ablative is used to refer to what the adjective is comparing: . Armenian The modern Armenian ablative has different markers for each main dialect, both originating from Classical Armenian. The Western Armenian affix (definite ) derives from the classical singular; the Eastern Armenian affix (both indefinite and definite) derives from the classical plural. For both dialects, those affixes are singular, with the corresponding plurals being and . The ablative case has several uses. Its principal function is to show "motion away" from a location, point in space or time: It also shows the agent when it is used with the passive voice of the verb: It is also used for comparative statements in colloquial Armenian (including infinitives and participles): Finally, it governs certain postpositions: Uralic languages Finnish In Finnish, the ablative case is the sixth of the locative cases with the meaning "from, off, of": pöytä – pöydältä "table – off from the table". It is an outer locative case, used like the adessive and allative cases, to denote both being on top of something and "being around the place" (as opposed to the inner locative case, the elative, which means "from out of" or "from the inside of"). With the locative, the receding object was near the other place or object, not inside it. The Finnish ablative is also used in time expressions to indicate times of something happening (kymmeneltä "at ten") as well as with verbs expressing feelings or emotions. The Finnish ablative has the ending -lta or -ltä, depending on vowel harmony. Usage away from a place katolta: off the roof pöydältä: off the table rannalta: from the beach maalta: from the land mereltä: from the sea from a person, object or other entity häneltä: from him/her/them with the verb lähteä (stop) lähteä tupakalta: stop smoking (in the sense of putting out the cigarette one is smoking now, lit. 'leave from the tobacco') lähteä hippasilta: stop playing tag (hippa=tag, olla hippasilla=playing tag) to smell/taste/feel/look/sound like something haisee pahalta: smells bad maistuu hyvältä: tastes good tuntuu kamalalta: feels awful näyttää tyhmältä: looks stupid kuulostaa mukavalta: sounds nice Estonian The ablative case in Estonian is the ninth case and has a similar function to that in Hungarian. Hungarian The ablative case in Hungarian is used to describe movement away from, as well as a concept, object, act or event originating from an object, person, location or entity. For example, one walking away from a friend who gave him a gift could say the following: a barátomtól jövök (I am coming (away) from my friend). a barátomtól kaptam egy ajándékot (I got a gift from my friend). When used to describe movement away from a location, the case may only refer to movement from the general vicinity of the location and not from inside of it. Thus, a postától jövök would mean one had been standing next to the post office before, not inside the building. When the case is used to refer to the origin of a possible act or event, the act/event may be implied while not explicitly stated, such as : I will defend you from the robber. The application of vowel harmony gives two different suffixes: -tól and -től. These are applied to back-vowel and front-vowel words, respectively. Hungarian has a narrower delative case, similar to ablative, but more specific: movement off/from a surface of something, with suffixes -ról and -ről. Turkic languages Azerbaijani The ablative in Azerbaijani () is expressed through the suffixes or : Tatar The ablative in Tatar () is expressed through the suffixes ,, , , , or : Turkish The ablative in Turkish ( or ) is expressed through the suffix (which changes to , , or to accommodate the vowel and voicing harmony): In some situations simple ablative can have a "because of" meaning; in these situations, ablative can be optionally followed by the postposition . Tungusic Manchu The ablative in Manchu is expressed through the suffix and can also be used to express comparisons. It is usually not directly attached to its parent word. Evenki The ablative in Evenki is expressed with the suffix . See also Allative case Delative case Locative case Further reading References Grammatical cases

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adamic%20language

Adamic language

The Adamic language, according to Jewish tradition (as recorded in the midrashim) and some Christians, is the language spoken by Adam (and possibly Eve) in the Garden of Eden. It is variously interpreted as either the language used by God to address Adam (the divine language), or the language invented by Adam with which he named all things (including Eve), as in the second Genesis creation narrative (). In the Middle Ages, various Jewish commentators held that Adam spoke Hebrew, a view also addressed in various ways by the late medieval Italian poet Dante Alighieri. In the early modern period, some authors continued to discuss the possibility of an Adamic language, some continuing to hold to the idea that it was Hebrew, while others such as John Locke were more skeptical. More recently, a variety of Mormon authors have expressed various opinions about the nature of the Adamic language. According to Ethiopian and Eritrean traditions, the ancient Semitic language of Ge'ez is the language of Adam, the first and original language. Patristic Period Augustine addresses the issue in The City of God. While not explicit, the implication of there being but one human language prior to the Tower of Babel's collapse is that the language, which was preserved by Heber and his son Peleg, and which is recognized as the language passed down to Abraham and his descendants, is the language that would have been used by Adam. Middle Ages Traditional Jewish exegesis such as Midrash says that Adam spoke the Hebrew language because the names he gives Eve – Isha and Chava – only make sense in Hebrew. By contrast, Kabbalism assumed an "eternal Torah" which was not identical to the Torah written in Hebrew. Thus, Abraham Abulafia in the 13th century assumed that the language spoken in Paradise had been different from Hebrew, and rejected the claim then-current also among Christian authors, that a child left unexposed to linguistic stimulus would automatically begin to speak in Hebrew. Both Muslim and Christian Arabs, such as Sulayman al-Ghazzi, considered Syriac the language spoken by Adam and Eve. Umberto Eco (1993) notes that Genesis is ambiguous on whether the language of Adam was preserved by Adam's descendants until the confusion of tongues, or if it began to evolve naturally even before Babel. Dante Alighieri addresses the topic in his De vulgari eloquentia (1302–1305). He argues that the Adamic language is of divine origin and therefore unchangeable. He also notes that according to Genesis, the first speech act is due to Eve, addressing the serpent, and not to Adam. In his Divine Comedy (c. 1308–1320), however, Dante changes his view to another that treats the Adamic language as the product of Adam. This had the consequence that it could no longer be regarded as immutable, and hence Hebrew could not be regarded as identical with the language of Paradise. Dante concludes (Paradiso XXVI) that Hebrew is a derivative of the language of Adam. In particular, the chief Hebrew name for God in scholastic tradition, El, must be derived of a different Adamic name for God, which Dante gives as I. Early modern period Proponents Elizabethan scholar John Dee makes references to an occult or angelic language recorded in his private journals and those of spirit medium Edward Kelley. Dee's journals did not describe the language as "Enochian", instead preferring "Angelical", the "Celestial Speech", the "Language of Angels", the "First Language of God-Christ", the "Holy Language", or "Adamical" because, according to Dee's Angels, it was used by Adam in Paradise to name all things. The language was later dubbed Enochian, due to Dee's assertion that the Biblical Patriarch Enoch had been the last human (before Dee and Kelley) to know the language. Dutch physician, linguist, and humanist Johannes Goropius Becanus (1519–1572) theorized in Origines Antwerpianae (1569) that Antwerpian Brabantic, spoken in the region between the Scheldt and Meuse Rivers, was the original language spoken in Paradise. Goropius believed that the most ancient language on Earth would be the simplest language, and that the simplest language would contain mostly short words. Since Brabantic has a higher number of short words than do Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, Goropius reasoned that it was the older language. His work influenced that of Simon Stevin (1548–1620), who espoused similar ideas in "Uytspraeck van de weerdicheyt der Duytse tael", a chapter in De Beghinselen Der Weeghconst (1586). Opponents By the 17th century, the existence and nature of the alleged Adamic language was commonly discussed amongst European Jewish and Christian mystics and primitive linguists. Robert Boyle (1627–1691) was skeptical that Hebrew was the language best capable of describing the nature of things, stating: I could never find, that the Hebrew names of animals, mentioned in the beginning of Genesis, argued a (much) clearer insight into their natures, than did the names of the same or some other animals in Greek, or other languages (1665:45). John Locke (1632–1704) expressed similar skepticism in his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). Modern period Latter Day Saint movement Joseph Smith, founder of the Latter Day Saint movement, in his revision of the Bible, declared the Adamic language to have been "pure and undefiled". Some Latter Day Saints believe it to be the language of God. Glossolalia, or speaking in tongues, was commonplace in the early years of the movement, and it was commonly believed that the incomprehensible language spoken during these incidents was the language of Adam. However, this belief seems to have never been formally or officially adopted. Some other early Latter Day Saint leaders, including Brigham Young, Orson Pratt, and Elizabeth Ann Whitney, claimed to have received several words in the Adamic language by revelation. Some Latter Day Saints believe that the Adamic language is the "pure language" spoken of by Zephaniah and that it will be restored as the universal language of humankind at the end of the world. Apostle Orson Pratt declared that "Ahman", part of the name of the settlement "Adam-ondi-Ahman" in Daviess County, Missouri, was the name of God in the Adamic language. An 1832 handwritten page from the Joseph Smith Papers, titled "A Sample of the Pure Language", and reportedly dictated by Smith to "Br. Johnson", asserts that the name of God is Awman. The Latter Day Saint endowment prayer circle once included use of the words "Pay Lay Ale". These untranslated words are no longer used in temple ordinances and have been replaced by an English version, "O God, hear the words of my mouth". Some believe that the "Pay Lay Ale" sentence is derived from the Hebrew phrase "pe le-El" (), "mouth to God". "Pay Lay Ale" was identified in the temple ceremony as words from the "pure Adamic language". Other words thought by some Latter Day Saints to derive from the Adamic language include deseret ("honey bee") and Ahman ("God"). The Book of Moses refers to "a book of remembrance" written in the language of Adam. Goidelic languages Nicholas Wolf writes that 19th-century Irish language speakers and publications will claim Irish (or some Goidelic language) is a language of Biblical primacy comparable to Hebrew, with some claiming it is the language of Adam. See also History of linguistics Mythical origins of language Origin of language Proto-Human language Universal language Enochian Sacred language References Bibliography Allison P. Coudert (ed.), The Language of Adam = Die Sprache Adams, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1999. Angelo Mazzocco, Linguistic Theories in Dante and the Humanists, (chapter 9: "Dante's Reappraisal of the Adamic language", 159–181). Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language (1993). Dante Alighieri Hebrew language Kabbalah Language and mysticism Latter Day Saint temple practices Midrashim Obsolete scientific theories Religious language Spurious languages Adam and Eve

2338

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rise%20and%20Fall%20of%20the%20City%20of%20Mahagonny

Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny

Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny () is a political-satirical opera composed by Kurt Weill to a German libretto by Bertolt Brecht. It was first performed on 9 March 1930 at the in Leipzig. Some interpreters have viewed the play as a critique of American society. Others have perceived it as a critique of the chaotic and immoral Weimar Republic, particularly Berlin of the 1920s with its rampant prostitution, unstable government, political corruption, and economic crises. Composition history Weill was asked by the 1927 Baden-Baden music festival committee to write a one-act chamber opera for the festival. He ended up writing Mahagonny-Songspiel, sometimes known as Das kleine Mahagonny, a concert work commissioned for voices and a small orchestra. The work was written in May 1927, and performed in June. It consisted of eleven numbers, including "Alabama Song" and "Benares Song". Weill then continued to rework the material into a full opera while Brecht worked on the libretto. The opera had its premiere in Leipzig on 9 March 1930 and played in Berlin in December of the following year. The opera was banned by the Nazis in 1933 and did not have a significant production until the 1960s. Weill's score uses a number of styles, including ragtime, jazz and formal counterpoint. The "Alabama Song" has been interpreted by a range of artists, notably Ute Lemper, The Doors and David Bowie. Language The lyrics for the "Alabama Song" and another song, the "Benares Song", are in English (albeit specifically idiosyncratic English) and are performed in that language even when the opera is performed in its original (German) language. A few lines of the briefly interpolated song, "Asleep in the Deep" (1897), lyrics by Arthur J. Lamb, music by H. W. Petrie, referred to in the opera by its opening words, "Stürmisch die Nacht " or "Stormy the Deep", are sung in the German version of the song, composed on verses of Martell, under the title "Des Seemanns Los" (The Sailor's Fate), when the opera is sung in the original German. Although the name of the city itself sounds like the English word mahogany and its German-language equivalent, Mahagoni, the character Leokadja Begbick states that it means "City of Nets" while Brecht stated that it was a made-up word. Performance history The opera has played in opera houses around the world. Never achieving the popularity of Weill and Brecht's The Threepenny Opera, Mahagonny is still considered a work of stature with a haunting score. Herbert Lindenberger in his book Opera in History, for example, views Mahagonny alongside Schoenberg's Moses und Aron as indicative of the two poles of modernist opera. Following the Leipzig premiere, the opera was presented in Berlin in December 1931 at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm conducted by Alexander von Zemlinsky with Lotte Lenya as Jenny, Trude Hesterberg as Begbick, and Harald Paulsen as Jimmy. Another production was presented in January 1934 in Copenhagen at the Det ny Teater. Other productions within Europe waited until the end of the Second World War, some notable ones being in January 1963 in London at Sadler's Wells Opera conducted by Colin Davis and in Berlin in September 1977 by the Komische Oper. It was not presented in the United States until 1970, when a short-lived April production at the Phyllis Anderson Theatre off Broadway starred Barbara Harris as Jenny, Frank Porretta as Jimmy, and Estelle Parsons as Begbick. It was then presented in Boston in 1973 under the direction of Sarah Caldwell. The first university production in the US was in 1973 at UC Berkeley, directed by Jean-Bernard Bucky and Michael Senturia. A full version was presented at the Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1974, with Gilbert Price as Jimmy and Stephanie Cotsirilos as Jenny. Kurt Kasznar played Moses. The libretto was performed in an original translation by Michael Feingold; the production was directed by Alvin Epstein. In October 1978, Yale presented a "chamber version" adapted and directed by Keith Hack, with John Glover as Jimmy and June Gable as Begbick. Mark Linn-Baker played Fatty; Michael Gross was Trinity Moses. In November 1979, Mahagonny debuted at the Metropolitan Opera in a John Dexter production conducted by James Levine. The cast included Teresa Stratas as Jenny, Astrid Varnay as Begbick, Richard Cassilly as Jimmy, Cornell MacNeil as Moses, Ragnar Ulfung as Fatty and Paul Plishka as Joe. The production was televised in 1979 and was released on DVD in 2010. This production was streamed through the Met Opera on Demand platform on 12 December 2020 and 3-4 July 2021. The Los Angeles Opera presented the opera in September 1989 under conductor Kent Nagano and with a Jonathan Miller production. Other notable productions in Europe from the 1980s included the March 1986 presentation by the Scottish Opera in Glasgow; a June 1990 production in Florence by the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino. In October 1995 and 1997, the Paris Opera staged by Graham Vick, under the baton of Jeffrey Tate starring Marie McLaughlin as Jenny, Felicity Palmer (1995) and Kathryn Harries (1997) as Begbick, and Kim Begley (1995)/Peter Straka (1997) as Jimmy. The July 1998 Salzburg Festival production featured Catherine Malfitano as Jenny, Gwyneth Jones as Begbick, and Jerry Hadley as Jimmy. The Vienna State Opera added it to its repertoire in January 2012 in a production by Jérôme Deschamps conducted by Ingo Metzmacher starring Christopher Ventris as Jimmy and Angelika Kirchschlager as Jenny, notably casting young mezzo-soprano Elisabeth Kulman as Begbick, breaking the tradition of having a veteran soprano (like Varnay or Jones) or musical theater singer (like Patti LuPone) perform the role. Productions within the US have included those in November 1998 by the Lyric Opera of Chicago directed by David Alden. Catherine Malfitano repeated her role as Jenny, while Felicity Palmer sang Begbick, and Kim Begley sang the role of Jimmy. The Los Angeles Opera's February 2007 production directed by John Doyle and conducted by James Conlon included Audra McDonald as Jenny, Patti LuPone as Begbick, and Anthony Dean Griffey as Jimmy. This production was recorded on DVD, and subsequently won the 2009 Grammy Awards for "Best Classical Album" and "Best Opera Recording." In 2014 it was performed using an alternate libretto as a "wrestling opera" at the Oakland Metro by the performers of Hoodslam. A major new production had its world premiere in July 2019 at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen with stage direction by Ivo van Hove. It is a co-production of Dutch National Opera, Metropolitan Opera, Opera Ballet Vlaanderen, and Les Theatres De La Ville De Luxembourg. Roles Synopsis Act 1 Scene 1: A desolate no-man's land A truck breaks down. Three fugitives from justice get out and find themselves in the city of Mahagonny: Fatty the Bookkeeper, Trinity Moses, and Leocadia Begbick. Because the federal agents pursuing them will not search this far north, and they are in a good location to attract ships coming south from the Alaskan gold fields, Begbick decides that they can profit by staying where they are and founding a pleasure city, where men can have fun, because there is nothing else in the world to rely on. Scene 2 The news of Mahagonny spreads quickly, and sharks from all over flock to the bait, including the whore Jenny Smith, who is seen, with six other girls, singing the "Alabama Song", in which she waves goodbye to her home and sets out in pursuit of whiskey, dollars and pretty boys. Scene 3 In the big cities, where men lead boring, purposeless lives, Fatty and Moses spread the gospel of Mahagonny, city of gold, among the disillusioned. Scene 4 Four Alaskan Lumberjacks who have shared hard times together in the timberlands and made their fortunes set off together for Mahagonny. Jimmy Mahoney and his three friends – Jacob Schmidt, Bank Account Billy, and Alaska Wolf Joe – sing of the pleasures awaiting them in "Off to Mahagonny", and look forward to the peace and pleasure they will find there. Scene 5 The four friends arrive in Mahagonny, only to find other disappointed travelers already leaving. Begbick, well-informed about their personal tastes, marks down her prices, but for the penurious Billy, they still seem too high. Jimmy impatiently calls for the girls of Mahagonny to show themselves, so he can make a choice. Begbick suggests Jenny as the right girl for Jack, who finds her rates too high. She pleads with Jack to reconsider ("Havana Song"), which arouses Jim's interest, and he chooses her. Jenny and the girls sing a tribute to "the Jimmys from Alaska." Scene 6 Jimmy and Jenny get to know one another as she asks him to define the terms of their contact: Does he wish her to wear her hair up or down, to wear fancy underwear or none at all? "What is your wish?" asks Jim, but Jenny evades answering. Scene 7 Begbick, Fatty, and Moses meet to discuss the pleasure city's financial crisis: People are leaving in droves, and the price of whiskey is sinking rapidly. Begbick suggests going back to civilization, but Fatty reminds her that the federal agents have been inquiring for her in nearby Pensacola. Money would solve everything, declares Begbick, and she decides to soak the four new arrivals for all they've got. Scene 8 Jimmy, restless, attempts to leave Mahagonny because he misses the wife he left in Alaska. Scene 9 In front of the Rich Man's Hotel, Jimmy and the others sit lazily as a pianist plays Tekla Bądarzewska's "A Maiden's Prayer". With growing anger, Jimmy sings of how his hard work and suffering in Alaska have led only to this. Drawing a knife, he shouts for Begbick, while his friends try to disarm him and the other men call to have him thrown out. Calm again, he tells Begbick that Mahagonny can never make people happy: it has too much peace and quiet. Scene 10 As if in answer to Jimmy's complaint, the city is threatened by a hurricane. Everyone sings in horror of the destruction awaiting them. Scene 11 Tensely, people watch for the hurricane's arrival. The men sing a hymn-like admonition not to be afraid. Jim meditatively compares Nature's savagery to the far greater destructiveness of Man. Why do we build, he asks, if not for the pleasure of destroying? Since Man can outdo any hurricane, fear makes no sense. For the sake of human satisfaction, nothing should be forbidden: If you want another man's money, his house or his wife, knock him down and take it; do what you please. As Begbick and the men ponder Jimmy's philosophy, Fatty and Moses rush in with news: The hurricane has unexpectedly struck Pensacola, destroying Begbick's enemies, the federal agents. Begbick and her cohorts take it as a sign that Jimmy is right; they join him, Jenny, and his three friends in singing a new, defiant song: If someone walks over someone else, then it's me, and if someone gets walked on, then it's you. In the background, the men continue to chant their hymn as the hurricane draws nearer. Act 2 Scene 12 Magically, the hurricane bypasses Mahagonny, and the people sing in awe of their miraculous rescue. This confirms Begbick's belief in the philosophy of "Do what you want," and she proceeds to put it into effect. Scene 13 at the renovated "Do It" tavern. The men sing of the four pleasures of life: Eating, Lovemaking, Fighting, and Drinking. First comes eating: To kitschy cafe music, Jimmy's friend Jacob gorges until he keels over and dies. The men sing a chorale over his body, saluting "a man without fear". Scene 14: Loving. While Begbick collects money and issues tips on behavior, Moses placates the impatient men queuing to make love to Jenny and the other whores. The men sing the "Mandalay Song", warning that love does not last forever, and urging those ahead of them to make it snappy. Scene 15: Fighting. The men flock to see a boxing match between Trinity Moses and Jim's friend Alaska Wolf Joe. While most of the men, including the ever-cautious Billy, bet on the burly Moses, Jim, out of friendship, bets heavily on Joe. The match is manifestly unfair; Moses not only wins but kills Joe in knocking him out. Scene 16: Drinking. In an effort to shake off the gloom of Joe's death, Jimmy invites everyone to have a drink on him. The men sing "Life in Mahagonny", describing how one could live in the city for only five dollars a day, but those who wanted to have fun always needed more. Jim, increasingly drunk, dreams of sailing back to Alaska. He takes down a curtain rod for a mast and climbs on the pool table, pretending it is a ship; Jenny and Billy play along. Jimmy is abruptly sobered up when Begbick demands payment for the whiskey as well as for the damage to her property. Totally broke, he turns in a panic to Jenny, who explains her refusal to help him out in the song "Make your own bed" – an adaptation of the ideas he proclaimed at the end of act 1. Jim is led off in chains as the chorus, singing another stanza of "Life in Mahagonny", returns to its pastimes. Trinity Moses assures the crowd that Jimmy will pay for his crimes with his life. Scene 17 At night, Jim alone and chained to a lamppost sings a plea for the sun not to rise on the day of his impending trial. Act 3 Scene 18: In the courtroom Moses, like a carnival barker, sells tickets to the trials. He serves as prosecutor, Fatty as defense attorney, Begbick as judge. First comes the case of Toby Higgins, accused of premeditated murder for the purpose of testing an old revolver. Fatty invites the injured party to rise, but no one does so, since the dead do not speak. Toby bribes all three, and as a result, Begbick dismisses the case. Next Jimmy's case is called. Chained, he is led in by Billy, from whom he tries to borrow money; Billy of course refuses, despite Jim's plea to remember their time together in Alaska. In virtually the same speech he used to attack Higgins, Moses excoriates him for not paying his bills, for seducing Jenny (who presents herself as a plaintiff) to commit a "carnal act" with him for money, and for inciting the crowd with "an illegal joyous song" on the night of the typhoon. Billy, with the chorus's support, counters that, in committing the latter act, Jimmy discovered the laws by which Mahagonny lives. Moses argues that Jim hastened his friend Joe's death in a prizefight by betting on him, and Billy counters by asking who actually killed Joe. Moses does not reply. But there is no answer for the main count against him. Jim gets short sentences for his lesser crimes, but for having no money, he is sentenced to death. Begbick, Fatty, and Moses, rising to identify themselves as the injured parties, proclaim "in the whole human race / there is no greater criminal / than a man without money". As Jim is led off to await execution, everyone sings the "Benares Song", in which they long for that exotic city "where the sun is shining." But Benares has been destroyed by an earthquake. "Where shall we go?" they ask. Scene 19: At the gallows Jim says a tender goodbye to Jenny, who, dressed in white, declares herself his widow. He surrenders her to Billy, his last remaining companion from Alaska. When he tries to delay the execution by reminding the people of Mahagonny that God exists, they play out for him, under Moses' direction, the story of "God in Mahagonny", in which the Almighty condemns the town and is overthrown by its citizens, who declare that they can not be sent to Hell because they are already in Hell. Jim, chastened, asks only for a glass of water, but is refused even this as Moses gives the signal for the trap to be sprung. Scene 20 A caption advises that, after Jim's death, increasing hostility among the city's various factions has caused the destruction of Mahagonny. To a potpourri of themes from earlier in the opera, groups of protesters are seen on the march, in conflict with one another, while the city burns in the background. Jenny and the whores carry Jim's clothing and accessories like sacred relics; Billy and several men carry his coffin. In a new theme, they and the others declare, "Nothing you can do will help a dead man". Begbick, Fatty, and Moses appear with placards of their own, joining the entire company in its march and declaring "Nothing will help him or us or you now," as the opera ends in chaos. Musical numbers Act 1 Scene 1: Gesucht werden Leokadja Begbick ("The Desired Progress of Leocadia Begbick") Scene 1: Sie soll sein wie ein Netz ("It Should Be Made Like a Net") Scene 2: Rasch wuchs ("Growing Up Quickly" ) / Moon of Alabama ("Oh, Show Us The Way...") Scene 3: Die Nachricht ("The News") Scene 4: In den nächsten Tagen ("In the Next Few Days") Scene 5: Damals kam unter Anderen ("Among the Crowd There Came") Scene 5: Heraus, ihr Schönen von Mahagonny ("Come Out, You Beauties of Mahagonny") Scene 5: Ach, bedenken Sie ("Oh Worries") Scene 6: Ich habe gelernt ("I Have Learned") Scene 7: Alle großen Unternehmungen ("All Great Things") Scene 7: Auch ich bin einmal ("Also I Was Once") Scene 8: Alle wahrhaft Suchenden ("All Seekers of the Truth") Scene 8: Aber etwas fehlt ("But Something is Missing") Scene 9: Das ist die ewige Kunst ("That is the Eternal Art") Scene 9: Sieben Jahre ("Seven Years!") Scene 10: Ein Taifun! ("A Typhoon!") Scene 11: In dieser Nacht des Entsetzens ("In This Night of Terror") Scene 11: Nein, jetzt sage ich ("No, I Say Do It Now") Scene 11: So tuet nur, was euch beliebt ("So, Just Do What You Like") Act 2 Scene 12: Hurrikan bewegt ("The Eventful Hurricane") Scene 12: O wunderbare Lösung! ("O Wonderful Result!") Scene 13: Von nun an war der Leitspruch ("From Then On The Motto Was...") Scene 13: Jetzt hab ich gegessen zwei Kälber ("Now I Have Eaten Two Calves") Scene 14: Zweitens kommt die Liebe dran! ("Secondly Comes Being in Love") Scene 14: Sieh jene Kraniche ("Look at Those Cranes") / The Duet of the Cranes Scene 14: Erstens, vergesst nicht, kommt das Fressen ("Firstly, Don't Forget, Comes the Eating") Scene 15: Wir, meine Herren ("We, My Dear Sirs...") Scene 15: Dreimal hoch, Dreieinigkeitsmoses! ("Three Cheers for Trinity Moses!") Scene 16: Freunde, kommt, ich lade euch ein ("Friends, Come, I Summon You") Scene 16: Meine Herren, meine Mutter prägte ("My Dear Sirs, My Mother Impressed [Upon Me]") Scene 17: Wenn der Himmel hell wird ("When the Sky is Bright") Act 3 Scene 18: Haben all Zuschauer Billete? ("Do All The Gawkers Have Tickets?") Scene 18: Zweitens der Fall des Jimmy Mahoney ("Secondly, the Case of Jimmy Mahoney") Scene 19: In dieser Zeit gab es in Mahagonny ("In This Time It Was In Mahagonny") Scene 20: Hinrichtung und Tod des Jimmy Mahoney ("The Execution and Death of Jimmy Mahoney") Scene 20: Erstens, vergesst nicht, kommt das Fressen ("Firstly, Don't Forget, Comes the Eating") Scene 21: Wollt ihr mich denn wirklich hinrichten? ("Do You Really Want Me to Be Executed After All?") Scene 21: In diesen Tagen fanden in Mahagonny ("To This Day Found In Mahagonny") In other media The opera influenced Harry Everett Smith in his 1970-1980 film Mahagonny, which features Allen Ginsberg and Patti Smith. The 2005 movie Manderlay, directed by Lars von Trier, contains several references to the plot of Mahagonny. The most notable of these is the threat of a hurricane approaching the city during the first act. Von Trier's earlier movie Dogville, to which Manderlay is a sequel, was in large part based on a song from Brecht's Threepenny Opera ("Pirate Jenny"). In the brothel scene in act 2 of Mahagonny, the choir sings a "Song von Mandelay". The play Happy End (1929) by Elisabeth Hauptmann, Brecht and Weill, also contains a song called "Der Song von Mandelay", which uses the same refrain as in the brothel scene of Mahagonny. Brecht's use of the name Mandelay/Mandalay was inspired by Rudyard Kipling's poem "Mandalay". Recordings 1956: Lotte Lenya, Wilhelm Brückner-Rüggeberg (Sony 1990; originally recorded 1956) 1979: DVD, James Levine; John Dexter, stage director; Teresa Stratas, Astrid Varnay, Richard Cassilly; Metropolitan Opera 1985: Anja Silja, Jan Latham-Koenig (Capriccio 1988; recorded in 1985) 1997: DVD 1997, Salzburg Festival 2007: DVD Los Angeles Opera, starring Audra McDonald, Patti LuPone, and Anthony Dean Griffey. This recording won two 2009 Grammy Awards for Best Opera Recording and Best Classical Album. It was screened on TV as part of PBS' Great Performances 2010: Teatro Real (Madrid), starring Measha Brueggergosman, Jane Henschel, Michael König and Willard White, conducted by Pablo Heras-Casado and staged by La Fura dels Baus. (DVD and Blu-ray Bel Air Classiques 2011; filmed in 2010) Cover versions of songs "Alabama Song" has been covered by many artists, notably Ute Lemper, The Doors and David Bowie. References Informational notes Citations External links Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny), Kurt Weill Foundation for Music Libretto (Italian/German, dicoseunpo.it "Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny", work details, opera-arias.com Work details (incl. instrumentation), Universal Edition Operas by Kurt Weill German-language operas Operas Plays by Bertolt Brecht 1930 operas

2339

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avery%20Hopwood

Avery Hopwood

James Avery Hopwood (May 28, 1882 – July 1, 1928) was an American playwright of the Jazz Age. He had four plays running simultaneously on Broadway in 1920. Early life Hopwood was born to James and Jule Pendergast Hopwood on May 28, 1882, in Cleveland, Ohio. He graduated from Cleveland's West High School in 1900. In 1901, he began attending the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. However, his family experienced financial difficulties, so for his second year he transferred to Adelbert College. He returned to the University of Michigan in the fall of 1903, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1905. Career Hopwood started out as a journalist for the Cleveland Leader as its New York correspondent, but within a year had his first play, Clothes (1906), produced on Broadway, with the aid of playwright Channing Pollock. Hopwood eventually became known as "The Playboy Playwright" and specialized in comedies and farces, some of them with material considered risqué at the time. One play, The Demi-Virgin in 1921, prompted a court case because of its suggestive subject matter, including a risque game of cards, "Stripping Cupid". The case was dismissed. His many plays included Nobody's Widow (1910), starring Blanche Bates; Fair and Warmer (1915), starring Madge Kennedy (filmed in 1919); The Gold Diggers (1919), starring Ina Claire in New York and Tallulah Bankhead in London; (filmed in 1923 as The Gold Diggers, in 1928 as Gold Diggers of Broadway and also as Gold Diggers of 1933); Ladies' Night, 1920, starring Charlie Ruggles (filmed in 1928); the famous mystery play The Bat (with Mary Roberts Rinehart), 1920 (filmed in 1926 as The Bat, in 1930 as The Bat Whispers, and in 1959 as The Bat); Getting Gertie's Garter (with Wilson Collison), 1921, starring Hazel Dawn (filmed in 1927 and 1945); The Demi-Virgin, 1921, also starring Dawn; The Alarm Clock, 1923, translated from the French; The Best People (with David Gray), 1924 (filmed in 1925 and as Fast and Loose in 1930 with Clara Bow); the song-farce Naughty Cinderella, 1925, starring Irène Bordoni and The Garden of Eden in 1927, with Tallulah Bankhead in London and Miriam Hopkins in New York; (filmed in 1928 as The Garden of Eden). Personal life In 1906, Hopwood was introduced to writer and photographer Carl Van Vechten. The two became close friends and were sometimes sexual partners. In the 1920s Hopwood had a tumultuous and abusive romantic relationship with fellow Cleveland-born playwright John Floyd. Although Hopwood announced to the press in 1924 that he was engaged to vaudeville dancer and choreographer Rosa Rolanda, Van Vechten confirmed in later years that it was a publicity stunt. Rolanda would later marry caricaturist Miguel Covarrubias. On the evening of July 1, 1928, at Juan-les-Pins on the French Riviera, Hopwood suffered a fatal heart attack while swimming. He was buried in Riverside Cemetery, Cleveland. His mother, Jule Hopwood, inherited a large trust from him, but he had not made arrangements for the disposition of other items, including literary rights. While she was working through the legal issues with his estate, Jule Hopwood fell ill and died on March 1, 1929. She was buried next to her son. Legacy Hopwood's plays were very successful commercially, but they did not have the lasting literary significance he hoped to achieve. Hopwood Award The terms of Hopwood's will left a substantial portion of his estate to his alma mater, the University of Michigan, for the establishment of the Avery Hopwood and Jule Hopwood Creative Writing Awards. The bequest stipulated: "It is especially desired that students competing for prizes shall be allowed the widest possible latitude, and that the new, the unusual, and the radical shall be especially encouraged." Famous Hopwood award winners include Robert Hayden, Marge Piercy, Arthur Miller, Betty Smith, Lawrence Kasdan, John Ciardi, Mary Gaitskill, Edmund White, Nancy Willard, Frank O'Hara, and Steve Hamilton. The Great Bordello Throughout his life, Hopwood worked on a novel that he hoped would "expose" the strictures the commercial theater machine imposed on playwrights, but the manuscript was never published. Jack Sharrar recovered the manuscript for this novel in 1982 during his research for Avery Hopwood, His Life and Plays. The novel was published in July 2011 by Mondial Books (New York) as The Great Bordello, a Story of the Theatre, edited and with an Afterword by Sharrar. Works Clothes (1906) with Channing Pollock This Woman and This Man (1909) Seven Days (1909) with Mary Roberts Rinehart Judy Forgot (1910) Nobody's Widow (1910) Somewhere Else (1913) Fair and Warmer (1915) Remains popular in Germany (Der Mustergatte) and Scandinavia (Gröna hissen ) Sadie Love (1915) Our Little Wife (1916) Double Exposure (1918) Tumble In (1919, musical version of Seven Days) The Gold Diggers (1919) The Girl in the Limousine (1919) with Wilson Collison Ladies' Night (1920) with Charlton Andrews Spanish Love (1920, Adaptation of María del Carmen by Josep Feliu i Codina) with Mary Roberts Rinehart The Bat (1920) with Mary Roberts Rinehart Getting Gertie's Garter (1921) with Wilson Collison The Demi-Virgin (1921) Why Men Leave Home (1922) Little Miss Bluebeard (1923, Adaptation of Kisasszony férje by Gábor Drégely) The Alarm Clock (1923, Adaptation of La Sonnette d'alarme by Maurice Hennequin and Romain Coolus) The Best People (1924) with David Gray The Harem (1924) with Ernest Vajda Naughty Cinderella (1925, Adaptation of Pouche by René Peter and Henri Falk) The Garden of Eden (1927, Adaptation of Der Garten Eden by Rudolf Bernauer and Rudolf Österreicher) Filmography Clothes (1914, based on Clothes) Judy Forgot (1915, based on Judy Forgot) Our Little Wife (1918, based on Our Little Wife) Sadie Love (1919, based on Sadie Love) Fair and Warmer (1919, based on Fair and Warmer) Guilty of Love (1920, based on This Woman and This Man) Clothes (1920, based on Clothes) The Little Clown (1921, based on The Little Clown) The Gold Diggers (1923, based on The Gold Diggers) Why Men Leave Home (1924, based on Why Men Leave Home) The Girl in the Limousine (1924, based on The Girl in the Limousine) Miss Bluebeard (1925, based on Little Miss Bluebeard) The Best People (1925, based on The Best People) The Bat (1926, based on The Bat) Good and Naughty (1926, based on Naughty Cinderella) Nobody's Widow (1927, based on Nobody's Widow) Getting Gertie's Garter (1927, based on Getting Gertie's Garter) The Garden of Eden (1928, based on The Garden of Eden) Ladies' Night in a Turkish Bath (1928, based on Ladies' Night) Gold Diggers of Broadway (1929, based on The Gold Diggers) Her Wedding Night (1930, based on Little Miss Bluebeard) Let's Get Married (France, 1931, based on Little Miss Bluebeard) Su noche de bodas (Spain, 1931, based on Little Miss Bluebeard) Ich heirate meinen Mann (Germany, 1931, based on Little Miss Bluebeard) A Minha Noite de Núpcias (Portugal, 1931, based on Little Miss Bluebeard) Fast and Loose (1930, based on The Best People) The Bat Whispers (1930, based on The Bat) This Is the Night (1932, based on Naughty Cinderella) Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933, based on The Gold Diggers) Night of the Garter (UK, 1933, based on Getting Gertie's Garter) The Model Husband (Germany, 1937, based on Fair and Warmer) Unsere kleine Frau (Germany, 1938, based on Our Little Wife) Mia moglie si diverte (Italy, 1938, based on Our Little Wife) Gröna hissen (Sweden, 1944, based on Fair and Warmer) Getting Gertie's Garter (1945, based on Getting Gertie's Garter) Painting the Clouds with Sunshine (1951, based on The Gold Diggers) The Green Lift (1952 film) (Sweden, 1952, based on Fair and Warmer) The Model Husband (West Germany, 1956, based on Fair and Warmer) The Bat (1959, based on The Bat) The Model Husband (Switzerland, 1959, based on Fair and Warmer) (Denmark, 1961, based on Fair and Warmer) Den grønne heisen (Norway, 1981, based on Fair and Warmer) References Works cited Further reading Broadway, by Brooks Atkinson. NY: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1974. Matinee Tomorrow, by Ward Morehouse. NY: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1948. Posing a Threat: Flappers, Chorus Girls, and Other Brazen Performers of the American 1920s, by Angela Latham. Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 2000. The Splendid Drunken Twenties: Carl Van Vechten Selections from the Daybooks, 1922–1930. Edited by Bruce Kellner. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003. External links Mary Roberts Rinehart at University of Pittsburgh digital library – includes material on her collaboration with Hopwood 1882 births 1928 deaths American gay writers American LGBT dramatists and playwrights LGBT people from Ohio University of Michigan alumni American male dramatists and playwrights 20th-century American dramatists and playwrights Writers from Cleveland 20th-century American male writers

2340

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antipope%20Felix%20II

Antipope Felix II

Antipope Felix II, an archdeacon of Rome, was installed as Pope in 355 AD after the Emperor Constantius II banished the reigning Pope, Liberius, for refusing to subscribe to a sentence of condemnation against Saint Athanasius. Biography In May 357 AD the Roman laity, which had remained faithful to Liberius, demanded that Constantius, who was on a visit to Rome, should recall Liberius. The Emperor planned to have Felix and Liberius rule jointly, but when Liberius returned Felix was forced to retire to Porto, near Rome, where, after making an unsuccessful attempt to establish himself again in Rome, he died on 22 November 365 AD. This Felix was later confused with a Roman martyr named Felix, with the result that he was included in lists of the Popes as Felix II and that the succeeding Popes of the same name (Pope Felix III and Pope Felix IV) were given wrong numerals, as was Antipope Felix V. The Catholic Encyclopedia (1909) called this confusion a "distortion of the true facts" and suggested that it arose because the "Liber Pontificalis", which at this point may be registering a reliable tradition, says that this Felix built a church on the Via Aurelia, which is where the Roman martyr of an earlier date was buried. However, a more recent source says that of the martyr Felix nothing is known except his name, that he was a martyr, and that he was buried in the cemetery on the Via Portuensis that bears his name. The Catholic Encyclopedia remarked that "the real story of the antipope was lost and he obtained in local Roman history the status of a saint and a confessor. As such he appears in the Roman Martyrology on 29 July." At that time (1909) the Roman Martyrology had the following text: This entry was based on what the Catholic Encyclopedia called later legends that confound the relative positions of Felix and Liberius. More recent editions of the Roman Martyrology have instead: The feast day of the Roman martyr Felix is 29 July. The antipope Felix died, as stated above, on a 22 November, and his death was not a martyr's, occurring when the Peace of Constantine had been in force for half a century. As well as the Roman Martyrology, the Roman Missal identified the Saint Felix of 29 July with the antipope. This identification, still found in the 1920 typical edition, does not appear in the 1962 typical edition. To judge by the Marietti printing of 1952, which omits the numeral "II" and the word "Papae", the correction had already been made by then. One Catholic writer excuses this by saying that the antipope "himself did refuse to accept Arianism, and so his feast has been kept in the past on [29 July]". See also Papal selection before 1059 References External links The Papal Schism between Liberius and Felix (a primary source) Catholic Encyclopedia: Felix II Encyclopædia Britannica: Felix (II) 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica: Felix II Felix II Felix II 4th-century antipopes 4th-century Christian clergy Felix II Ancient Christians involved in controversies Felix II Date of birth unknown Date of death unknown Place of birth unknown Place of death unknown

2341

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alkaloid

Alkaloid

Alkaloids are a class of basic, naturally occurring organic compounds that contain at least one nitrogen atom. This group also includes some related compounds with neutral and even weakly acidic properties. Some synthetic compounds of similar structure may also be termed alkaloids. In addition to carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen, alkaloids may also contain oxygen or sulfur. More rarely still, they may contain elements such as phosphorus, chlorine, and bromine. Alkaloids are produced by a large variety of organisms including bacteria, fungi, plants, and animals. They can be purified from crude extracts of these organisms by acid-base extraction, or solvent extractions followed by silica-gel column chromatography. Alkaloids have a wide range of pharmacological activities including antimalarial (e.g. quinine), antiasthma (e.g. ephedrine), anticancer (e.g. homoharringtonine), cholinomimetic (e.g. galantamine), vasodilatory (e.g. vincamine), antiarrhythmic (e.g. quinidine), analgesic (e.g. morphine), antibacterial (e.g. chelerythrine), and antihyperglycemic activities (e.g. berberine). Many have found use in traditional or modern medicine, or as starting points for drug discovery. Other alkaloids possess psychotropic (e.g. psilocin) and stimulant activities (e.g. cocaine, caffeine, nicotine, theobromine), and have been used in entheogenic rituals or as recreational drugs. Alkaloids can be toxic too (e.g. atropine, tubocurarine). Although alkaloids act on a diversity of metabolic systems in humans and other animals, they almost uniformly evoke a bitter taste. The boundary between alkaloids and other nitrogen-containing natural compounds is not clear-cut. Compounds like amino acid peptides, proteins, nucleotides, nucleic acid, amines, and antibiotics are usually not called alkaloids. Natural compounds containing nitrogen in the exocyclic position (mescaline, serotonin, dopamine, etc.) are usually classified as amines rather than as alkaloids. Some authors, however, consider alkaloids a special case of amines. Naming The name "alkaloids" () was introduced in 1819 by German chemist Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Meissner, and is derived from late Latin root and the Greek-language suffix -('like'). However, the term came into wide use only after the publication of a review article, by Oscar Jacobsen in the chemical dictionary of Albert Ladenburg in the 1880s. There is no unique method for naming alkaloids. Many individual names are formed by adding the suffix "ine" to the species or genus name. For example, atropine is isolated from the plant Atropa belladonna; strychnine is obtained from the seed of the Strychnine tree (Strychnos nux-vomica L.). Where several alkaloids are extracted from one plant their names are often distinguished by variations in the suffix: "idine", "anine", "aline", "inine" etc. There are also at least 86 alkaloids whose names contain the root "vin" because they are extracted from vinca plants such as Vinca rosea (Catharanthus roseus); these are called vinca alkaloids. History Alkaloid-containing plants have been used by humans since ancient times for therapeutic and recreational purposes. For example, medicinal plants have been known in Mesopotamia from about 2000 BC. The Odyssey of Homer referred to a gift given to Helen by the Egyptian queen, a drug bringing oblivion. It is believed that the gift was an opium-containing drug. A Chinese book on houseplants written in 1st–3rd centuries BC mentioned a medical use of ephedra and opium poppies. Also, coca leaves have been used by Indigenous South Americans since ancient times. Extracts from plants containing toxic alkaloids, such as aconitine and tubocurarine, were used since antiquity for poisoning arrows. Studies of alkaloids began in the 19th century. In 1804, the German chemist Friedrich Sertürner isolated from opium a "soporific principle" (), which he called "morphium", referring to Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams; in German and some other Central-European languages, this is still the name of the drug. The term "morphine", used in English and French, was given by the French physicist Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac. A significant contribution to the chemistry of alkaloids in the early years of its development was made by the French researchers Pierre Joseph Pelletier and Joseph Bienaimé Caventou, who discovered quinine (1820) and strychnine (1818). Several other alkaloids were discovered around that time, including xanthine (1817), atropine (1819), caffeine (1820), coniine (1827), nicotine (1828), colchicine (1833), sparteine (1851), and cocaine (1860). The development of the chemistry of alkaloids was accelerated by the emergence of spectroscopic and chromatographic methods in the 20th century, so that by 2008 more than 12,000 alkaloids had been identified. The first complete synthesis of an alkaloid was achieved in 1886 by the German chemist Albert Ladenburg. He produced coniine by reacting 2-methylpyridine with acetaldehyde and reducing the resulting 2-propenyl pyridine with sodium. Classifications Compared with most other classes of natural compounds, alkaloids are characterized by a great structural diversity. There is no uniform classification. Initially, when knowledge of chemical structures was lacking, botanical classification of the source plants was relied on. This classification is now considered obsolete. More recent classifications are based on similarity of the carbon skeleton (e.g., indole-, isoquinoline-, and pyridine-like) or biochemical precursor (ornithine, lysine, tyrosine, tryptophan, etc.). However, they require compromises in borderline cases; for example, nicotine contains a pyridine fragment from nicotinamide and a pyrrolidine part from ornithine and therefore can be assigned to both classes. Alkaloids are often divided into the following major groups: "True alkaloids" contain nitrogen in the heterocycle and originate from amino acids. Their characteristic examples are atropine, nicotine, and morphine. This group also includes some alkaloids that besides the nitrogen heterocycle contain terpene (e.g., evonine) or peptide fragments (e.g. ergotamine). The piperidine alkaloids coniine and coniceine may be regarded as true alkaloids (rather than pseudoalkaloids: see below) although they do not originate from amino acids. "Protoalkaloids", which contain nitrogen (but not the nitrogen heterocycle) and also originate from amino acids. Examples include mescaline, adrenaline and ephedrine. Polyamine alkaloids – derivatives of putrescine, spermidine, and spermine. Peptide and cyclopeptide alkaloids. Pseudoalkaloids – alkaloid-like compounds that do not originate from amino acids. This group includes terpene-like and steroid-like alkaloids, as well as purine-like alkaloids such as caffeine, theobromine, theacrine and theophylline. Some authors classify ephedrine and cathinone as pseudoalkaloids. Those originate from the amino acid phenylalanine, but acquire their nitrogen atom not from the amino acid but through transamination. Some alkaloids do not have the carbon skeleton characteristic of their group. So, galanthamine and homoaporphines do not contain isoquinoline fragment, but are, in general, attributed to isoquinoline alkaloids. Main classes of monomeric alkaloids are listed in the table below: Properties Most alkaloids contain oxygen in their molecular structure; those compounds are usually colorless crystals at ambient conditions. Oxygen-free alkaloids, such as nicotine or coniine, are typically volatile, colorless, oily liquids. Some alkaloids are colored, like berberine (yellow) and sanguinarine (orange). Most alkaloids are weak bases, but some, such as theobromine and theophylline, are amphoteric. Many alkaloids dissolve poorly in water but readily dissolve in organic solvents, such as diethyl ether, chloroform or 1,2-dichloroethane. Caffeine, cocaine, codeine and nicotine are slightly soluble in water (with a solubility of ≥1g/L), whereas others, including morphine and yohimbine are very slightly water-soluble (0.1–1 g/L). Alkaloids and acids form salts of various strengths. These salts are usually freely soluble in water and ethanol and poorly soluble in most organic solvents. Exceptions include scopolamine hydrobromide, which is soluble in organic solvents, and the water-soluble quinine sulfate. Most alkaloids have a bitter taste or are poisonous when ingested. Alkaloid production in plants appeared to have evolved in response to feeding by herbivorous animals; however, some animals have evolved the ability to detoxify alkaloids. Some alkaloids can produce developmental defects in the offspring of animals that consume but cannot detoxify the alkaloids. One example is the alkaloid cyclopamine, produced in the leaves of corn lily. During the 1950s, up to 25% of lambs born by sheep that had grazed on corn lily had serious facial deformations. These ranged from deformed jaws to cyclopia (see picture). After decades of research, in the 1980s, the compound responsible for these deformities was identified as the alkaloid 11-deoxyjervine, later renamed to cyclopamine. Distribution in nature Alkaloids are generated by various living organisms, especially by higher plants – about 10 to 25% of those contain alkaloids. Therefore, in the past the term "alkaloid" was associated with plants. The alkaloids content in plants is usually within a few percent and is inhomogeneous over the plant tissues. Depending on the type of plants, the maximum concentration is observed in the leaves (for example, black henbane), fruits or seeds (Strychnine tree), root (Rauvolfia serpentina) or bark (cinchona). Furthermore, different tissues of the same plants may contain different alkaloids. Beside plants, alkaloids are found in certain types of fungus, such as psilocybin in the fruiting bodies of the genus Psilocybe, and in animals, such as bufotenin in the skin of some toads and a number of insects, markedly ants. Many marine organisms also contain alkaloids. Some amines, such as adrenaline and serotonin, which play an important role in higher animals, are similar to alkaloids in their structure and biosynthesis and are sometimes called alkaloids. Extraction Because of the structural diversity of alkaloids, there is no single method of their extraction from natural raw materials. Most methods exploit the property of most alkaloids to be soluble in organic solvents but not in water, and the opposite tendency of their salts. Most plants contain several alkaloids. Their mixture is extracted first and then individual alkaloids are separated. Plants are thoroughly ground before extraction. Most alkaloids are present in the raw plants in the form of salts of organic acids. The extracted alkaloids may remain salts or change into bases. Base extraction is achieved by processing the raw material with alkaline solutions and extracting the alkaloid bases with organic solvents, such as 1,2-dichloroethane, chloroform, diethyl ether or benzene. Then, the impurities are dissolved by weak acids; this converts alkaloid bases into salts that are washed away with water. If necessary, an aqueous solution of alkaloid salts is again made alkaline and treated with an organic solvent. The process is repeated until the desired purity is achieved. In the acidic extraction, the raw plant material is processed by a weak acidic solution (e.g., acetic acid in water, ethanol, or methanol). A base is then added to convert alkaloids to basic forms that are extracted with organic solvent (if the extraction was performed with alcohol, it is removed first, and the remainder is dissolved in water). The solution is purified as described above. Alkaloids are separated from their mixture using their different solubility in certain solvents and different reactivity with certain reagents or by distillation. A number of alkaloids are identified from insects, among which the fire ant venom alkaloids known as solenopsins have received greater attention from researchers. These insect alkaloids can be efficiently extracted by solvent immersion of live fire ants or by centrifugation of live ants followed by silica-gel chromatography purification. Tracking and dosing the extracted solenopsin ant alkaloids has been described as possible based on their absorbance peak around 232 nanometers. Biosynthesis Biological precursors of most alkaloids are amino acids, such as ornithine, lysine, phenylalanine, tyrosine, tryptophan, histidine, aspartic acid, and anthranilic acid. Nicotinic acid can be synthesized from tryptophan or aspartic acid. Ways of alkaloid biosynthesis are too numerous and cannot be easily classified. However, there are a few typical reactions involved in the biosynthesis of various classes of alkaloids, including synthesis of Schiff bases and Mannich reaction. Synthesis of Schiff bases Schiff bases can be obtained by reacting amines with ketones or aldehydes. These reactions are a common method of producing C=N bonds. In the biosynthesis of alkaloids, such reactions may take place within a molecule, such as in the synthesis of piperidine: Mannich reaction An integral component of the Mannich reaction, in addition to an amine and a carbonyl compound, is a carbanion, which plays the role of the nucleophile in the nucleophilic addition to the ion formed by the reaction of the amine and the carbonyl. The Mannich reaction can proceed both intermolecularly and intramolecularly: Dimer alkaloids In addition to the described above monomeric alkaloids, there are also dimeric, and even trimeric and tetrameric alkaloids formed upon condensation of two, three, and four monomeric alkaloids. Dimeric alkaloids are usually formed from monomers of the same type through the following mechanisms: Mannich reaction, resulting in, e.g., voacamine Michael reaction (villalstonine) Condensation of aldehydes with amines (toxiferine) Oxidative addition of phenols (dauricine, tubocurarine) Lactonization (carpaine). There are also dimeric alkaloids formed from two distinct monomers, such as the vinca alkaloids vinblastine and vincristine, which are formed from the coupling of catharanthine and vindoline. The newer semi-synthetic chemotherapeutic agent vinorelbine is used in the treatment of non-small-cell lung cancer. It is another derivative dimer of vindoline and catharanthine and is synthesised from anhydrovinblastine, starting either from leurosine or the monomers themselves. Biological role Alkaloids are among the most important and best-known secondary metabolites, i.e. biogenic substances not directly involved in the normal growth, development, or reproduction of the organism. Instead, they generally mediate ecological interactions, which may produce a selective advantage for the organism by increasing its survivability or fecundity. In some cases their function, if any, remains unclear. An early hypothesis, that alkaloids are the final products of nitrogen metabolism in plants, as urea and uric acid are in mammals, was refuted by the finding that their concentration fluctuates rather than steadily increasing. Most of the known functions of alkaloids are related to protection. For example, aporphine alkaloid liriodenine produced by the tulip tree protects it from parasitic mushrooms. In addition, the presence of alkaloids in the plant prevents insects and chordate animals from eating it. However, some animals are adapted to alkaloids and even use them in their own metabolism. Such alkaloid-related substances as serotonin, dopamine and histamine are important neurotransmitters in animals. Alkaloids are also known to regulate plant growth. One example of an organism that uses alkaloids for protection is the Utetheisa ornatrix, more commonly known as the ornate moth. Pyrrolizidine alkaloids render these larvae and adult moths unpalatable to many of their natural enemies like coccinelid beetles, green lacewings, insectivorous hemiptera and insectivorous bats. Another example of alkaloids being utilized occurs in the poison hemlock moth (Agonopterix alstroemeriana). This moth feeds on its highly toxic and alkaloid-rich host plant poison hemlock (Conium maculatum) during its larval stage. A. alstroemeriana may benefit twofold from the toxicity of the naturally-occurring alkaloids, both through the unpalatability of the species to predators and through the ability of A. alstroemeriana to recognize Conium maculatum as the correct location for oviposition. A fire ant venom alkaloid known as solenopsin has been demonstrated to protect queens of invasive fire ants during the foundation of new nests, thus playing a central role in the spread of this pest ant species around the world. Applications In medicine Medical use of alkaloid-containing plants has a long history, and, thus, when the first alkaloids were isolated in the 19th century, they immediately found application in clinical practice. Many alkaloids are still used in medicine, usually in the form of salts widely used including the following: Many synthetic and semisynthetic drugs are structural modifications of the alkaloids, which were designed to enhance or change the primary effect of the drug and reduce unwanted side-effects. For example, naloxone, an opioid receptor antagonist, is a derivative of thebaine that is present in opium. In agriculture Prior to the development of a wide range of relatively low-toxic synthetic pesticides, some alkaloids, such as salts of nicotine and anabasine, were used as insecticides. Their use was limited by their high toxicity to humans. Use as psychoactive drugs Preparations of plants and fungi containing alkaloids and their extracts, and later pure alkaloids, have long been used as psychoactive substances. Cocaine, caffeine, and cathinone are stimulants of the central nervous system. Mescaline and many indole alkaloids (such as psilocybin, dimethyltryptamine and ibogaine) have hallucinogenic effect. Morphine and codeine are strong narcotic pain killers. There are alkaloids that do not have strong psychoactive effect themselves, but are precursors for semi-synthetic psychoactive drugs. For example, ephedrine and pseudoephedrine are used to produce methcathinone and methamphetamine. Thebaine is used in the synthesis of many painkillers such as oxycodone. See also Amine Base (chemistry) List of poisonous plants Mayer's reagent Natural products Palau'amine Secondary metabolite Explanatory notes Citations General and cited references External links

2346

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion%2C%20Michigan

Albion, Michigan

Albion is a city in Calhoun County in the south central region of the Lower Peninsula of the U.S. state of Michigan. The population was 7,700 at the 2020 census. Albion is part of the Battle Creek Metropolitan Statistical Area. The earliest English-speaking settlers also called this area The Forks, because it is at the confluence of the north and south branches of the Kalamazoo River. In the early 20th century, immigrants came to Albion from various eastern European nations, including the current Lithuania and Russia. More recently, Latino immigrants have come from Mexico and Central America. The Festival of the Forks has been held annually since 1967 to celebrate Albion's diverse ethnic heritage. Since the 19th century, several major manufacturers were established in Albion, which became known as a factory town. This changed after several manufacturers closed. In the 21st century, Albion's culture is changing to that of a college town whose residents have a strong interest in technology and sustainability. Albion College is a private liberal arts college with a student population of about 1,250. Albion is a sister city with Noisy-le-Roi, France. History The first European-American settler, Tenney Peabody, arrived in 1833 along with his brother-in-law, Charles Blanchard, and another young man, Clark Dowling. Peabody's family followed soon after. In 1835, the Albion Company, a land development company formed by Jesse Crowell, platted a village. Peabody's wife was asked to name the settlement. She considered the name "Peabodyville", but selected "Albion" instead, after the former residence of Jesse Crowell. Crowell was appointed in 1838 as the first US postmaster there. Many early settlers migrated to Albion from western New York and New England, part of a movement after the construction of the Erie Canal and the opening of new lands in Michigan and other Great Lakes territories. They first developed agriculture and it became a rural trading village. Settlers were strong supporters of education and in 1835, Methodists established Albion College affiliated with their church. Its first classes were held in 1843. The college was known by a few other names before 1861. At that time it was fully authorized to confer four-year degrees on both men and women. Albion incorporated as a village in 1855, following construction of the railroad here in 1852, which stimulated development. It became a city in 1885. Mills were constructed to operate on the water power of the forks of the Kalamazoo River. They were the first industry in the town, used to process lumber, grain, and other products to build the village. Albion quickly became a mill town as well as an agricultural market. The river that powered industry also flooded the town. In the Great Flood of 1908, there was severe property damage. In February, several feet of snow fell across the region. Heavy rains and warmer conditions in early March created water saturation in the ground and risk of flooding because of the rivers' high flow. After the Homer Dam broke around 3 p.m. on March 7, the Kalamazoo River flooded Albion. By midnight, the bridges surrounding town were underwater. Six buildings in Albion collapsed, resulting in more than $125,000 in damage (1908 dollars). The town struggled to recover. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, numerous Lithuanian and other Eastern European immigrants settled there, most working for the Albion Malleable Iron Company, and some in the coal mine north of town. The iron company initially made agricultural implements, but around World War I shifted to making automotive parts. The Malleable merged in 1969 with the Hayes Corporation, becoming the Hayes-Albion Corporation. Now known as a division of Harvard Industries, the company continues to produce automotive castings in Albion. Molder Statue Park downtown is dedicated to the many molders who dealt with molten iron. There were soon enough Lithuanians in town to establish Holy Ascension Orthodox Church, which they built in 1916. It is part of the Orthodox Church in America. Today its services are in English. Albion's population peaked in 1960. In 1973 Albion was named an All-America City by the National Civic League. It celebrated the award on May 15, 1974, when Michigan Governor William Milliken and many other dignitaries came to town. In 1975 the closure of a major factory began a difficult period of industrial restructuring and decline in jobs and population. Since that time citizens have mobilized, founding the Albion Community Foundation in 1968. They formed the Albion Volunteer Service Organization in the 1980s, with support from Albion College, to address the challenge of diminishing economic opportunity. Key to the City Honor Bestowed: 1964: Aunt Jemima visited Albion on January 25. 1960s: Columnist Ann Landers was presented with a key upon her visit to Starr Commonwealth for Boys. Law and government Albion has a council-manager government. City residents elect a mayor at-large and City Council members from each of six single-member districts. The council in turn selects a city manager to handle the city's day-to-day affairs. The mayor presides over and is a voting member of the council. Council members are elected to four-year terms, staggered every two years. A mayor is elected every two years. The city levies an income tax of 1% on residents and 0.5% on nonresidents. Geography According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has an area of , of which is land and is water. Albion is 42.24 degrees north of the equator and 84.75 degrees west of the prime meridian. Climate Demographics 2010 population by gender/age 2010 population by ethnicity 2010 population by race Transportation Major highways Rail Amtrak provides daily service to Albion, operating its Wolverine both directions between Chicago, Illinois and Pontiac, Michigan, via Detroit. Bus Greyhound Lines provides daily intercity city bus service to Albion between Chicago and Detroit. Notable people Kim Cascone, musician, composer, owner of Silent Records; born in Albion M. F. K. Fisher, food writer, born in Albion Ada Iddings Gale, author, lived and buried in Albion Frank Joranko, football player and coach for Albion College LaVall Jordan, head men's basketball coach for Butler University, born in Albion Martin Wells Knapp, American Methodist evangelist who founded the Pilgrim Holiness Church and God's Bible School and College, born in Albion. Bill Laswell, jazz bassist, record producer and record label owner; raised in Albion Jerome D. Mack, banker, director of Las Vegas hotels Riviera and Dunes, founder of University of Nevada, Las Vegas; born in Albion Deacon McGuire, professional baseball player for 26 seasons, lived in Albion Gary Lee Nelson, composer, pioneer in electronic and computer music; grew up in Albion John Sinclair, poet and political activist, attended Albion College Jon Scieszka, children's author, attended Albion College Brian Tyler, racing driver, born in Albion Jack Vaughn, Assistant Secretary of State, Ambassador to Panama and Colombia, and Director of the Peace Corps (1966-1969); grew up in Albion The War and Treaty, musical duo See also Holy Ascension Orthodox Church References External links City of Albion official website Albion City Information Page Albion District Library Albion Michigan Home Page Historical Albion Michigan Festival of the Forks – Albion's annual music and food festival by the forks of the Kalamazoo River The Greater Albion Chamber of Commerce Albion Michigan Community Foundation – For Good. For Ever. Cities in Calhoun County, Michigan Populated places established in 1835 1835 establishments in Michigan Territory

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anointing%20of%20the%20sick

Anointing of the sick

Anointing of the sick, known also by other names such as unction, is a form of religious anointing or "unction" (an older term with the same meaning) for the benefit of a sick person. It is practiced by many Christian churches and denominations. Anointing of the sick was a customary practice in many civilizations, including among the ancient Greeks and early Jewish communities. The use of oil for healing purposes is referred to in the writings of Hippocrates. Anointing of the sick should be distinguished from other religious anointings that occur in relation to other sacraments, in particular baptism, confirmation and ordination, and also in the coronation of a monarch. Names Since 1972, the Roman Catholic Church has used the name "Anointing of the Sick" both in the English translations issued by the Holy See of its official documents in Latin and in the English official documents of Episcopal conferences. It does not, of course, forbid the use of other names, for example the more archaic term "Unction of the Sick" or the term "Extreme Unction". Cardinal Walter Kasper used the latter term in his intervention at the 2005 Assembly of the Synod of Bishops. However, the Church declared that "'Extreme unction' ... may also and more fittingly be called 'anointing of the sick'", and has itself adopted the latter term, while not outlawing the former. This is to emphasize that the sacrament is available, and recommended, to all those suffering from any serious illness, and to dispel the common misconception that it is exclusively for those at or very near the point of death. Extreme Unction was the usual name for the sacrament in the West from the late twelfth century until 1972, and was thus used at the Council of Trent and in the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia. Peter Lombard (died 1160) is the first writer known to have used the term, which did not become the usual name in the West till towards the end of the twelfth century, and never became current in the East. The word "extreme" (final) indicated either that it was the last of the sacramental unctions (after the anointings at Baptism, Confirmation and, if received, Holy Orders) or because at that time it was normally administered only when a patient was in extremis. Other names used in the West include the unction or blessing of consecrated oil, the unction of God, and the office of the unction. Among some Protestant bodies, who do not consider it a sacrament, but instead as a practice suggested rather than commanded by Scripture, it is called anointing with oil. In the Greek Church, the sacrament is called Euchelaion (Greek Εὐχέλαιον, from εὐχή, "prayer", and ἔλαιον, "oil"). Other names are also used, such as ἅγιον ἔλαιον (holy oil), ἡγιασμένον ἔλαιον (consecrated oil), and χρῖσις or χρῖσμα (anointing). The Community of Christ uses the term administration to the sick. The term "last rites" refers to administration to a dying person not only of this sacrament but also of Penance and Holy Communion, the last of which, when administered in such circumstances, is known as "Viaticum", a word whose original meaning in Latin was "provision for the journey". The normal order of administration is: first Penance (if the dying person is physically unable to confess, absolution, conditional on the existence of contrition, is given); next, Anointing; finally, Viaticum (if the person can receive it). Biblical texts The chief biblical text concerning the rite is the Epistle of James (): "Is any among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord; and the prayer of faith will save the sick man, and the Lord will raise him up; and if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven" (RSV). , and are also quoted in this context. Sacramental beliefs The Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Coptic and Old Catholic Churches consider this anointing to be a sacrament. Other Christians too, in particular, Lutherans, Anglicans and some Protestant and other Christian communities use a rite of anointing the sick, without necessarily classifying it as a sacrament. In the Churches mentioned here by name, the oil used (called "oil of the sick" in both West and East) is blessed specifically for this purpose. Roman Catholic Church An extensive account of the teaching of the Catholic Church on Anointing of the Sick is given in Catechism of the Catholic Church. Anointing of the Sick is one of the seven Sacraments recognized by the Catholic Church, and is associated with not only bodily healing but also forgiveness of sins. Only ordained priests can administer it, and "any priest may carry the holy oil with him, so that in a case of necessity he can administer the sacrament of anointing of the sick." Sacramental graces The Catholic Church sees the effects of the sacrament as follows. As the sacrament of Marriage gives grace for the married state, the sacrament of Anointing of the Sick gives grace for the state into which people enter through sickness. Through the sacrament a gift of the Holy Spirit is given, that renews confidence and faith in God and strengthens against temptations to discouragement, despair and anguish at the thought of death and the struggle of death; it prevents from losing Christian hope in God's justice, truth and salvation. The special grace of the sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick has as its effects: the uniting of the sick person to the passion of Christ, for his own good and that of the whole Church; the strengthening, peace, and courage to endure, in a Christian manner, the sufferings of illness or old age; the forgiveness of sins, if the sick person was not able to obtain it through the sacrament of penance; the restoration of health, if it is conducive to the salvation of his soul; the preparation for passing over to eternal life." Sacramental oil The duly blessed oil used in the sacrament is, as laid down in the Apostolic Constitution, Sacram unctionem infirmorum, pressed from olives or from other plants. It is blessed by the bishop of the diocese at the Chrism Mass he celebrates on Holy Thursday or on a day close to it. If oil blessed by the bishop is not available, the priest administering the sacrament may bless the oil, but only within the framework of the celebration. Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite (1972) The Roman Rite Anointing of the Sick, as revised in 1972, puts greater stress than in the immediately preceding centuries on the sacrament's aspect of healing, primarily spiritual but also physical, and points to the place sickness holds in the normal life of Christians and its part in the redemptive work of the Church. Canon law permits its administration to a Catholic who has reached the age of reason and is beginning to be put in danger by illness or old age, unless the person in question obstinately persists in a manifestly grave sin. "If there is any doubt as to whether the sick person has reached the use of reason, or is dangerously ill, or is dead, this sacrament is to be administered". There is an obligation to administer it to the sick who, when they were in possession of their faculties, at least implicitly asked for it. A new illness or a renewal or worsening of the first illness enables a person to receive the sacrament a further time. The ritual book on pastoral care of the sick provides three rites: anointing outside Mass, anointing within Mass, and anointing in a hospital or institution. The rite of anointing outside Mass begins with a greeting by the priest, followed by sprinkling of all present with holy water, if deemed desirable, and a short instruction. There follows a penitential act, as at the beginning of Mass. If the sick person wishes to receive the sacrament of penance, it is preferable that the priest make himself available for this during a previous visit; but if the sick person must confess during the celebration of the sacrament of anointing, this confession replaces the penitential rite A passage of Scripture is read, and the priest may give a brief explanation of the reading, a short litany is said, and the priest lays his hands on the head of the sick person and then says a prayer of thanksgiving over the already blessed oil or, if necessary, blesses the oil himself. The actual anointing of the sick person is done on the forehead, with the prayer: PER ISTAM SANCTAM UNCTIONEM ET SUAM PIISSIMAM MISERICORDIAM ADIUVET TE DOMINUS GRATIA SPIRITUS SANCTI, UT A PECCATIS LIBERATUM TE SALVET ATQUE PROPITIUS ALLEVIET. AMEN. "Through this holy anointing may the Lord in his love and mercy help you with the grace of the Holy Spirit," and on the hands, with the prayer "May the Lord who frees you from sin save you and raise you up". To each prayer the sick person, if able, responds: "Amen." It is permitted, in accordance with local culture and traditions and the condition of the sick person, to anoint other parts of the body in addition, such as the area of pain or injury, but without repeating the sacramental form. In case of emergency, a single anointing, if possible but not absolutely necessary if not possible on the forehead, is sufficient. Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite From the early Middle Ages until after the Second Vatican Council the sacrament was administered, within the Latin Church, only when death was approaching and, in practice, bodily recovery was not ordinarily looked for, giving rise, as mentioned above to the name "Extreme Unction" (i.e. final anointing). The extraordinary form of the Roman Rite includes anointing of seven parts of the body while saying in Latin: Per istam sanctam Unctiónem + et suam piisimam misericórdiam, indúlgeat tibi Dóminus quidquid per (visum, auditorum, odorátum, gustum et locutiónem, tactum, gressum, lumborum delectationem) deliquisti. Through this holy unction and His own most tender mercy may the Lord pardon thee whatever sins thou hast committed by (sight by hearing, smell, taste, touch, walking, carnal delectation), the last phrase corresponding to the part of the body that was touched. The 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia explains that "the unction of the loins is generally, if not universally, omitted in English-speaking countries, and it is of course everywhere forbidden in case of women". Anointing in the extraordinary form is still permitted under the conditions mentioned in article 9 of the 2007 motu proprio Summorum Pontificum. In the case of necessity when only a single anointing on the forehead is possible, it suffices for valid administration of the sacrament to use the shortened form: Per istam sanctam unctionem indulgeat tibi Dominus, quidquid deliquisti. Amen. Through this holy anointing, may the Lord pardon thee whatever sins thou hast committed. Amen. When it become opportune, all the anointings are to be supplied together with their respective forms for the integrity of the sacrament. If the sacrament is conferred conditionally, for example, if a person is unconscious, "Si es capax (If you are capable)" is added to the beginning of the form, not "Si dispositus es (if you are disposed)." In doubt if the soul has left the body through death, the priest adds, "Si vivis (If you are alive)." Other Western historical forms Liturgical rites of the Catholic Church, both Western and Eastern, other than the Roman, have a variety of other forms for celebrating the sacrament. For example, according to Giovanni Diclich who cites De Rubeis, De Ritibus vestutis &c. cap. 28 p. 381, the Aquileian Rite, also called Rito Patriarchino, had twelve anointings, namely, of the head, forehead, eyes, ears, nose, lips, throat, chest, heart, shoulders, hands, and feet. The form used to anoint is the first person plural indicative, except for the anointing on the head which could be either in the first person singular or plural. For example, the form is given as: Ungo caput tuum Oleo benedicto + in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Vel Ungimus caput tuum Oleo divinitus sanctificato + in nomine Sanctae et Individuae Trinitatis ut more militis praeparatus ad luctamen, possis aereas superare catervas: per Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen. I anoint your head with blessed Oil + in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Or We anoint your head with divinely sanctified Oil + in the name of the Holy and Undivided Trinity so that prepared for the conflict in the way of a soldier, you might be able to overcome the aereal throng: through Christ our Lord. Amen. The other anointings all mention an anointing with oil and are all made "through Christ our Lord," and "in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit," except the anointing of the heart which, as in the second option for anointing of the head, is "in the name of the Holy and Undivided Trinity." the Latin forms are as follows: (Ad frontem) Ungimus frontem tuam Oleo sancto in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti, in remissionem omnium peccatorum; ut sit tibi haec unction sanctificationis ad purificationem mentis et corporis; ut non lateat in te spiritus immundus neque in membris, neque in medullis, neque in ulla compagine membrorum: sed habitet in te virtus Christi Altissimi et Spiritus Sancti: per Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen. (Ad oculos) Ungimus oculos tuos Oleo sanctificato, in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti: ut quidquid illicito visu deliquisti, hac unctione expietur per Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen. (Ad aures) Ungimus has aures sacri Olei liquore in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti: ut quidquid peccati delectatione nocivi auditus admissum est, medicina hac spirituali evacuetur: per Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen. (Ad nares) Ungimus has nares Olei hujus liquore in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti: ut quidquid noxio vapore contractum est, vel odore superfluo, ista evacuet unctio vel medicatio: per Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen. (Ad labia) Ungimus labia ista consecrati Olei medicamento, in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti: ut quidquid otiose, vel etiam crimnosa peccasti locutione, divina clementia miserante expurgetur: per Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen. (Ad guttur) Ungimus te in gutture Oleo sancto in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti, ut non lateat in te spiritus immundus, neque in membris, neque in medullis, neque in ulla compagine membrorum: sed habitet in te virtus Christi Altissimi et Spiritus Sancti:quatenus per hujus operationem mysterii, et per hanc sacrati Olei unctionem, atque nostrum deprecationem virtute Sanctae Trinitatis medicates, sive fotus; pristinam, et meliorem percipere merearis sanitatem: per Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen. (Ad pectus) Ungimus pectus tuum Oleo divinitus sanctificato in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti, ut hac unctione pectoris fortiter certare valeas adversus aereas potestates: per Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen. (Ad cor) Ungimus locum cordis Oleo divinitus sanctificato, coelesti munere nobis attributo, in nomine Sanctae et Individuae Trinitatis, ut ipsa interius exteriusque te sanando vivificet, quae universum ne pereat continent: per Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen. (Ad scapulas) Ungimus has scapulas, sive in medio scapularum Oleo sacrato, in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti, ut ex omni parte spirituali protectione munitus, jacula diabolici impetus viriliter contemnere, ac procul possis cum robore superni juvaminis repellere: per Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen. (Ad manus) Ungimus has manus Oleo sacro, in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti, ut quidquid illicito opera, vel noxio peregerunt, per hanc sanctam unctionem evacuetur: per Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen. (Ad pedes) Ungimus hos pedes Oleo benedicto, in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti, ut quidquid superfluo, vel nocivo incessu commiserunt, ista aboleat perunctio: per Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen. Eastern Orthodox Church The teaching of the Eastern Orthodox Church on the Holy Mystery (sacrament) of Unction is similar to that of the Roman Catholic Church. However, the reception of the Mystery is not limited to those who are enduring physical illness. The Mystery is given for healing (both physical and spiritual) and for the forgiveness of sin. For this reason, it is normally required that one go to confession before receiving Unction. Because it is a Sacred Mystery of the Church, only Orthodox Christians may receive it. The solemn form of Eastern Christian anointing requires the ministry of seven priests. A table is prepared, upon which is set a vessel containing wheat. Into the wheat has been placed an empty shrine-lamp, seven candles, and seven anointing brushes. Candles are distributed for all to hold during the service. The rite begins with reading Psalm 50 (the great penitential psalm), followed by the chanting of a special canon. After this, the senior priest (or bishop) pours pure olive oil and a small amount of wine into the shrine lamp, and says the "Prayer of the Oil", which calls upon God to "...sanctify this Oil, that it may be effectual for those who shall be anointed therewith, unto healing, and unto relief from every passion, every malady of the flesh and of the spirit, and every ill..." Then follow seven series of epistles, gospels, long prayers, Ektenias (litanies) and anointings. Each series is served by one of the seven priests in turn. The afflicted one is anointed with the sign of the cross on seven places: the forehead, the nostrils, the cheeks, the lips, the breast, the palms of both hands, and the back of the hands. After the last anointing, the Gospel Book is opened and placed with the writing down upon the head of the one who was anointed, and the senior priest reads the "Prayer of the Gospel". At the end, the anointed kisses the Gospel, the Cross and the right hands of the priests, receiving their blessing. Anointing is considered to be a public rather than a private sacrament, and so as many of the faithful who are able are encouraged to attend. It should be celebrated in the church when possible, but if this is impossible, it may be served in the home or hospital room of the afflicted. Unction in the Greek Orthodox Church and Churches of Hellenic custom (Antiochian Eastern Orthodox, Melkite, etc.) is usually given with a minimum of ceremony. Anointing may also be given during Forgiveness Vespers and Great Week, on Great and Holy Wednesday, to all who are prepared. Those who receive Unction on Holy Wednesday should go to Holy Communion on Great Thursday. The significance of receiving Unction on Holy Wednesday is shored up by the hymns in the Triodion for that day, which speak of the sinful woman who anointed the feet of Christ. Just as her sins were forgiven because of her penitence, so the faithful are exhorted to repent of their sins. In the same narrative, Jesus says, "in that she hath poured this ointment on my body, she did it for my burial" (Id., v. 12), linking the unction with Christ's death and resurrection. In some dioceses of the Russian Orthodox Church it is customary for the bishop to visit each parish or region of the diocese some time during Great Lent and give Anointing for the faithful, together with the local clergy. Hussite Church The Hussite Church regards anointing of the sick as one of the seven sacraments. Anabaptist Churches Anabaptists observe the ordinance of anointing of the sick in obedience to , with it being counted among the seven ordinances by Conservative Mennonite Anabaptists. In a compendium of Anabaptist doctrine, theologian Daniel Kauffman stated: The 2021 Church Polity of the Dunkard Brethren Church, a Conservative Anabaptist denomination in the Schwarzenau Brethren tradition, teaches: Lutheran churches Anointing of the sick has been retained in Lutheran churches since the Reformation. Although it is not considered a sacrament like baptism, confession and the Eucharist, it is known as a ritual in the same respect as confirmation, holy orders, and matrimony. Liturgy After the penitent has received absolution following confession, the presiding minister recites James 5:14-16. He goes on to recite the following: [Name], you have confessed your sins and received Holy Absolution. In remembrance of the grace of God given by the Holy Spirit in the waters of Holy Baptism, I will anoint you with oil. Confident in our Lord and in love for you, we also pray for you that you will not lose faith. Knowing that in Godly patience the Church endures with you and supports you during this affliction. We firmly believe that this illness is for the glory of God and that the Lord will both hear our prayer and work according to His good and gracious will. He anoints the person on the forehead and says this blessing: Almighty God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has given you the new birth of water and the Spirit and has forgiven you all your sins, strengthen you with His grace to life everlasting. Amen. Anglican churches The 1552 and later editions of the Book of Common Prayer omitted the form of anointing given in the original (1549) version in its Order for the Visitation of the Sick, but most twentieth-century Anglican prayer books do have anointing of the sick. The Book of Common Prayer (1662) and the proposed revision of 1928 include the "visitation of the sick" and "communion of the sick" (which consist of various prayers, exhortations and psalms). Some Anglicans accept that anointing of the sick has a sacramental character and is therefore a channel of God's grace, seeing it as an "outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace" which is the definition of a sacrament. The Catechism of the Episcopal Church of the United States of America includes Unction of the Sick as among the "other sacramental rites" and it states that unction can be done with oil or simply with laying on of hands. The rite of anointing is included in the Episcopal Church's "Ministration to the Sick" Article 25 of the Thirty-Nine Articles, which are one of the historical formularies of the Church of England (and as such, the Anglican Communion), speaking of the sacraments, says: "Those five commonly called Sacraments, that is to say, Confirmation, Penance, Orders, Matrimony, and extreme Unction, are not to be counted for Sacraments of the Gospel, being such as have grown partly of the corrupt following of the Apostles, partly are states of life allowed in the Scriptures; but yet have not like nature of Sacraments with Baptism, and the Lord's Supper, for that they have not any visible sign or ceremony ordained of God." In 1915 members of the Anglican Communion founded the Guild of St Raphael, an organisation dedicated to promoting, supporting and practising Christ's ministry of healing. Other Protestant communities Protestants provide anointing in a wide variety of formats. Protestant communities generally vary widely on the sacramental character of anointing. Most Mainline Protestants recognize only two sacraments, the eucharist and baptism, deeming anointing only a humanly-instituted rite. Non-traditional Protestant communities generally use the term ordinance rather than sacrament. Mainline beliefs Liturgical or Mainline Protestant communities (e.g. Presbyterian, Congregationalist/United Church of Christ, Methodist, etc.) all have official yet often optional liturgical rites for the anointing of the sick partly on the model of Western pre-Reformation rites. Anointing need not be associated with grave illness or imminent danger of death. Charismatic and Pentecostal beliefs In Charismatic and Pentecostal communities, anointing of the sick is a frequent practice and has been an important ritual in these communities since the respective movements were founded in the 19th and 20th centuries. These communities use extemporaneous forms of administration at the discretion of the minister, who need not be a pastor. There is minimal ceremony attached to its administration. Usually, several people physically touch (laying on of hands) the recipient during the anointing. It may be part of a worship service with the full assembly of the congregation present, but may also be done in more private settings, such as homes or hospital rooms. Some Pentecostals believe that physical healing is within the anointing and so there is often great expectation or at least great hope that a miraculous cure or improvement will occur when someone is being prayed over for healing. Evangelical and fundamentalist beliefs In Evangelical and Fundamentalist communities, anointing of the sick is performed with varying degrees of frequency, although laying on of hands may be more common than anointing. The rite would be similar to that of Pentecostals in its simplicity, but would usually not have the same emotionalism attached to it. Unlike some Pentecostals, Evangelicals and Fundamentalists generally do not believe that physical healing is within the anointing. Therefore, God may or may not grant physical healing to the sick. The healing conferred by anointing is thus a spiritual event that may not result in physical recovery. The Church of the Brethren practices Anointing with Oil as an ordinance along with Baptism, Communion, Laying on of Hands, and the Love Feast. Evangelical Protestants who use anointing differ about whether the person doing the anointing must be an ordained member of the clergy, whether the oil must necessarily be olive oil and have been previously specially consecrated, and about other details. Several Evangelical groups reject the practice so as not to be identified with charismatic and Pentecostal groups, which practice it widely. Latter Day Saint movement Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Latter-day Saints, who consider themselves restorationists, also practice ritual anointing of the sick, as well as other forms of anointing. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) consider anointing to be an ordinance. Members of the LDS Church who hold the Melchizedek priesthood may use consecrated olive oil in performing the ordinance of blessing of the "sick or afflicted", though oil is not required if it is unavailable. The priesthood holder anoints the recipient's head with a drop of oil, then lays hands upon that head and declare their act of anointing. Then another priesthood holder joins in, if available, and pronounces a "sealing" of the anointing and other words of blessing, as he feels inspired. Melchizedek priesthood holders are also authorized to consecrate any pure olive oil and often carry a personal supply in case they have need to perform an anointing. Oil is not used in other blessings, such as for people seeking comfort or counsel. In addition to the James 5:14-15 reference, the Doctrine and Covenants contains numerous references to the anointing and healing of the sick by those with authority to do so. Community of Christ Administration to the sick is one of the eight sacraments of the Community of Christ, in which it has also been used for people seeking spiritual, emotional or mental healing. See also Anointing of the Sick (Catholic Church) Faith healing References External links Church Fathers on the Anointing of the Sick Western The Anointing of the Sick Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick "Extreme Unction" in Catholic Encyclopedia (1913) Apostolic Constitution "Sacram unctionem infirmorum" Eastern Holy Anointing of the Sick article from the Moscow Patriarchate Unction of the Sick article from the Sydney, Australia diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia The Mystery of Unction Russian Orthodox Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, Washington, DC Coptic Unction on Holy Saturday (Photo) Christian terminology New Testament words and phrases Supernatural healing Sacramentals

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract%20data%20type

Abstract data type

In computer science, an abstract data type (ADT) is a mathematical model for data types, defined by its behavior (semantics) from the point of view of a user of the data, specifically in terms of possible values, possible operations on data of this type, and the behavior of these operations. This mathematical model contrasts with data structures, which are concrete representations of data, and are the point of view of an implementer, not a user. For example, a stack has push/pop operations that follow a Last-In-First-Out rule, and can be concretely implemented using either a list or an array. Another example is a set which stores values, without any particular order, and no repeated values. Values themselves are not retrieved from sets, rather one tests a value for membership to obtain a Boolean "in" or "not in". ADTs are a theoretical concept, used in formal semantics and program verification and, less strictly, in the design and analysis of algorithms, data structures, and software systems. Most mainstream computer languages do not directly support formally specifying ADTs. However, various language features correspond to certain aspects of implementing ADTs, and are easily confused with ADTs proper; these include abstract types, opaque data types, protocols, and design by contract. For example, in modular programming, the module declares procedures that correspond to the ADT operations, often with comments that describe the constraints. This information hiding strategy allows the implementation of the module to be changed without disturbing the client programs, but the module only informally defines an ADT. The notion of abstract data types is related to the concept of data abstraction, important in object-oriented programming and design by contract methodologies for software engineering. History ADTs were first proposed by Barbara Liskov and Stephen N. Zilles in 1974, as part of the development of the CLU language. Algebraic specification was an important subject of research in CS around 1980 and almost a synonym for abstract data types at that time. It has a mathematical foundation in universal algebra. Definition Formally, an ADT is analogous to an algebraic structure in mathematics, consisting of a domain, a collection of operations, and a set of constraints the operations must satisfy. The domain is often defined implicitly, for example the free object over the set of ADT operations. The interface of the ADT typically refers only to the domain and operations, and perhaps some of the constraints on the operations, such as pre-conditions and post-conditions; but not to other constraints, such as relations between the operations, which are considered behavior. There are two main styles of formal specifications for behavior, axiomatic semantics and operational semantics. Despite not being part of the interface, the constraints are still important to the definition of the ADT; for example a stack and a queue have similar add element/remove element interfaces, but it is the constraints that distinguish last-in-first-out from first-in-first-out behavior. The constraints do not consist only of equations such as but also logical formulas. Axiomatic semantics In the spirit of functional programming, each state of an abstract data structure is a separate entity or value. In this view, each operation is modelled as a mathematical function with no side effects. Operations that modify the ADT are modeled as functions that take the old state as an argument and returns the new state as part of the result. The order in which operations are evaluated is immaterial, and the same operation applied to the same arguments (including the same input states) will always return the same results (and output states). The constraints are specified as axioms or algebraic laws that the operations must satisfy. Operational semantics In the spirit of imperative programming, an abstract data structure is conceived as an entity that is mutable—meaning that there is a notion of time and the ADT may be in different states at different times. Operations then change the state of the ADT over time; therefore, the order in which operations are evaluated is important, and the same operation on the same entities may have different effects if executed at different times. This is analogous to the instructions of a computer or the commands and procedures of an imperative language. To underscore this view, it is customary to say that the operations are executed or applied, rather than evaluated, similar to the imperative style often used when describing abstract algorithms. The constraints are typically specified in prose. Auxiliary operations Presentations of ADTs are often limited in scope to only key operations. More thorough presentations often specify auxiliary operations on ADTs, such as: (), that yields a new instance of the ADT; (s, t), that tests whether two instances' states are equivalent in some sense; (s), that computes some standard hash function from the instance's state; (s) or (s), that produces a human-readable representation of the instance's state. These names are illustrative and may vary between authors. In imperative-style ADT definitions, one often finds also: (s), that prepares a newly created instance s for further operations, or resets it to some "initial state"; (s, t), that puts instance s in a state equivalent to that of t; (t), that performs s ← (), (s, t), and returns s; (s) or (s), that reclaims the memory and other resources used by s. The operation is not normally relevant or meaningful, since ADTs are theoretical entities that do not "use memory". However, it may be necessary when one needs to analyze the storage used by an algorithm that uses the ADT. In that case, one needs additional axioms that specify how much memory each ADT instance uses, as a function of its state, and how much of it is returned to the pool by . Restricted types The definition of an ADT often restricts the stored value(s) for its instances, to members of a specific set X called the range of those variables. For example, an abstract variable may be constrained to only store integers. As in programming languages, such restrictions may simplify the description and analysis of algorithms, and improve its readability. Aliasing In the operational style, it is often unclear how multiple instances are handled and if modifying one instance may affect others. A common style of defining ADTs writes the operations as if only one instance exists during the execution of the algorithm, and all operations are applied to that instance. For example, a stack may have operations (x) and (), that operate on the only existing stack. ADT definitions in this style can be easily rewritten to admit multiple coexisting instances of the ADT, by adding an explicit instance parameter (like S in the stack example below) to every operation that uses or modifies the implicit instance. Some ADTs cannot be meaningfully defined without allowing multiple instances, for example when a single operation takes two distinct instances of the ADT as parameters, such as a operation on sets or a operation on lists. The multiple instance style is sometimes combined with an aliasing axiom, namely that the result of () is distinct from any instance already in use by the algorithm. Implementations of ADTs may still reuse memory and allow implementations of () to yield a previously created instance; however, defining that such an instance even is "reused" is difficult in the ADT formalism. More generally, this axiom may be strengthened to exclude also partial aliasing with other instances, so that composite ADTs (such as trees or records) and reference-style ADTs (such as pointers) may be assumed to be completely disjoint. For example, when extending the definition of an abstract variable to include abstract records, operations upon a field F of a record variable R, clearly involve F, which is distinct from, but also a part of, R. A partial aliasing axiom would state that changing a field of one record variable does not affect any other records. Complexity analysis Some authors also include the computational complexity ("cost") of each operation, both in terms of time (for computing operations) and space (for representing values), to aid in analysis of algorithms. For example, one may specify that each operation takes the same time and each value takes the same space regardless of the state of the ADT, or that there is a "size" of the ADT and the operations are linear, quadratic, etc. in the size of the ADT. Alexander Stepanov, designer of the C++ Standard Template Library, included complexity guarantees in the STL specification, arguing: Other authors disagree, arguing that a stack ADT is the same whether it is implemented with a linked list or an array, despite the difference in operation costs, and that an ADT specification should be independent of implementation. Examples Abstract variable An abstract variable may be regarded as the simplest non-trivial ADT, with the semantics of an imperative variable. It admits two operations, and . Operational definitions are often written in terms of abstract variables. In the axiomatic semantics, letting be the type of the abstract variable and be the type of its contents, is a function and is a function of type . The main constraint is that always returns the value x used in the most recent operation on the same variable V, i.e. . We may also require that overwrites the value fully, . In the operational semantics, (V) is a procedure that returns the current value in the location V, and (V, x) is a procedure with return type that stores the value x in the location V. The constraints are described informally as that reads are consistent with writes. As in many programming languages, the operation (V, x) is often written V ← x (or some similar notation), and (V) is implied whenever a variable V is used in a context where a value is required. Thus, for example, V ← V + 1 is commonly understood to be a shorthand for (V,(V) + 1). In this definition, it is implicitly assumed that names are always distinct: storing a value into a variable U has no effect on the state of a distinct variable V. To make this assumption explicit, one could add the constraint that: if U and V are distinct variables, the sequence { (U, x); (V, y) } is equivalent to { (V, y); (U, x) }. This definition does not say anything about the result of evaluating (V) when V is un-initialized, that is, before performing any operation on V. Fetching before storing can be disallowed, defined to have a certain result, or left unspecified. There are some algorithms whose efficiency depends on the assumption that such a is legal, and returns some arbitrary value in the variable's range. Abstract stack An abstract stack is a last-in-first-out structure, It is generally defined by three key operations: , that inserts a data item onto the stack; , that removes a data item from it; and or , that accesses a data item on top of the stack without removal. A complete abstract stack definition includes also a Boolean-valued function (S) and a () operation that returns an initial stack instance. In the axiomatic semantics, letting be the type of state states and be the type of values contained in the stack, these could have the types , , , , and . In the axiomatic semantics, creating the initial stack is a "trivial" operation, and always returns the same distinguished state. Therefore, it is often designated by a special symbol like Λ or "()". The operation predicate can then be written simply as or . The constraints are then , , () = T (a newly created stack is empty), ((S, x)) = F (pushing something into a stack makes it non-empty). These axioms do not define the effect of (s) or (s), unless s is a stack state returned by a . Since leaves the stack non-empty, those two operations can be defined to be invalid when s = Λ. From these axioms (and the lack of side effects), it can be deduced that (Λ, x) ≠ Λ. Also, (s, x) = (t, y) if and only if x = y and s = t. As in some other branches of mathematics, it is customary to assume also that the stack states are only those whose existence can be proved from the axioms in a finite number of steps. In this case, it means that every stack is a finite sequence of values, that becomes the empty stack (Λ) after a finite number of s. By themselves, the axioms above do not exclude the existence of infinite stacks (that can be ped forever, each time yielding a different state) or circular stacks (that return to the same state after a finite number of s). In particular, they do not exclude states s such that (s) = s or (s, x) = s for some x. However, since one cannot obtain such stack states from the initial stack state with the given operations, they are assumed "not to exist". In the operational definition of an abstract stack, (S, x) returns nothing and (S) yields the value as the result but not the new state of the stack. There is then the constraint that, for any value x and any abstract variable V, the sequence of operations { (S, x); V ← (S) } is equivalent to V ← x. Since the assignment V ← x, by definition, cannot change the state of S, this condition implies that V ← (S) restores S to the state it had before the (S, x). From this condition and from the properties of abstract variables, it follows, for example, that the sequence: { (S, x); (S, y); U ← (S); (S, z); V ← (S); W ← (S) } where x, y, and z are any values, and U, V, W are pairwise distinct variables, is equivalent to: { U ← y; V ← z; W ← x } Unlike the axiomatic semantics, the operational semantics can suffer from aliasing. Here it is implicitly assumed that operations on a stack instance do not modify the state of any other ADT instance, including other stacks; that is: For any values x, y, and any distinct stacks S and T, the sequence { (S, x); (T, y) } is equivalent to { (T, y); (S, x) }. Boom hierarchy A more involved example is the Boom hierarchy of the binary tree, list, bag and set abstract data types. All these data types can be declared by three operations: null, which constructs the empty container, single, which constructs a container from a single element and append, which combines two containers of the same type. The complete specification for the four data types can then be given by successively adding the following rules over these operations: Access to the data can be specified by pattern-matching over the three operations, e.g. a member function for these containers by: Care must be taken to ensure that the function is invariant under the relevant rules for the data type. Within each of the equivalence classes implied by the chosen subset of equations, it has to yield the same result for all of its members. Common ADTs Some common ADTs, which have proved useful in a great variety of applications, are Collection Container List String Set Multiset Map Multimap Graph Tree Stack Queue Priority queue Double-ended queue Double-ended priority queue Each of these ADTs may be defined in many ways and variants, not necessarily equivalent. For example, an abstract stack may or may not have a operation that tells how many items have been pushed and not yet popped. This choice makes a difference not only for its clients but also for the implementation. Abstract graphical data type An extension of ADT for computer graphics was proposed in 1979: an abstract graphical data type (AGDT). It was introduced by Nadia Magnenat Thalmann, and Daniel Thalmann. AGDTs provide the advantages of ADTs with facilities to build graphical objects in a structured way. Implementation Abstract data types are theoretical entities, used (among other things) to simplify the description of abstract algorithms, to classify and evaluate data structures, and to formally describe the type systems of programming languages. However, an ADT may be implemented. This means each ADT instance or state is represented by some concrete data type or data structure, and for each abstract operation there is a corresponding procedure or function, and these implemented procedures satisfy the ADT's specifications and axioms up to some standard. In practice, the implementation is not perfect, and users must be aware of issues due to limitations of the representation and implemented procedures. For example, integers may be specified as an ADT, defined by the distinguished values 0 and 1, the operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, division (with care for division by zero), comparison, etc., behaving according to the familiar mathematical axioms in abstract algebra such as associativity, commutativity, and so on. However, in a computer, integers are most commonly represented as fixed-width 32-bit or 64-bit binary numbers. Users must be aware of issues with this representation, such as arithmetic overflow, where the ADT specifies a valid result but the representation is unable to accommodate this value. Nonetheless, for many purposes, the user can ignore these infidelities and simply use the implementation as if it were the abstract data type. Usually, there are many ways to implement the same ADT, using several different concrete data structures. Thus, for example, an abstract stack can be implemented by a linked list or by an array. Different implementations of the ADT, having all the same properties and abilities, can be considered semantically equivalent and may be used somewhat interchangeably in code that uses the ADT. This provides a form of abstraction or encapsulation, and gives a great deal of flexibility when using ADT objects in different situations. For example, different implementations of the ADT may be more efficient in different situations; it is possible to use each in the situation where they are preferable, thus increasing overall efficiency. Code that uses an ADT implementation according to its interface will continute working even if the implementation of the ADT is changed. In order to prevent clients from depending on the implementation, an ADT is often packaged as an opaque data type or handle of some sort, in one or more modules, whose interface contains only the signature (number and types of the parameters and results) of the operations. The implementation of the module—namely, the bodies of the procedures and the concrete data structure used—can then be hidden from most clients of the module. This makes it possible to change the implementation without affecting the clients. If the implementation is exposed, it is known instead as a transparent data type. Modern object-oriented languages, such as C++ and Java, support a form of abstract data types. When a class is used as a type, it is an abstract type that refers to a hidden representation. In this model, an ADT is typically implemented as a class, and each instance of the ADT is usually an object of that class. The module's interface typically declares the constructors as ordinary procedures, and most of the other ADT operations as methods of that class. Many modern programming languages, such as C++ and Java, come with standard libraries that implement numerous ADTs in this style. However, such an approach does not easily encapsulate multiple representational variants found in an ADT. It also can undermine the extensibility of object-oriented programs. In a pure object-oriented program that uses interfaces as types, types refer to behaviours, not representations. The specification of some programming languages is intentionally vague about the representation of certain built-in data types, defining only the operations that can be done on them. Therefore, those types can be viewed as "built-in ADTs". Examples are the arrays in many scripting languages, such as Awk, Lua, and Perl, which can be regarded as an implementation of the abstract list. In a formal specification language, ADTs may be defined axiomatically, and the language then allows manipulating values of these ADTs, thus providing a straightforward and immediate implementation. The OBJ family of programming languages for instance allows defining equations for specification and rewriting to run them. Such automatic implementations are usually not as efficient as dedicated implementations, however. Example: implementation of the abstract stack As an example, here is an implementation of the abstract stack above in the C programming language. Imperative-style interface An imperative-style interface might be: typedef struct stack_Rep stack_Rep; // type: stack instance representation (opaque record) typedef stack_Rep* stack_T; // type: handle to a stack instance (opaque pointer) typedef void* stack_Item; // type: value stored in stack instance (arbitrary address) stack_T stack_create(void); // creates a new empty stack instance void stack_push(stack_T s, stack_Item x); // adds an item at the top of the stack stack_Item stack_pop(stack_T s); // removes the top item from the stack and returns it bool stack_empty(stack_T s); // checks whether stack is empty This interface could be used in the following manner: #include <stack.h> // includes the stack interface stack_T s = stack_create(); // creates a new empty stack instance int x = 17; stack_push(s, &x); // adds the address of x at the top of the stack void* y = stack_pop(s); // removes the address of x from the stack and returns it if (stack_empty(s)) { } // does something if stack is empty This interface can be implemented in many ways. The implementation may be arbitrarily inefficient, since the formal definition of the ADT, above, does not specify how much space the stack may use, nor how long each operation should take. It also does not specify whether the stack state s continues to exist after a call x ← (s). In practice the formal definition should specify that the space is proportional to the number of items pushed and not yet popped; and that every one of the operations above must finish in a constant amount of time, independently of that number. To comply with these additional specifications, the implementation could use a linked list, or an array (with dynamic resizing) together with two integers (an item count and the array size). Functional-style interface Functional-style ADT definitions are more appropriate for functional programming languages, and vice versa. However, one can provide a functional-style interface even in an imperative language like C. For example: typedef struct stack_Rep stack_Rep; // type: stack state representation (opaque record) typedef stack_Rep* stack_T; // type: handle to a stack state (opaque pointer) typedef void* stack_Item; // type: value of a stack state (arbitrary address) stack_T stack_empty(void); // returns the empty stack state stack_T stack_push(stack_T s, stack_Item x); // adds an item at the top of the stack state and returns the resulting stack state stack_T stack_pop(stack_T s); // removes the top item from the stack state and returns the resulting stack state stack_Item stack_top(stack_T s); // returns the top item of the stack state See also Concept (generic programming) Formal methods Functional specification Generalized algebraic data type Initial algebra Liskov substitution principle Type theory Walls and Mirrors Notes Citations References Further reading External links Abstract data type in NIST Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures Data types Type theory

2357

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American%20Football%20League

American Football League

The American Football League (AFL) was a major professional American football league that operated for ten seasons from 1960 until 1970, when it merged with the older National Football League (NFL), and became the American Football Conference. The upstart AFL operated in direct competition with the more established NFL throughout its existence. It was more successful than earlier rivals to the NFL with the same name, the 1926, 1936 and 1940 leagues, and the later All-America Football Conference (which existed between 1944 and 1950 but only played between 1946 and 1949). This fourth version of the AFL was the most successful, created by a number of owners who had been refused NFL expansion franchises or had minor shares of NFL franchises. The AFL's original lineup consisted of an Eastern division of the New York Titans, Boston Patriots, Buffalo Bills, and the Houston Oilers, and a Western division of the Los Angeles Chargers, Denver Broncos, Oakland Raiders, and Dallas Texans. The league first gained attention by signing 75% of the NFL's first-round draft choices in 1960, including Houston's successful signing of college star and Heisman Trophy winner Billy Cannon. While the first years of the AFL saw uneven competition and low attendance, the league was buttressed by a generous television contract with the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), followed by a contract with the competing National Broadcasting Company (NBC) for games starting with the 1965 season, that broadcast the more offense-oriented football league nationwide. Continuing to attract top talent from colleges and the NFL by the mid-1960s, as well as successful franchise shifts of the Chargers from L.A. south to San Diego and the Texans north to Kansas City (becoming the Kansas City Chiefs), the AFL established a dedicated following. The transformation of the struggling Titans into the New York Jets under new ownership, including the signing of University of Alabama star quarterback Joe Namath, further solidified the league's reputation among the major media. As fierce competition made player salaries skyrocket in both leagues, especially after a series of "raids", the leagues agreed to a merger in 1966. Among the conditions were a common draft and a championship game played between the two league champions first played in early 1967, which would eventually become known as the Super Bowl. The AFL and NFL operated as separate leagues until 1970, with separate regular season and playoff schedules except for the championship game. NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle also became chief executive of the AFL from July 26, 1966, through the completion of the merger. During this time the AFL expanded, adding the Miami Dolphins and Cincinnati Bengals. After losses by the Kansas City Chiefs and Oakland Raiders in the first two AFL-NFL World Championship Games to the Green Bay Packers (1966–67), the New York Jets and Chiefs won Super Bowls III and IV (1968–69) respectively, cementing the league's claim to being an equal to the NFL. In 1970, the AFL was absorbed into the NFL. The ten AFL franchises joined three existing NFL teams- the Baltimore Colts, the Cleveland Browns, and the Pittsburgh Steelers-to form the merged league's American Football Conference. League history During the 1950s, the National Football League had grown to rival Major League Baseball as one of the most popular professional sports leagues in the United States. One franchise that did not share in this newfound success of the league was the Chicago Cardinals – owned by the Bidwill family – who had become overshadowed by the more popular Chicago Bears. The Bidwills hoped to move their franchise, preferably to St. Louis, but could not come to terms with the league, which demanded money before it would approve the move. Needing cash, the Bidwills began entertaining offers from would-be investors, and one of the men who approached the Bidwills was Lamar Hunt, son and heir of millionaire oilman H. L. Hunt. Hunt offered to buy the Cardinals and move them to Dallas, where he had grown up. However, these negotiations came to nothing, since the Bidwills insisted on retaining a controlling interest in the franchise and were unwilling to move their team to a city where a previous NFL franchise had failed in . While Hunt negotiated with the Bidwills, similar offers were made by Bud Adams, Bob Howsam, and Max Winter. When Hunt, Adams, and Howsam were unable to secure a controlling interest in the Cardinals, they approached NFL commissioner Bert Bell and proposed the addition of expansion teams. Bell, wary of expanding the 12-team league and risking its newfound success, rejected the offer. On his return flight to Dallas, Hunt conceived the idea of an entirely new league and decided to contact the others who had shown interest in purchasing the Cardinals. In addition to Adams, Howsam, and Winter, Hunt reached out to Bill Boyer, Winter's business partner, to gauge their interest in starting a new league. Hunt's first meeting with Adams was held in March 1959. Hunt, who felt a regional rivalry would be critical for the success of the new league, convinced Adams to join and found his team in Houston. Hunt next secured an agreement from Howsam to bring a team to Denver. After Winter and Boyer agreed to start a team in Minneapolis-Saint Paul, the new league had its first four teams. Hunt then approached Willard Rhodes, who hoped to bring pro football to Seattle. However, not wanting to undermine its own brand, the University of Washington was unwilling to let the fledgling league use Husky Stadium, and Rhodes' effort came to nothing (Seattle would later get a pro football team of its own). Hunt also sought franchises in Los Angeles, Buffalo and New York City. During the summer of 1959, he sought the blessings of the NFL for his nascent league, as he did not seek a potentially costly rivalry. Within weeks of the July 1959 announcement of the league's formation, Hunt received commitments from Barron Hilton and Harry Wismer to bring teams to Los Angeles and New York, respectively. His initial efforts for Buffalo, however, were rebuffed, when Hunt's first choice of owner, Pat McGroder, declined to take part; McGroder had hoped that the threat of the AFL would be enough to prompt the NFL to expand to Buffalo. On August 14, 1959, the first league meeting was held in Chicago, and charter memberships were given to Dallas, New York, Houston, Denver, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis-Saint Paul. On August 22, the league officially was named the American Football League at a meeting in Dallas. The NFL's initial reaction was not as openly hostile as it had been with the earlier All-America Football Conference (AAFC), as Bell had even given his public approval; but he died suddenly in October 1959, and individual NFL owners soon began a campaign to undermine the new league. AFL owners were approached with promises of new NFL franchises or ownership stakes in existing ones. Only the party from Minneapolis-Saint Paul accepted, and with the addition of Ole Haugsrud and Bernie Ridder the Minnesota group joined the NFL in 1961 as the Minnesota Vikings. The older league also announced on August 29 that it had conveniently reversed its position against expansion, and planned to bring new NFL teams to Houston and Dallas, to start play in 1961. (The NFL did not expand to Houston at that time; the promised Dallas team – the Dallas Cowboys – actually started play in 1960, and the Vikings began play in 1961.) Finally, the NFL quickly came to terms with the Bidwills and allowed them to relocate the struggling Cardinals to St. Louis, eliminating that city as a potential AFL market. Ralph Wilson, who owned a minority interest in the NFL's Detroit Lions at the time, initially announced he was placing a team in Miami, but like the Seattle situation, was also rebuffed by local ownership (like Seattle, Miami would later get a pro football team of its own as well); given five other choices, Wilson negotiated with McGroder and brought the team that became the Bills to Buffalo. Buffalo was officially awarded its franchise on October 28. During a league meeting on November 22, a 10-man ownership group from Boston (led by Billy Sullivan) was awarded the AFL's eighth team. On November 30, 1959, Joe Foss, a World War II Marine fighter ace and former governor of South Dakota, was named the AFL's first commissioner. Foss commissioned a friend of Harry Wismer's to develop the AFL's eagle-on-football logo. Hunt was elected President of the AFL on January 26, 1960. The AFL draft The AFL's first draft took place the same day Boston was awarded its franchise, and lasted 33 rounds. The league held a second draft on December 2, which lasted for 20 rounds. Because the Oakland Raiders joined after the initial AFL drafts, they inherited Minnesota's selections. A special allocation draft was held in January 1960, to allow the Raiders to stock their team, as some of the other AFL teams had already signed some of Minneapolis' original draft choices. Crisis and success (1960–61) In November 1959, Minneapolis-Saint Paul owner Max Winter announced his intent to leave the AFL to accept a franchise offer from the NFL. In 1961, his team began play in the NFL as the Minnesota Vikings. Los Angeles Chargers owner Barron Hilton demanded that a replacement for Minnesota be placed in California, to reduce his team's operating costs and to create a rivalry. After a brief search, Oakland was chosen and an ownership group led by F. Wayne Valley and local real estate developer Chet Soda was formed. After initially being called the Oakland Señors, the rechristened Oakland Raiders officially joined the AFL on January 30, 1960. The AFL's first major success came when the Houston Oilers signed Billy Cannon, the All-American and 1959 Heisman Trophy winner from LSU. Cannon signed a $100,000 contract to play for the Oilers, despite having already signed a $50,000 contract with the NFL's Los Angeles Rams. The Oilers filed suit and claimed that Rams general manager Pete Rozelle had unduly manipulated Cannon. The court upheld the Houston contract, and with Cannon the Oilers appeared in the AFL's first three championship games (winning two). On June 9, 1960, the league signed a five-year television contract with ABC, which brought in revenues of approximately $2.125 million per year for the entire league. On June 17, the AFL filed an antitrust lawsuit against the NFL, which was dismissed in 1962 after a two-month trial. The AFL began regular-season play (a night game on Friday, September 9, 1960) with eight teams in the league – the Boston Patriots, Buffalo Bills, Dallas Texans, Denver Broncos, Houston Oilers, Los Angeles Chargers, New York Titans, and Oakland Raiders. Raiders' co-owner Wayne Valley dubbed the AFL ownership "The Foolish Club", a term Lamar Hunt subsequently used on team photographs he sent as Christmas gifts. The Oilers became the first-ever league champions by defeating the Chargers, 24–16, in the AFL Championship on January 1, 1961. Attendance for the 1960 season was respectable for a new league, but not nearly that of the NFL. In 1960, the NFL averaged attendance of more than 40,000 fans per game and more popular NFL teams in 1960 regularly saw attendance figures in excess of 50,000 per game, while CFL attendances averaged approximately 20,000 per game. By comparison, AFL attendance averaged about 16,500 per game and generally hovered between 10,000 and 20,000 per game. Professional football was still primarily a gate-driven business in 1960, so low attendance meant financial losses. The Raiders, with a league-worst average attendance of just 9,612, lost $500,000 in their first year and only survived after receiving a $400,000 loan from Bills owner Ralph Wilson. In an early sign of stability, however, the AFL did not lose any teams after its first year of operation. In fact, the only major change was the Chargers' move from Los Angeles to nearby San Diego (they would return to Los Angeles in 2017). On August 8, 1961, the AFL challenged the Canadian Football League to an exhibition game that would feature the Hamilton Tiger-Cats and the Buffalo Bills, which was attended by 24,376 spectators. Playing at Civic Stadium in Hamilton, Ontario, the Tiger-Cats defeated the Bills 38–21 playing a mix of AFL and CFL rules. Movement and instability (1962–63) While the Oilers found instant success in the AFL, other teams did not fare as well. The Oakland Raiders and New York Titans struggled on and off the field during their first few seasons in the league. Oakland's eight-man ownership group was reduced to just three in 1961, after heavy financial losses in their first season. Attendance for home games was poor, partly due to the team playing in the San Francisco Bay Area—which already had an established NFL team (the San Francisco 49ers)—but the product on the field was also to blame. After winning six games in their debut season, the Raiders won a total of three times in the 1961 and 1962 seasons. Oakland took part in a 1961 supplemental draft meant to boost the weaker teams in the league, but it did little good. They participated in another such draft in 1962. The Titans fared a little better on the field but had their own financial troubles. Attendance was so low for home games that team owner Harry Wismer had fans move to seats closer to the field to give the illusion of a fuller stadium on television. Eventually Wismer could no longer afford to meet his payroll, and on November 8, 1962, the AFL took over operations of the team. The Titans were sold to a five-person ownership group headed by Sonny Werblin on March 28, 1963, and in April the new owners changed the team's name to the New York Jets. The Raiders and Titans both finished last in their divisions in the 1962 season. The Texans and Oilers, winners of their divisions, faced each other for the 1962 AFL Championship on December 23. The Texans dethroned the two-time champion Oilers, 20–17, in a double-overtime contest that was, at the time, professional football's longest-ever game. In 1963, the Texans became the second AFL team to relocate. Lamar Hunt felt that despite winning the league championship in 1962, the Texans could not sufficiently profit in the same market as the Dallas Cowboys, which entered the NFL as an expansion franchise in 1960. After meetings with New Orleans, Atlanta, and Miami, Hunt announced on May 22 that the Texans' new home would be Kansas City, Missouri. Kansas City mayor Harold Roe Bartle (nicknamed "Chief") was instrumental in his city's success in attracting the team. Partly to honor Bartle, the franchise officially became the Kansas City Chiefs on May 26. The San Diego Chargers, under head coach Sid Gillman, won a decisive 51–10 victory over the Boston Patriots for the 1963 AFL Championship. Confident that his team was capable of beating that season's NFL champion Chicago Bears (he had the Chargers' rings inscribed with the phrase "World Champions"), Gillman approached NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle and proposed a final championship game between the two teams. Rozelle declined the offer; however, the game would be instituted three seasons later. Watershed years (1964–65) A series of events throughout the next few years demonstrated the AFL's ability to achieve a greater level of equality with the NFL. On January 29, 1964, the AFL signed a lucrative $36 million television contract with NBC (beginning in the 1965 season), which gave the league money it needed to compete with the NFL for players. Pittsburgh Steelers owner Art Rooney was quoted as saying to NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle after receiving the news of the AFL's new TV deal that, "They don't have to call us 'Mister' anymore". A single-game attendance record was set on November 8, 1964, when 61,929 fans packed Shea Stadium to watch the New York Jets and Buffalo Bills. The bidding war for players between the AFL and NFL escalated in 1965. The Chiefs drafted University of Kansas star Gale Sayers in the first round of the 1965 AFL draft (held November 28, 1964), while the Chicago Bears did the same in the NFL draft. Sayers eventually signed with the Bears. A similar situation occurred when the New York Jets and the NFL's St. Louis Cardinals both drafted University of Alabama quarterback Joe Namath. In what was viewed as a key victory for the AFL, Namath signed a $427,000 contract with the Jets on January 2, 1965 (the deal included a new car). It was the highest amount of money ever paid to a collegiate football player, and is cited as the strongest contributing factor to the eventual merger between the two leagues. After the 1963 season, the Newark Bears of the Atlantic Coast Football League expressed interest in joining the AFL; concerns over having to split the New York metro area with the still-uncertain Jets were a factor in the Bears' bid being rejected. In 1965, Milwaukee officials tried to lure an expansion team to play at Milwaukee County Stadium where the Green Bay Packers had played parts of their home schedule after an unsuccessful attempt to lure the Packers there full-time, but Packers head coach Vince Lombardi invoked the team's exclusive lease, and additionally, signed an extension to keep some home games in Milwaukee until 1976. In June 1965, the AFL awarded its first expansion team to Cox Broadcasting of Atlanta. The NFL quickly counteroffered insurance executive Rankin Smith a franchise, which he accepted; the Atlanta Falcons began play as an NFL franchise for the 1966 season. In March 1965, Joe Robbie had met with Commissioner Foss to inquire about an expansion franchise for Miami. On May 6, Robbie secured an agreement with Miami mayor Robert King High to bring a team to Miami. League expansion was approved at a meeting held on June 7, and on August 16 the AFL's ninth franchise was officially awarded to Robbie and entertainer Danny Thomas. The Miami Dolphins joined the league for a fee of $7.5 million and started play in the AFL's Eastern Division in 1966. The AFL also planned to add two more teams by 1967. Escalation and merger (1966–67) In 1966, the rivalry between the AFL and NFL reached an all-time peak. On April 7, Joe Foss resigned as AFL commissioner. His successor was Oakland Raiders head coach and general manager Al Davis, who had been instrumental in turning around the fortunes of that franchise. That following May, Wellington Mara, owner of the NFL's New York Giants, broke a "gentleman's agreement" against signing another league's players and lured kicker Pete Gogolak away from the AFL's Buffalo Bills. In response to the Gogolak signing and no longer content with trying to outbid the NFL for college talent, the AFL under Davis began to also recruit players already on NFL squads. Davis's strategy focused on quarterbacks in particular, and in two months he persuaded seven NFL quarterbacks to sign with the AFL. Although Davis's intention was to help the AFL win the bidding war, some AFL and NFL owners saw the escalation as detrimental to both leagues. Alarmed with the rate of spending in the league, Hilton Hotels forced Barron Hilton to relinquish his stake in the Chargers as a condition of maintaining his leadership role with the hotel chain. The same month Davis was named commissioner, several NFL owners, headed by Dallas Cowboys general manager Tex Schramm, secretly approached Lamar Hunt and other AFL owners and started negotiations with the AFL to merge. A series of secret meetings commenced in Dallas to discuss the concerns of both leagues over rapidly increasing player salaries, as well as the practice of player poaching. Hunt and Schramm completed the basic groundwork for a merger of the two leagues by the end of May, and on June 8, 1966, the merger was officially announced. Under the terms of the agreement, the two leagues would hold a common player draft. The agreement also called for a title game to be played between the champions of the respective leagues. The two leagues would be fully merged by 1970, NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle would remain as commissioner of the merged league, which would be named the NFL. Additional expansion teams would eventually be awarded by 1970 or soon thereafter to bring it to a 28-team league. (The additional expansion would not happen until 1976.) The AFL also agreed to pay indemnities of $18 million to the NFL over 20 years. In protest, Davis resigned as AFL commissioner on July 25 rather than remain until the completion of the merger, and Milt Woodard was named president of the AFL, with the "commissioner" title vacated because of Rozelle's expanded role. On January 15, 1967, the first-ever championship game between the two separate professional football leagues, the "AFL-NFL World Championship Game" (retroactively referred to as Super Bowl I), was played in Los Angeles. After a close first half, the NFL champion Green Bay Packers overwhelmed the AFL champion Kansas City Chiefs, 35–10. The loss reinforced for many the notion that the AFL was an inferior league. Packers head coach Vince Lombardi stated after the game, "I do not think they are as good as the top teams in the National Football League." The second AFL-NFL Championship (Super Bowl II) yielded a similar result. The Oakland Raiders—who had easily beaten the Houston Oilers to win their first AFL championship—were overmatched by the Packers, 33–14. The more experienced Packers capitalized on a number of Raiders miscues and never trailed. Green Bay defensive tackle Henry Jordan offered a compliment to Oakland and the AFL, when he said, "... the AFL is becoming much more sophisticated on offense. I think the league has always had good personnel, but the blocks were subtler and better conceived in this game." The AFL added its tenth and final team on May 24, 1967, when it awarded the league's second expansion franchise to an ownership group from Cincinnati, Ohio, headed by NFL legend Paul Brown. Although Brown had intended to join the NFL, he agreed to join the AFL when he learned that his team would be included in the NFL once the merger was completed. The league's last newest expansion team, the Cincinnati Bengals began play in the 1968 season, finishing last in the Western Division. Legitimacy and the end of an era (1968–1970) While many AFL players and observers believed their league was the equal of the NFL, their first two Super Bowl performances did nothing to prove it. However, on November 17, 1968, when NBC cut away from a game between the Jets and Raiders to air the children's movie Heidi, the ensuing uproar helped disprove the notion that fans still considered the AFL an inferior product. The perception of AFL inferiority forever changed on January 12, 1969, when the AFL Champion New York Jets shocked the heavily favored NFL Champion Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III. The Colts, who entered the contest favored by as many as 18 points, had completed the 1968 NFL season with a 13–1 record, and won the NFL title with a convincing 34–0 win over the Cleveland Browns. Led by their stalwart defense—which allowed a record-low 144 points—the 1968 Colts were considered one of the best-ever NFL teams. By contrast, the Jets had allowed 280 points, the highest total for any division winner in the two leagues. They had also only narrowly beaten the favored Oakland Raiders 27–23 in the AFL championship game. Jets quarterback Joe Namath recalled that in the days leading up to the game, he grew increasingly angry when told New York had no chance to beat Baltimore. Three days before the game, a frustrated Namath responded to a heckler at the Touchdown Club in Miami by declaring, "We're going to win Sunday, I guarantee it!" Namath and the Jets made good on his guarantee as they held the Colts scoreless until late in the fourth quarter. The Jets won, 16–7, in what is considered one of the greatest upsets in American sports history. With the win, the AFL finally achieved parity with the NFL and legitimized the merger of the two leagues. That notion was reinforced one year later in Super Bowl IV, when the AFL champion Kansas City Chiefs upset the NFL champion Minnesota Vikings, 23–7, in the last championship game to be played between the two leagues. The Vikings, favored by 12½ points, were held to just 67 rushing yards. The last game in AFL history was the AFL All-Star Game, held in Houston's Astrodome on January 17, 1970. The Western All-Stars, led by Chargers quarterback John Hadl, defeated the Eastern All-Stars, 26–3. Buffalo rookie running back O. J. Simpson carried the ball for the last play in AFL history. Hadl was named the game's Most Valuable Player. The AFL ceased to exist as an unincorporated organization on February 1, 1970, when the NFL granted 10 new franchises and issued a new constitution. Prior to the start of the 1970 NFL season, the merged league was organized into two conferences of three divisions each. All ten AFL teams made up the bulk of the new American Football Conference. To avoid having an inequitable number of teams in each conference, the leagues voted to move three NFL teams to the AFC. Motivated by the prospect of an intrastate rivalry with the Bengals as well as by personal animosity toward Paul Brown, Cleveland Browns owner Art Modell quickly offered to include his team in the AFC. He helped persuade the Pittsburgh Steelers (the Browns' archrivals) and Baltimore Colts (who shared the Baltimore-Washington market with the Washington Redskins) to follow suit, and each team received US$3 million to make the switch. The remaining 13 NFL teams became part of the National Football Conference. Pro Football Hall of Fame receiver Charlie Joiner, who started his career with the Houston Oilers (1969), was the last AFL player active in professional football, retiring after the 1986 season, when he played for the San Diego Chargers. Legacy Overview The American Football League stands as the only professional football league to successfully compete against the NFL. When the two leagues merged in 1970, all ten AFL franchises and their statistics became part of the new NFL. Every other professional league that had competed against the NFL before the AFL–NFL merger had folded completely: the three previous leagues named "American Football League" and the All-America Football Conference. From an earlier AFL (1936–1937), only the Cleveland Rams (now the Los Angeles Rams) joined the NFL and are currently operating, as are the Cleveland Browns and the San Francisco 49ers from the AAFC. A third AAFC team, the Baltimore Colts (not related to the 1953–1983 Baltimore Colts or to the current Indianapolis Colts franchise), played only one year in the NFL, disbanding at the end of the 1950 season. The league resulting from the merger was a 26-team juggernaut (since expanded to 32) with television rights covering all of the Big Three television networks (and since the 1990s, the newer Fox network) and teams in close proximity to almost all of the top 40 metropolitan areas, a fact that has precluded any other competing league from gaining traction since the merger; failed attempts to mimic the AFL's success included the World Football League (1974–75), United States Football League (1983–85), the United Football League (2009–2012) and the AAF (2019), and two iterations of the XFL (2001 and 2020), in addition to the NFL-backed and created World League of American Football (1991-92). The AFL was also the most successful of numerous upstart leagues of the 1960s and 1970s that attempted to challenge a major professional league's dominance. All nine teams that were in the AFL at the time the merger was agreed upon were accepted into the league intact (as was the tenth team added between the time of the merger's agreement and finalization), and none of the AFL's teams have ever folded. For comparison, the World Hockey Association (1972–79) managed to have four of its six remaining teams merged into the National Hockey League, which actually caused the older league to contract a franchise, but WHA teams were forced to disperse the majority of their rosters and restart as expansion teams. The merged WHA teams were also not financially sound (in large part from the hefty expansion fees the NHL imposed on them), and three of the four were forced to relocate within 20 years. Like the WHA, The American Basketball Association (1967–76) also managed to have only four of its teams merged into the National Basketball Association, and the rest of the league was forced to fold. Both the WHA and ABA lost several teams to financial insolvency over the course of their existences. The Continental League, a proposed third league for Major League Baseball that was to begin play in 1961, never played a single game, largely because MLB responded to the proposal by expanding to four of that league's proposed cities. Historically, the only other professional sports league in the United States to exhibit a comparable level of franchise stability from its inception was the American League of Major League Baseball, which made its debut in the early 20th century. Rule changes The NFL adopted some of the innovations introduced by the AFL immediately and a few others in the years following the merger. One was including the names on player jerseys. The older league also adopted the practice of using the stadium scoreboard clocks to keep track of the official game time, instead of just having a stopwatch used by the referee. The AFL played a 14-game schedule for its entire existence, starting in 1960. The NFL, which had played a 12-game schedule since 1947, changed to a 14-game schedule in 1961, a year after the American Football League instituted it. The AFL also introduced the two-point conversion to professional football 34 years before the NFL instituted it in 1994 (college football had adopted the two-point conversion in the late 1950s). All of these innovations pioneered by the AFL, including its more exciting style of play and colorful uniforms, have essentially made today's professional football more like the AFL than like the old-line NFL. The AFL's challenge to the NFL also laid the groundwork for the Super Bowl, which has become the standard for championship contests in the United States of America. Television The NFL also adapted how the AFL used the growing power of televised football games, which were bolstered with the help of major network contracts (first with ABC, later with NBC after the latter network lost NFL rights to CBS). With that first contract with ABC, the AFL adopted the first-ever cooperative television plan for professional football, in which the proceeds were divided equally among member clubs. It featured many outstanding games, such as the classic 1962 double-overtime American Football League championship game between the Dallas Texans and the defending champion Houston Oilers. At the time it was the longest professional football championship game ever played. The AFL also appealed to fans by offering a flashier style of play (just like the ABA in basketball), compared to the more conservative game of the NFL. Long passes ("bombs") were commonplace in AFL offenses, led by such talented quarterbacks as John Hadl, Daryle Lamonica and Len Dawson. Despite having a national television contract, the AFL often found itself trying to gain a foothold, only to come up against roadblocks. For example, CBS, which broadcast NFL games, ignored and did not report scores from the innovative AFL. While it has been alleged this snub was on orders from the NFL, it is more likely the arrangement was mutual due to the equally bitter rivalry between CBS and NBC. After the merger agreement was announced, CBS agreed to report AFL scores. Expanding and reintroducing the sport to more cities The AFL took advantage of the burgeoning popularity of football by locating teams in major cities that lacked NFL franchises. Hunt's vision not only brought a new professional football league to California and New York, but introduced the sport to Colorado, restored it to Texas and later to fast-growing Florida, as well as bringing it to Greater Boston for the first time in 12 years. Buffalo, having lost its original NFL franchise in 1929 and turned down by the NFL at least twice (1940 and 1950) for a replacement, returned to the NFL with the merger. The return of football to Kansas City was the first time that city had seen professional football since the NFL's Kansas City Blues of the 1920s; the arrival of the Chiefs, and the contemporary arrival of the St. Louis Football Cardinals, brought professional football back to Missouri for the first time since the temporary St. Louis Gunners of 1934. St. Louis would later regain an NFL franchise in 1995 with the relocation of the LA Rams to the city. The Rams moved back in 2016. In the case of the Dallas Cowboys, the NFL had long sought to return to the Dallas area after the Dallas Texans folded in 1952, but was originally met with strong opposition by Washington Redskins owner George Preston Marshall, who had enjoyed a monopoly as the only NFL team to represent the American South. Marshall later changed his position after future-Cowboys owner Clint Murchison bought the rights to Washington's fight song "Hail to the Redskins" and threatened to prevent Marshall from playing it at games. By then, the NFL wanted to quickly award the new Dallas franchise to Murchison so the team could immediately begin play and compete with the AFL's Texans. As a result, the Cowboys played its inaugural season in 1960 without the benefit of the NFL draft. The Texans eventually ceded Dallas to the Cowboys and became the Kansas City Chiefs. As part of the merger agreement, additional expansion teams would be awarded by 1970 or soon thereafter to bring the league to 28 franchises; this requirement was fulfilled when the Seattle Seahawks and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers began play in 1976. In addition, had it not been for the existence of the Oilers from 1960 to 1996, the Houston Texans also would likely not exist today; the 2002 expansion team restored professional football in Houston after the original charter AFL member Oilers relocated to become the Tennessee Titans. Kevin Sherrington of The Dallas Morning News has argued that the presence of AFL and the subsequent merger radically altered the fortunes of the Pittsburgh Steelers, saving the team "from stinking". Before the merger, the Steelers had long been one of the NFL's worst teams. Constantly lacking the money to build a quality team, the Steelers had only posted eight winning seasons, and just one playoff appearance, since their first year of existence in 1933 until the end of the 1969 season. They also finished with a 1–13 record in 1969, tied with the Chicago Bears for the worst record in the NFL. The $3 million indemnity that the Steelers received for joining the AFC with the rest of the former AFL teams after the merger helped them rebuild into a contender, drafting eventual-Pro Football Hall of Famers like Terry Bradshaw and Joe Greene, and ultimately winning four Super Bowls in the 1970s. Since the 1970 merger, the Steelers have the NFL's highest winning percentage, the most total victories, the most trips to either conference championship game, are tied for the second most trips to the Super Bowl (tied with the Dallas Cowboys and Denver Broncos, trailing only the New England Patriots), and have won six Super Bowl championships, tied with the Patriots for the most in NFL history. Effects on players Perhaps the greatest social legacy of the AFL was the domino effect of its policy of being more liberal than the entrenched NFL in offering opportunity for black players. While the NFL was still emerging from thirty years of segregation influenced by Washington Redskins' owner George Preston Marshall, the AFL actively recruited from small and predominantly black colleges. The AFL's color-blindness led not only to the explosion of black talent on the field, but to the eventual entry of blacks into scouting, coordinating, and ultimately head coaching positions, long after the league merged itself out of existence. The AFL's free agents came from several sources. Some were players who could not find success playing in the NFL, while another source was the then newly-formed Canadian Football League. In the late 1950s, many players released by the NFL, or un-drafted and unsigned out of college by the NFL, went North to try their luck with the CFL (which formed in 1958), and later returned to the states to play in the AFL. In the league's first years, players such as Oilers' George Blanda, Chargers/Bills' Jack Kemp, Texans' Len Dawson, the NY Titans' Don Maynard, Raiders/Patriots/Jets' Babe Parilli, Pats' Bob Dee proved to be AFL standouts. Other players such as the Broncos' Frank Tripucka, the Pats' Gino Cappelletti, the Bills' Cookie Gilchrist and the Chargers' Tobin Rote, Sam DeLuca and Dave Kocourek also made their mark to give the fledgling league badly needed credibility. Rounding out this mix of potential talent were the true "free agents", the walk-ons and the "wanna-be's", who tried out in droves for the chance to play professional American football. After the AFL–NFL merger agreement in 1966, and after the AFL's Jets defeated an extremely strong Baltimore Colts team, a popular misconception fostered by the NFL and spread by media reports was that the AFL defeated the NFL because of the Common Draft instituted in 1967. This apparently was meant to assert that the AFL could not achieve parity as long as it had to compete with the NFL in the draft. But the 1968 Jets had less than a handful of "common draftees". Their stars were honed in the AFL, many of them since the Titans days. Players who chose the AFL to develop their talent included Lance Alworth and Ron Mix of the Chargers, who had also been drafted by the NFL's San Francisco 49ers and Baltimore Colts respectively. Both eventually were elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame after earning recognition during their careers as being among the best at their positions. Among specific teams, the 1964 Buffalo Bills stood out by holding their opponents to a pro football record 913 yards rushing on 300 attempts, while also recording fifty quarterback sacks in a 14-game schedule. In 2009, a five-part series, Full Color Football: The History of the American Football League, on the Showtime Network, refuted many of the long-held misconceptions about the AFL. In it, Abner Haynes tells of how his father forbade him to accept being drafted by the NFL, after drunken scouts from that league had visited the Haynes home; the NFL Cowboys' Tex Schramm is quoted as saying that if his team had ever agreed to play the AFL's Dallas Texans, they would very likely have lost; George Blanda makes a case for more AFL players being inducted to the Pro Football Hall of Fame by pointing out that Hall of Famer Willie Brown was cut by the Houston Oilers because he couldn't cover Oilers flanker Charlie Hennigan in practice. Later, when Brown was with the Broncos, Hennigan needed nine catches in one game against the Broncos to break Lionel Taylor's Professional Football record of 100 catches in one season. Hennigan caught the nine passes and broke the record, even though he was covered by Brown. Influence on professional football coaching The AFL also spawned coaches whose style and techniques have profoundly affected the play of professional football to this day. In addition to AFL greats like Hank Stram, Lou Saban, Sid Gillman and Al Davis were eventual hall of fame coaches such as Bill Walsh, a protégé of Davis with the AFL Oakland Raiders for one season; and Chuck Noll, who worked for Gillman and the AFL LA/San Diego Chargers from 1960 through 1965. Others include Buddy Ryan (AFL's New York Jets), Chuck Knox (Jets), Walt Michaels (Jets), and John Madden (AFL's Oakland Raiders). Additionally, many prominent coaches began their pro football careers as players in the AFL, including Sam Wyche (Cincinnati Bengals), Marty Schottenheimer (Buffalo Bills), Wayne Fontes (Jets), and two-time Super Bowl winner Tom Flores (Oakland Raiders). Flores also has a Super Bowl ring as a player (1969 Kansas City Chiefs). AFL 50th anniversary celebration As the influence of the AFL continues through the present, the 50th anniversary of its launch was celebrated during 2009. The season-long celebration began in August with the 2009 Pro Football Hall of Fame Game in Canton, Ohio, between two AFC teams (as opposed to the AFC-vs-NFC format the game first adopted in 1971). The opponents were two of the original AFL franchises, the Buffalo Bills and Tennessee Titans (the former Houston Oilers). Bills' owner Ralph C. Wilson Jr. (a 2009 Hall of Fame inductee) and Titans' owner Bud Adams were the only surviving members of the Foolish Club at the time (both are now deceased; Wilson's estate sold the team in 2014), the eight original owners of AFL franchises. (As of the season, the Titans and Chiefs are still owned by descendants of the original eight owners.) The Hall of Fame Game was the first of several "Legacy Weekends", during which each of the "original eight" AFL teams sported uniforms from their AFL era. Each of the 8 teams took part in at least two such "legacy" games. On-field officials also wore red-and-white-striped AFL uniforms during these games. In the fall of 2009, the Showtime pay-cable network premiered Full Color Football: The History of the American Football League, a 5-part documentary series produced by NFL Films that features vintage game film and interviews as well as more recent interviews with those associated with the AFL. The NFL sanctioned a variety of "Legacy" gear to celebrate the AFL anniversary, such as "throwback" jerseys, T-shirts, signs, pennants and banners, including items with the logos and colors of the Dallas Texans, Houston Oilers, and New York Titans, the three of the Original Eight AFL teams which have changed names or venues. A December 5, 2009, story by Ken Belson in The New York Times quotes league officials as stating that AFL "Legacy" gear made up twenty to thirty percent of the league's annual $3 billion merchandise income. Fan favorites were the Denver Broncos' vertically striped socks, which could not be re-stocked quickly enough. AFL franchises Today, two of the NFL's eight divisions are composed entirely of former AFL teams, the AFC West (Broncos, Chargers, Chiefs, and Raiders) and the AFC East (Bills, Dolphins, Jets, and Patriots). Additionally, the Bengals now play in the AFC North and the Tennessee Titans (formerly the Oilers) play in the AFC South. Former stadiums: Oakland–Alameda County Coliseum, Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, Fenway Park, Nickerson Field, Alumni Stadium, Nippert Stadium, the Cotton Bowl, Balboa Stadium and Kezar Stadium), still standing but currently vacant (Houston Astrodome), or demolished. AFL playoffs From 1960 to 1968, the AFL determined its champion via a single-elimination playoff game between the winners of its two divisions. The home teams alternated each year by division, so in 1968 the Jets hosted the Raiders, even though Oakland had a better record (this was changed in 1969). In 1963, the Buffalo Bills and Boston Patriots finished tied with identical records of 7–6–1 in the AFL East Division. There was no tie-breaker protocol in place, so a one-game playoff was held in War Memorial Stadium in December. The visiting Patriots defeated the host Bills 26–8. The Patriots traveled to San Diego as the Chargers completed a three-game season sweep over the weary Patriots with a 51–10 victory. A similar situation occurred in the 1968 season, when the Oakland Raiders and the Kansas City Chiefs finished the regular season tied with identical records of 12–2 in the AFL West Division. The Raiders beat the Chiefs 41–6 in a division playoff to qualify for the AFL Championship Game. In 1969, the final year of the independent AFL, Professional Football for first team featured a playoff team that had not won its division or counference during the regular season. A four-team playoff was held, with the second-place teams in each division playing the winner of the other division. The Chiefs upset the Raiders in Oakland 17–7 in the league's Championship, the final AFL game played. The Kansas City Chiefs were the first Super Bowl champion to win two road playoff games and the first team to win the Super Bowl despite not having won its division or conference during the regular season. AFL Championship Games AFL All-Star games The AFL did not play an All-Star game after its first season in 1960, but did stage All-Star games for the 1961 through 1969 seasons. All-Star teams from the Eastern and Western divisions played each other after every season except 1965. That season, the league champion Buffalo Bills played all-stars from the other teams. After the 1964 season, the AFL All-Star game had been scheduled for early 1965 in New Orleans' Tulane Stadium. After numerous black players were refused service by a number of area hotels and businesses, black and white players alike called for a boycott. Led by Bills players such as Cookie Gilchrist, the players successfully lobbied to have the game moved to Houston's Jeppesen Stadium. All-Time AFL Team As chosen by 1969 AFL Hall of Fame Selection committee members: AFL records The following is a sample of some records set during the existence of the league. The NFL considers AFL statistics and records equivalent to its own. Yards passing, game – 464, George Blanda (Oilers, October 29, 1961) Yards passing, season – 4,007, Joe Namath (Jets, 1967) Yards passing, career – 21,130, Jack Kemp (Chargers, Bills) Yards rushing, game – 243, Cookie Gilchrist (Bills, December 8, 1963) Yards rushing, season – 1,458, Jim Nance (Patriots, 1966) Yards rushing, career – 5,101, Clem Daniels (Texans, Raiders) Receptions, season – 101, Charlie Hennigan (Oilers, 1964) Receptions, career – 567, Lionel Taylor (Broncos) Points scored, season – 155, Gino Cappelletti (Patriots, 1964) Points scored, career – 1,100, Gino Cappelletti (Patriots) Players, coaches, and contributors List of American Football League players American Football League Most Valuable Players American Football League Rookies of the Year American Football League Draft American Football League Officials Commissioners/Presidents of the American Football League Joe Foss, commissioner (November 30, 1959 – April 7, 1966) Al Davis, commissioner (April 8, 1966 – July 25, 1966) Milt Woodard, president (July 25, 1966 – March 12, 1970) See also American Football League Draft American Football League win–loss records American Football League seasons American Football League playoffs American Football League Most Valuable Players American Football League Rookies of the Year American Football League Officials AFL–NFL merger List of leagues of American football American Basketball Association World Hockey Association Footnotes References History: The AFL – Pro Football Hall of Fame (link). External links RemembertheAFL.com Website afl-football.50webs.com American Football League week-by-week box scores, 1960–1969 The Summer of the Little Super Bowls PFRA article about the 1926 seasons of both the NFL and AFL PFRA article about the 1930s and 40s AFL Pro Football Hall of Fame American Football League Legacy Game Official Titans website story on the AFL's 50th Anniversary Celebration Schedule of American Football League Legacy Games ESPN.com article on AFL Legacy Games The New York Times article on AFL "Legacy" gear Defunct professional sports leagues in the United States Sports leagues established in 1960 1970 disestablishments in the United States 1960 establishments in the United States Defunct national American football leagues Sports leagues disestablished in 1970 1970 mergers and acquisitions

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu%20Nidal%20Organization

Abu Nidal Organization

The Abu Nidal Organization (ANO; ), officially Fatah – Revolutionary Council ( ), was a Palestinian militant group founded by Abu Nidal in 1974. It broke away from Fatah, a faction within the Palestine Liberation Organization, following the emergence of a rift between Abu Nidal and Yasser Arafat. The ANO was designated as a terrorist organization by Israel, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, the European Union. and Japan. However, a number of Arab countries supported the group's activities; it was backed by Iraq from 1974 to 1983, by Syria from 1983 to 1987, and by Libya from 1987 to 1997. It briefly cooperated with Egypt from 1997 to 1998, but ultimately returned to Iraq in December 1998, where it continued to have the state's backing until Abu Nidal's death in August 2002. In practice, the ANO was leftist and secularist, as well as anti-Zionist and anti-Western. In theory, it was not particularly associated with any specific ideology—or at least no such foundation was declared. It was mostly linked with the pursuit of Abu Nidal's personal agendas. The ANO was established to carry on an armed struggle in pursuit of pan-Arabism and the destruction of Israel. Like other Palestinian militant groups, the ANO carried out worldwide hijackings, assassinations, kidnappings of diplomats, and attacks on synagogues. It was responsible for 90 terrorist attacks between 1974 and 1992. In 2002, Abu Nidal died under disputed circumstances in Baghdad, with Palestinian sources claiming that he was assassinated on the orders of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. Formation and background The Abu Nidal Organization was established by Sabri Khalil al-Bannah (Abu Nidal), known by his nom de guerre Abu Nidal, a Palestinian Arab nationalist and a former Ba'ath party member. Abu Nidal long argued that PLO membership should be open to all Arabs, not just Palestinians. He also argued that Palestine must be established as an Arab state, stretching from the Jordan River in the east to the Mediterranean Sea in the west. Abu Nidal established his faction within the PLO, just prior to Black September in Jordan, and following internal disagreements within the PLO. During Fatah's Third Congress in Damascus in 1971, he emerged as the leader of a leftist alliance against Yasser Arafat. After the 1973 Yom Kippur War, many members of the mainstream Fatah movement argued that a political solution with Israel should be an option. Consequently, Abu Nidal split from Fatah in 1974 and formed his "rejectionist" front to carry on a Pan-Arabist armed struggle. Abu Nidal's first independent operation took place on September 5, 1973, when five gunmen using the name Al-Iqab ("The Punishment") seized the Saudi embassy in Paris, taking 11 hostages and threatening to blow up the building if Abu Dawud was not released from jail in Jordan, where he had been arrested in February 1973 for an attempt on King Hussein's life. Following the incident, Mahmoud Abbas of the PLO took flight to Iraq to meet Abu Nidal. In the meeting Abbas became so angry, that he stormed out of the meeting, followed by the other PLO delegates, and from that point on, the PLO regarded Abu Nidal as a mercenary. Two months later, just after the October 1973 Yom Kippur War, during discussions about convening a peace conference in Geneva, the Abu Nidal Organization (ANO) hijacked a KLM airliner, using the name of the Arab Nationalist Youth Organization. The operation was intended to send a signal to Fatah not to send representatives to any peace conference. In response, Arafat officially expelled Abu Nidal from Fatah in March 1974, and the rift between the two groups, and the two men, was complete. In June the same year, ANO formed the Rejectionist Front, a political coalition that opposed the Ten Point Program adopted by the Palestine Liberation Organization in its 12th Palestinian National Congress session. Abu Nidal then moved to Ba'athist Iraq where he set up the ANO, which soon began a string of terrorist attacks aimed at Israel and Western countries. Setting himself up as a freelance contractor, Abu Nidal is believed by the United States Department of State to have ordered attacks in 20 countries, killing or injuring over 900 people. The ANO group's most notorious attacks were on the El Al ticket counters at Rome and Vienna airports in December 1985, when Arab gunmen high on amphetamines opened fire on passengers in simultaneous shootings, killing 18 and wounding 120. Patrick Seale, Abu Nidal's biographer, wrote of the attacks that their "random cruelty marked them as typical Abu Nidal operations." Attacks The ANO carried out attacks in 20 countries worldwide, killing or injuring about 1,650 people. Targets include the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Israel, moderate Palestinians, the PLO, and various Arab and European countries. The group has not attacked Western targets since the late 1980s. Major attacks included the Rome and Vienna Airport Attacks in December 1985, the Neve Shalom synagogue in Istanbul and the Pan Am Flight 73 hijacking in Karachi in September 1986, and the City of Poros day-excursion ship attack in Greece in July 1988. The ANO has been especially noted for its uncompromising stance on negotiation with Israel, treating anything less than all-out military struggle against Israel as treachery. This led the group to perform numerous attacks against the PLO, which had made clear it accepted a negotiated solution to the conflict. Fatah-RC is believed to have assassinated PLO deputy chief Abu Iyad and PLO security chief Abul Hul in Tunis in January 1991. It assassinated a Jordanian diplomat in Lebanon in January 1994 and has been linked to the killing of the PLO representative there. Noted PLO moderate Issam Sartawi was killed by the Fatah-RC in 1983. In October 1974, the group also made a failed assassination attempt on the present Palestinian president and PLO chairman, Mahmoud Abbas. These attacks, and numerous others, led to the PLO issuing a death sentence in absentia against Abu Nidal. In the early 1990s, it made an attempt to gain control of a refugee camp in Lebanon, but this was thwarted by PLO organizations. Internal executions and torture The ANO's official newspaper Filastin al-Thawra regularly carried stories announcing the execution of traitors within the movement. Each new recruit of the ANO was given several days to write down his life story and sign a paper agreeing to his execution if anything was found to be untrue. Every so often, the recruit would be asked to rewrite the whole story. Any discrepancies were taken as evidence that he was a spy and he would be made to write it out again, often after days of being beaten and nights spent forced to sleep standing up. By 1987, Abu Nidal used extreme torture tactics on members of the ANO who were suspected of betrayal and disloyalty. The tactics included hanging prisoners naked, whipping them until unconsciousness, using salt or chili powder to revive them, forcing them into a car tire for whipping and salt application, melting plastic on their skin, frying their genitals, and confining them in tiny cells bound hand and foot. If cells were full, prisoners might be buried alive with a steel pipe for breathing. Execution was carried out by firing a bullet down the pipe. From 1987 to 1988, hundreds of members of Abu Nidal's organization were killed due to internal paranoia and terror tactics. The elderly wife of a veteran member was also killed on false charges. The killings were mostly carried out by four individuals: Mustafa Ibrahim Sanduqa, Isam Maraqa, Sulaiman Samrin, and Mustafa Awad. Decisions to kill were mostly made by Abu Nidal after he had consumed a whole bottle of whiskey at night. According to ANO dissidents, the attacks made by the group were unconnected to the Palestinian cause and led to their defection. In addition, they claimed the guerrilla was the "living example of paranoia". See also Abu Nidal Arab People's Movement Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine Olivia Frank References Citations Sources Further reading Abu Nidal: Ruthless maverick Abu Nidal Arab nationalist militant groups Palestinian terrorism in Europe Organisations designated as terrorist by Japan Organisations designated as terrorist by the European Union Organisations designated as terrorist by the United Kingdom Organizations designated as terrorist by the United States Organizations based in Asia designated as terrorist Palestinian militant groups Organizations designated as terrorist by Canada