deserttrikkes

The Wallflower

2009-04-10T00:12:00.000-07:00

The Wallflower,a.k.a Perfect Girl Evolution is a manga series written by Tomoko Hayakawa. The individual chapters have been serialized in Bessatsu Friend since its premiere in 2000, and in 21 tankōbon volumes in Japan by Kodansha. The series was licensed for an English language release in North America by Del Rey Manga and in Singapore by Chuang Yi — under the name My Fair Lady.

Nippon Animation adapted part of the manga series into a twenty-five episode anime series which aired on TV Tokyo and TV Aichi from October 3, 2006 through March 27, 2007. The anime adaptation has been licensed for Region 1 release by A.D. Vision. In 2008, The WallFlower became one of over 30 ADV titles whose North American rights were transferred to Funimation Entertainment.

2008-05-02T09:45:00.001-07:00

The name "Vaalbara" is given to Earth's theorized first supercontinent. According to radiometric data of the encompassing cratons that comprised Vaalbara, it is known to have existed 3.3 billion years ago (3.3 Ga) and possibly even as far back as 3.6 Ga. Evidence includes geochronological and palaeomagnetic studies between the two Archaean cratons (protocontinents) called the Kaapvaal craton (the Kaapvaal province of South Africa) and the Pilbara craton (the Pilbara province of Western Australia).
Further evidence is the structural sequence similarities of the greenstone belts and gneiss belts of these two cratons. These same Archaean greenstone belts are now spread out across the margins of the Superior craton of Canada and are also spread out across the cratons of the former Gondwana and Laurasia continents. The subsequent drift paths of the Kaapvaal and Pilbara cratons after 2.8 Ga gives further evidence that they were once connected.
It is not certain when Vaalbara began to break up, but geochronological and palaeomagnetic evidence show that the two cratons had a rotational 30 degree latitudinal separation at 2.78 to 2.77 Ga, implying that they were no longer contiguous after ~2.8 Ga.

See also

Supercontinent
Kaapvaal craton
Pilbara craton
Gondwana
Laurasia

2008-05-01T09:18:00.001-07:00

Bill Doggett (February 16, 1916 – November 13, 1996) was an American jazz and rhythm and blues pianist and organist.
William Ballard Doggett was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His mother, a church pianist, introduced him to music when he was 9 years old. By the time he was 15, he had joined a Philadelphia area combo, playing local theaters and clubs while attending high school.
He later sold his band to Lucky Millinder, and worked during the 1930s and early 1940s for both Millinder and arranger Jimmy Mundy. In 1942 he was hired as The Ink Spots' pianist and arranger.
In 1949, he replaced Wild Bill Davis in Louis Jordan's Tympany Five. It was there that he first achieved success playing the Hammond organ and he is also reputed to have written one of Jordan's biggest hits, "Saturday Night Fish Fry", for which Jordan claimed the writing credit.
In 1951, he organized his own trio and began recording for King Records. His best known recording is "Honky Tonk," a rhythm and blues hit of 1956 which sold four million copies. He won the Cash Box award for best rhythm and blues performer in 1957, 1958, and 1959. He also arranged for many bandleaders and performers, including Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, and Lionel Hampton. He continued to play and arrange until he died of a heart attack in New York City.
As a jazz player Doggett started in swing music and later played soul jazz, a field in which rhythm and blues organists were highly sought after.

2008-04-30T08:22:00.001-07:00

California Proposition 98 requires a minimum percentage of the state budget to be spent on K-14 education. Prop 98 guarantees an annual increase in education in the California budget.

2008-04-29T09:39:00.001-07:00

The Carry On films were a long-running series of British low-budget comedy films, directed by Gerald Thomas and produced by Peter Rogers. An energetic mix of parody, farce, slapstick and double entendres, they are seen as classic examples of how to do British humour.
Twenty-nine original films and one compilation film were made between 1958 and 1978 at Pinewood Studios, with an additional film made in 1992. The films relied on a repertoire of comedy actors which changed gradually over the years. The mainstays of the series were Kenneth Williams (26 films), Joan Sims (24), Charles Hawtrey (23), Sid James (19), Kenneth Connor (17), Hattie Jacques (14) and Bernard Bresslaw (14). One of the most iconic Carry On stars was Barbara Windsor, although she appeared in only ten of the films. Comedy legend Frankie Howerd is also associated with the Carry On films, but only appeared in two of them (Doctor and Up The Jungle)
The films' humour was in the British comic tradition of the music hall and seaside postcards. Many of them parodied more serious films - in the case of Carry On Cleo (1964), the Burton and Taylor film Cleopatra (1963).
The mainstay of Carry On humour was innuendo and the sending-up of British institutions and customs, such as the National Health Service (Nurse, Doctor, Again Doctor, Matron), the monarchy (Henry), the Empire (Up the Khyber) and the trade unions (At Your Convenience) as well as the Hammer horror film (Screaming), camping (Camping), foreigners (Abroad), the seaside (Girls), and caravanning holidays (Behind) among others. Although the films were very often slated by the critics, they were popular.
The series began with Carry On Sergeant (1958), about a group of recruits on National Service, and was sufficiently successful that others followed. A film had appeared the previous year under the title Carry On Admiral; although this was a comedy in a similar vein (with Joan Sims in the cast) it has no connection to the series. There was also an unrelated 1937 film Carry On London, starring future Carry On performer Eric Barker.
The characters and comedy style of the Carry On film series later moved into shows in other media. There was a television series titled Carry On Laughing, and several Carry On Christmas specials. There were also three stage shows: Carry On London, Carry On Laughing and Wot a Carry On In Blackpool.

Early films
In 1963 Talbot Rothwell took over the role of screenwriter. The settings became more ambitious, often parodying well-known films or genres. Coinciding with the sexual revolution, they featured more explicit sexual jokes and situations. The films made in colour in the '60s remain among the most popular of the series.
At one point, Talbot Rothwell sought and received permission to borrow several one-liners and quotes that Frank Muir and Denis Norden had written for the successful radio comedy series Take It From Here. Rothwell was a friend and colleague of Muir and Norden.

Back to black-and-white; originally scripted as a non-Carry On film called Call Me a Cab

In colour again; not considered a successful film in the canon

In black-and-white as a deliberate spoof of Film Noir in some sequences

In full colour again (as were all the rest), using costumes and sets left standing from filming portions of Cleopatra; contains the line voted as the funniest comedy movie line ever: "Infamy! Infamy! they've all got it in for me!" (Kenneth Williams)

A spoof horror film, with the Gothic atmosphere of a Hammer production. In 2000, readers of Total Film magazine voted this the 40th greatest comedy film of all time. Harry H. Corbett guest-starred in the Sid James role. Most famous line is a lustily-delivered "Frying tonight!" from Kenneth Williams.

A Scarlet Pimpernel spoof.

A Foreign Legion parody, and an unsuccessful attempt to break into the American market by casting Phil Silvers as the lead — in a role written for Sid James, who had suffered his first heart-attack just before the film went into production.

The highest grossing film that year in the UK
The loss of the Carry On prefix from the titles of 'Don't Lose Your Head' and 'Follow That Camel' was due to the change of distributor from Anglo-Amalgamated to Rank. Both films were later re-issued with a Carry On... prefix.

Carry On Cabby (1963)
Carry On Jack (1963)
Carry On Spying (1964)
Carry On Cleo (1964)
Carry On Cowboy (1965)
Carry On Screaming (1966)
Don't Lose Your Head (1966)
Follow That Camel (1967)
Carry On Doctor (1967)
Carry On up the Khyber (1968)
Carry On Camping (1969)
Carry On Again Doctor (1969) Classic Carry On
Although the series continued to be popular in the early 1970s, there was a growing feeling among the cast and critics that the quality of the films was declining. British society was becoming more accustomed to seeing sexual content on screen, and the innuendos of the series no longer had the impact they did before, although they became noticeably stronger. Rothwell continued as writer.

The Wedded Bliss agency, run by Sidney and Sophie Bliss, is a picture of domestic happiness, until the customers walk out the door! This film tried to introduce younger stars into the mix, incorporating such newcomers as Jacki Piper, Imogen Hassall and Richard O'Callaghan in key roles.

This was the first box office failure in the series, something attributed to the film's attempt at exploring the political themes of the trade union movement — with, crucially, the unionists portrayed as buffoons. This apparently alienated the traditional working-class Carry On core audience, and the film did not return full production costs until 1976 after several international and television sales. This film is considered by many Carry On fans to be one of the best of the series. Richard O'Callaghan, Jacki Piper and Kenneth Cope play key roles along side the Carry On regulars.

After the problems caused by the topical and political nature of the previous film's story, this was a lightweight farce that returned to the familiar Carry On... setting of a large hospital. Matron featured all the main regular cast of the period with the exception of Peter Butterworth, and was the final Carry On for recurring players Terry Scott and Jacki Piper. The first appearance for Jack Douglas.

This film, about a disastrous package holiday where anything that could possibly go wrong did go wrong, was Charles Hawtrey's last Carry On.

The story of a struggling seaside resort's attempt to organise a beauty contest, and the efforts of militant feminists, to oppose it. This was the first film where key regulars Kenneth Williams and Charles Hawtrey were both absent. The sexual humour in this film is notably less subtle than its predecessors. Robin Askwith was cast as a sexually naïve young man; a similar role to that which he would play in the later Confessions films.

The last Rothwell film, and the last to feature Sid James, Hattie Jacques, and Barbara Windsor. It is often seen as the last "true" Carry On.

Carry On Up the Jungle (1970)
Carry On Loving (1970)
Carry On Henry (1971) (with Sid James as Henry VIII)
Carry On at Your Convenience (1971)
Carry On Matron (1972)
Carry On Abroad (1972)
Carry On Girls (1973)
Carry On Dick (1974) (a Dick Turpin spoof) Into the 1970s
After Rothwell ended his run as writer in 1974, the already variable quality of the series took a sharp downturn. British society had changed significantly and Carry On humour now seemed dated and innocent. Moreover fewer and fewer of the established cast were now appearing in the films; Abroad had been the last Carry On film appearance for Charles Hawtrey and Dick the last for Sid James (who died in 1976), Hattie Jacques and Barbara Windsor. Owing to the withdrawal of American funding from British films, with a few exceptions, many of the most profitable British films during the 1970s were those adapted from television series (such as Steptoe and Son), or erotic comedies. The influence of these genres is keenly felt in the Carry On series' output of this period, with an increased sexual content and more television stars (such as Windsor Davies) appearing in place of regulars.

Basically a remake of Carry On Camping with several established Carry On regulars along with an influx of new actors in main roles including Windsor Davies, Ian Lavender, and headlining guest star Elke Sommer. This was the final Carry On film appearance for Bernard Bresslaw.

This film featured an almost entirely new cast. Although Carry On regular Kenneth Connor had a leading role the only other regulars present, Joan Sims and Peter Butterworth, had only small roles in the film. Windsor Davies who had joined the series with the preceding film again plays a major role. Other key roles are taken by established and recognisable actors Judy Geeson and Patrick Mower. A major commercial failure, this film was withdrawn from some cinemas after just three days .

A compilation of clips with specially filmed linking footage presented by Kenneth Williams and Barbara Windsor.

An attempt to revive the series by increasing the sexual content. This film is notable in that Jack Douglas plays a character other than his stuttering Alf Ippititimus-type persona, in this case a snooty butler.

Carry On Behind (1975)
Carry On England (1976)
That's Carry On! (1977)
Carry On Emmannuelle (1978) Decline

The next film after Carry on Regardless, What A Carry On was to have been set around an Amateur Dramatics group putting on a production of Romeo and Juliet but Hudis couldn't work it into a full feature script and it was incorporated into Teacher.

Conflicting reports state that the script for this film would have been written by Michael Pertwee or Norman Hudis (Hudis sounds more likely), had it gone ahead. The story revolved around a fire station, under the command of Sid James, and various attempts to train a bungling group of new recruits. Kenneth Williams and Charles Hawtrey were to have played the supporting roles. The idea was abandoned because Gerald Thomas was afraid the film might suffer if a major disaster occurred at the time of its release.

Scripted by Norman Hudis, this story revolved around a group of RAF recruits. It got as far as pre-production, but was abandoned. This is probably what inspired the making of the failed Carry On England which had a similar plot.

See main article for more information.

During the Second World War, Talbot Rothwell and Peter Butterworth spent time interred in the same prisoner of war camp. Carry On Escaping was inspired by their experiences there and progressed as far in pre-production as a near-final script.

See main article for more information.

A planned spoof of the then popular US soap, Carry on Dallas. A full script was written and casting offers made - including Kenny Williams, Kenny Connor, Jack Douglas, Suzanne Danielle, Joan Sims, Charlie Hawtrey (in a guest role) and Jim Dale. The script centred around the Ramming family (and not screwing which was dropped in an early draft as this could have endangered the A certificate). When the 'Who Shot JR' thing happened and Dallas became the most watched TV programme in the world at that time. Lorrimar then wanted a royalty about 20 times the size of the total budget to use the programme as a base - so the production dried up.

Carry On Down Under was loosely to have been based on the Neighbours series and its ilk. Location scouting had been carried out by Gerald Thomas, in Australia, but eventually the finance fell through. Essentially, Peter always liked the script for Carry On Dallas, and so a couple of years later the oil tycoons became sewage farmers and the whole thing shifted to Australia. Gerry Thomas had seen some locations there whilst on holiday and spoke to the Australian film commission who welcomed the idea with open arms. The scripts for Carry On Dallas and Carry On Down Under were identical!

See main article for more information.

What a Carry On... (1961)
Carry On Smoking (1961)
Carry On Flying (1962)
Carry On Spaceman (1962)
Carry On Escaping (60's or 70's)
Carry On Again Nurse (1979)
Carry on Dallas (AKA Carry on Texas) (1987)
Carry on Down Under (1988)
Carry On Again Nurse (1988) Unmade Carry On's
During the 1980s the Carry On films were viewed by many as representing the worst side of British attitudes to women and to sex. However, they were still very popular and were regularly broadcast on television.
In 1992, an attempt was made to revive the series with Carry On Columbus, co-inciding with the production of two serious movies on the subject and the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus' first landing in the Americas. The producers managed to persuade a number of alternative comedians such as Rik Mayall, Alexei Sayle, Peter Richardson, and Julian Clary to appear in the film as well as the comic actress Maureen Lipman, but it did not achieve any great commercial success and was panned by some critics.
Of all the original Carry On stars, only Jim Dale (playing the title role) and Jack Douglas appeared in the film – many of the others had died. Barbara Windsor, however, refused to appear after reading the script. A handful of other actors who had played a few roles in the original films, such as Peter Gilmore, Bernard Cribbins, Jon Pertwee, June Whitfield, and Leslie Phillips also appeared. Frankie Howerd had originally agreed to appear, but he passed away before filming, and the role was adapted to be played by Julian Clary.
The script, by Dave Freeman, was more polished than those he wrote for the Carry On films during the 1970s, including comment on colonialism as well as the obligatory innuendo and slapstick.

Regular actors

2008-04-27T08:42:00.001-07:00

Coat of arms
The Bishopric and Archbishopric of Trier was one of the important ecclesiastical principalities of the Holy Roman Empire. Unlike the other Rhenish archbishoprics — Mainz and Cologne — Trier, as the important Roman provincial capital of Augusta Treverorum, had been the seat of a bishop since Roman times. It was raised to archiepiscopal status during the reign of Charlemagne, whose will mentions the bishoprics of Metz, Toul and Verdun as its suffragans.

History
The early bishops in this list are strictly legendary. The earliest authenticated bishop, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia (1908), was Agricius, who took part in the Council of Arles in 314, but who does not appear among the traditional list.
Bishops and Archbishops

Eucherius c. 50–73
Valerius of Trèves, c.73–88 Archbishops of Trier, 791–1189

John I 1189–1212
Theodoric II 1212–42
Arnold II von Isenburg 1242–59
Heinrich I von Finstingen 1260–86
Bohemond I von Warnesberg 1286–99
Diether von Nassau 1300–07
Heinrich III von Virneburg 1300–06 (in opposition)
Baldwin von Luxemburg 1307–54
Bohemond II von Saarbrücken 1354–61
Kuno II von Falkenstein 1362–88
Werner von Falkenstein 1388–1418
Otto von Ziegenhain 1418–30
Rhaban von Helmstadt 1430–38
Jakob von Sierk 1439–56
Johann II of Baden 1456–1503
Jakob II of Baden 1503–11
Richard Greiffenklau zu Vollraths 1511–31
Johann III von Metzenhausen 1531–40
Johann Ludwig von Hagen 1540–47
Johann IV von Isenburg 1547–56
Johann V von der Leyen 1556–67
Jakob III von Eltz 1567–81
Johann VI von Schonenberg 1581–99
Lothar von Metternich 1599–1623
Philipp Christoph von Sotern 1623–52
Karl Kaspar von der Leyen 1652–76
Johann Hugo von Orsbeck 1676–1711
Charles Joseph of Lorraine 1711–15
Franz Ludwig of Palatinate-Neuburg 1716–29
Franz Georg von Schönborn-Buchheim 1729–56
Johann Philipp von Walderdorf 1756–68
Clemens Wenzel of Saxony 1768–1803 Archbishop-Electors of Trier, 1189–1803

Charles Mannay 1802–16
Josef von Hommer 1824–36
Wilhelm Arnoldi 1842–64
Leopold Pelldram 1864–67
Matthias Eberhard 1867–76
Michael Felix Korum 1881–1921
Franz Rudolf Bornewasser 1922–51
Matthias Wehr 1951–66
Bernhard Stein 1967–80
Hermann Josef Spital 1981–2001
Reinhard Marx 2001–present Notes

History of Trier

2008-04-26T08:27:00.001-07:00

History
The National Express Group, operators of long-distance coach services in the United Kingdom under the National Express brand, has a fleet of twelve Neoplan Skyliners. On the evening of 3 January 2007, one overturned and crashed on a slip road near Heathrow Airport, killing two passengers. The other sixty-five passengers and two staff members were all taken to hospital. National Express Group temporarily withdrew all twelve Skyliners from service on 5 January 2007, pending investigations only reinstating them in late May 2007.

Accidents

Products

Current

Cityliner
Skyliner
Starliner
Tourliner
Trendliner Coaches

Centroliner
Electroliner
Airliner Buses

Hamburg
Megaliner
Jumbocruiser
Jetliner
Spaceliner
Metroliner
Transliner
Euroliner
Megashuttle
Apron See also

Alexander Dennis
Ayats
Berkhof
Bova
Irizar
Jonckheere
Marcopolo
Plaxton
Setra
TEMSA
Van Hool
Wrightbus

2008-04-25T09:57:00.001-07:00

BG Group Plc (LSE: BG.) is an energy production and distribution company which has its headquarters in Reading outside London, England. The company was created in 1997 when British Gas plc divested Centrica plc and became BG plc, which was reorganised in 1999 as BG Group plc. BG Group has use of the trading name "British Gas" outside the United Kingdom; Centrica owns the rights to use it within the UK.

Activities

Board of Directors

2008-04-24T08:34:00.000-07:00

Carl Thomas Rowan (August 11, 1925 - September 23, 2000), was an African American public servant, journalist and author. Rowan was a nationally-syndicated op-ed columnist for the Washington Post and the Chicago Sun-Times. He was one of the most prominent black journalists of the 20th century.

Controversy

South of Freedom (1952)
The Pitiful and the Proud (1956)
Go South to Sorrow (1957)
Wait till Next Year: The Life Story of Jackie Robinson (1960)
Just Between Us Blacks (1974)
Breaking Barriers: A Memoir (1991)
Growing up Black: From The Slave Days to the Present - 25 African-Americans Reveal the Trials and Triumphs of Their Childhoods (contributor, 1992)
Dream Makers, Dream Breakers: The World of Justice Thurgood Marshall (1993)
The Coming Race War in America: A Wake-Up Call (1996)

2008-04-23T09:09:00.001-07:00

Duncan Fegredo is a comic book artist born in Leicester in 1968.

Biography

New Statesmen (with John Smith):

"Where the railroad meets the sea" (in Crisis #7, 1988)
"Memories on Ice" (in Crisis #8, 1988)
Third World War (with Pat Mills):
- "Liats law" (in Crisis #19, 1989)
  "Liats law II" (in Crisis #26, 1989)
  Kid Eternity (with Grant Morrison, Vertigo, 3-issue mini-series, 1991, tpb, 2006 ISBN 1-4012-0933-5)
  Enigma (with Peter Milligan, DC, 1993, tpb, 1995)
  Judge Dredd (with John Wagner):
  - "Dead Ringer" (in Judge Dredd Megazine #3.64, 2000)
    "The Bad Juve (in 2000 AD #1227, 2001)
    "The Runner" (in 2000 AD #1240. 2001)
    Hellboy "Darkness Calls" (upcoming)

2008-04-22T09:21:00.001-07:00

How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must) is a 2004 book by author Ann Coulter.

Description
The book is a collection of columns written by Coulter between September 12, 2001 and March 9, 2005 on liberalism, the war on terror, and the media.
In it, Coulter offers advice gleaned from her experience as a political pundit. She attacks the New York Times and the Democratic Party, and sums up her opinion of liberals in two sentences: "Want to make liberals angry? Defend the United States." In arguing with liberals, she advises, "don't be defensive", "always outrage the enemy", and "never apologize to, compliment, or show graciousness to a Democrat".
The book was on the New York Times Bestseller list for 17 weeks.

2008-04-21T08:17:00.001-07:00

For the United States Department of Agriculture's nutritional program with a similar name, see Child and Adult Care Food Program.
Childcare (also written child care and babycare) is the act of caring for and supervising minor children. (In Australia, daycare is referred to as "childcare"—cf.)

The childcare debate
In many families (and almost exclusively so in some communities), the childcare role is taken on by the extended family. One of the challenges for parents who choose to use other sources of childcare is finding and affording qualified providers.
Some jurisdictions require licensing or certification. Parents may also turn to independent rating services, or rely on recommendations and referrals. Some places develop voluntary quality networks, for example in Australia most childcare services are part of the national Quality Assurance system which ensures they provide good developmental programs.
Many organizations (in the developed world) campaign for free or subsidized childcare for all. Others campaign for tax breaks or allowances to allow parents a non-finance driven choice. Many of the free or subsidized childcare programs in the United States are also Child Development programs, or after school programs which hire certified teachers to teach the children while they are in their care.
Most countries have laws relating to childcare, which seek to prevent and punish child abuse. Such laws may add cost and complexity to childcare provision and may provide tools to help ensure quality childcare.

The challenge of childcare
The Internet has become a tool for parents and childcare providers to connect.
Online classified ads allow parents to post job offers and childcare providers to post resumes in hopes of connecting with each other via cyberspace. Such postings allow anyone to post almost anything at any time with little monitoring. Services dedicated to matching parents and childcare providers have evolved from for-profit, nonprofit and governmental organizations. Such services generally offer greater screening, than general listing services.

Notes

Babysitter
Daycare
Care and feeding of an infant
Wood kindergarten

2008-04-20T09:44:00.001-07:00

The Ohio Turnpike (officially the James W. Shocknessy Ohio Turnpike) is a 241.26 mi (388.27 km)-long, limited-access toll highway in the U.S. state of Ohio, serving as a primary corridor to Chicago and Pittsburgh. The road runs east-west in the northern section of the state, from the Indiana Toll Road (at the Indiana-Ohio border near Montpelier) to the Pennsylvania Turnpike (at the Ohio-Pennsylvania border near Petersburg).
Built from 1949 to 1955, construction for the roadway was completed a year prior to the Interstate Highway System. The modern Ohio Turnpike is signed as three interstate numbers: I-76, I-80, and I-90.
The road is owned and maintained by the Ohio Turnpike Commission, headquartered in Berea.

History
The Ohio Turnpike has had service plazas since its inception. Service plazas differ from typical freeway rest areas in that they offer amenities such as 24-hour food and fuel service, which means motorists do not have to pay the toll to exit, then re-enter when they have to re-fuel or stop to eat.
Beginning in 1998, The Ohio Turnpike Commission began modernizing its service plazas, first demolishing the original plazas and then reconstructing them from the ground-up. In addition to modern restrooms, the new plazas offer several fast food choices, which vary between the plazas. They also include ATMs, gift shops, travel information counters, Wi-Fi internet access, and facilities for truck drivers, including shower facilities, lounge, and laundry areas. A fueling station is provided at each plaza. Facilities for overnight RV campers are provided at the service plazas located at mile markers 76, 139, and 197.

Service Plazas
Since the turnpike opened, the Ohio Turnpike Commission has contracted with the Ohio State Highway Patrol (District 10) to provide law enforcement, as well as assistance to disabled or stranded motorists. The Patrol is the only law enforcement agency with jurisdiction on the turnpike. It monitors Citizen's Band channel 9 for distress calls.

Law enforcement
In September 2004, the speed limit for heavy trucks was raised to 65 mph (105 km/h), creating a uniform speed limit for all traffic. For years, trucks had avoided the turnpike due to large toll increases in the 1990s, and because they could travel for free at the same speed on parallel highways such as State Route 2 and US 20. Truck traffic clogged the downtown shopping areas of US 20 towns such as Bellevue, Clyde, and Fremont, essentially driving away customers who didn't want to deal with the truck traffic; shopkeepers begged the state for relief for years.
Eventually, after prodding by Governor Bob Taft, the Ohio Turnpike Commission lowered truck tolls and implemented the uniform 65-mph speed limit on September 8, 2004. Truck traffic levels on the turnpike are estimated to be 20% higher since the change was made. The turnpike's 65-mph truck speed limit is unique in Ohio, as a 55-mph statutory speed limit applies to trucks on every other highway in the state.

Proposed leasing
Tolls are based upon the distance traveled, as well as the type and weight of vehicle driven. As of January 2007, the toll for a typical non-commercial passenger vehicle to travel the entire turnpike is $10.25. The system is expected to be fully functional by 2009.

Exit list

Interstate 76 in Ohio
Interstate 80 in Ohio
Interstate 90 in Ohio

2008-04-19T09:06:00.001-07:00

Livingston County is a county in the U.S. state of Michigan, and is part of the Detroit-Warren-Livonia Metropolitan Statistical Area. As of the 2000 census, the population was 156,951, with a 2003 Census estimate placing the population at 181,517. The county seat and most populous incorporated city is Howell. As one of Michigan's "Cabinet counties", a group of counties whose names honor members of President Andrew Jackson's Cabinet, it is named after former U.S. Secretary of State Edward Livingston.

Geography

Genesee County (northeast)
Shiawassee County (northwest)
Washtenaw County (south)
Oakland County (east)
Ingham County (west)
Jackson County (southwest) Adjacent counties
As of the census² of 2000, there were 156,951 people, 55,384 households, and 43,531 families residing in the county. The population density was 107/km² (276/mi²). There were 58,919 housing units at an average density of 40/km² (104/mi²). The racial makeup of the county was 97.13% White, 0.46% Black or African American, 0.43% Native American, 0.57% Asian, 0.03% Pacific Islander, 0.32% from other races, and 1.06% from two or more races. 1.24% of the population were Hispanic or Latino of any race. 96.8% spoke English and 1.1% Spanish as their first language.
There were 55,384 households out of which 39.80% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 68.50% were married couples living together, 6.80% had a female householder with no husband present, and 21.40% were non-families. 17.10% of all households were made up of individuals and 5.40% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.80 and the average family size was 3.18.
In the county the population was spread out with 28.80% under the age of 18, 6.60% from 18 to 24, 31.70% from 25 to 44, 24.60% from 45 to 64, and 8.30% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 36 years. For every 100 females there were 102.10 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 99.70 males.
With a median household income of $67,400, and a median family income of $75,284, Livingston county is one of the Highest-income counties in the United States. Males had a median income of $54,358 versus $32,073 for females. The per capita income for the county was $28,069. About 2.40% of families and 3.40% of the population were below the poverty line, including 3.60% of those under age 18 and 4.50% of those age 65 or over.
Livingston County has been the fastest growing county in the state for the past decade and also through the 1970s. More than 50% of all the population of Livingston County is located in the southeastern communities of Brighton Township, Genoa Township, Hamburg Township, Green Oak Township, the Village of Pinckney, Putnam Township and the City of Brighton.
The US Census Bureau in 2000 identified Brighton, Howell, and the nearby city of South Lyon to be a contiguous, urbanized area, one of the newest such areas in the United States.
By 2006 the county population had grown 17.6% to 184,511. Livingston County is the fastest-growing county in Michigan.
In 2006, non-Hispanic whites made up 95.7% of the county population; African-Americans made up 0.7%; Asians 0.8%; and Native Americans 0.4%. Hispanics were 1.6% of the population.

Location
There are two local newspapers, The Livingston Community News, a relatively new free weekly that is part of the Booth newspaper chain (which also owns The Ann Arbor News), and the The Livingston County Daily Press & Argus. Published Sunday through Friday, the "Daily Press & Argus" was launched in 2000 through the combination of two weekly newspapers -- The Livingston County Press and The Brighton Argus -- which served the communities for many decades. The Web site for the "Daily Press & Argus" was launched in 2005 and is located at www.livingstondaily.com.
Other media in the county includes WHMI-FM, a Classic Hits radio station that has local news on the hour. Local news and other station information is located at www.whmi.com

Media
The county government operates the jail, maintains rural roads, operates the major local courts, keeps files of deeds and mortgages, maintains vital records, administers public health regulations, and participates with the state in the provision of welfare and other social services. The county board of commissioners controls the budget but has only limited authority to make laws or ordinances. In Michigan, most local government functions — police and fire, building and zoning, tax assessment, street maintenance, etc. — are the responsibility of individual cities and townships.

Government
(information as of September 2005)

Prosecuting Attorney: David L. Morse
Sheriff: Robert J. Bezotte
County Clerk: Margaret M. Dunleavy
County Treasurer: Dianne H. Hardy
Register of Deeds: Sally Reynolds
Drain Commissioner: Brian Jonckheere Livingston County elected officials

Cities, villages, and townships

Brighton
Howell Cities

Pinckney
Fowlerville Villages

Brighton Township
Cohoctah Township
Conway Township
Deerfield Township
Genoa Township
Green Oak Township
Hamburg Township
Handy Township
Hartland Township
Howell Township
Iosco Township
Marion Township
Oceola Township
Putnam Township
Tyrone Township
Unadilla Township Census Designated Places (CDP)

Hell, unincorporated community
Parshallville
Hartland

2008-04-18T09:04:00.001-07:00

Wilfrid Pelletier (June 20, 1896 – April 9, 1982) was a Canadian orchestra conductor.
In 1937, Pelletier married American opera singer Rose Bampton. In 1967, he was made a Companion of the Order of Canada.
Place des Arts' Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, the largest multi-purpose concert hall in Canada, was named in his honour in 1966.
In 2002, Wilfrid Pelletier became a MasterWorks honouree for the Audio-Visual Preservation Trust of Canada.

2008-04-17T09:15:00.001-07:00

The Bishops' Wars — Bellum Episcopale — refers to two armed encounters between Charles I and the Scottish Covenanters in 1639 and 1640, which helped to set the stage for the English Civil War and the subsequent Wars of the Three Kingdoms

Rise of the Bishops
For Charles, war with the Scots was a risky strategy. In England he had ruled without Parliament for eleven years and simply did not have the resources for a sustained campaign. Calling a new Parliament was potentially dangerous because of past opposition and current hostility to official policy. Instead the king tried to conjure up a coalition of forces against the Covenanters, to include such armed units he was able to gather in England from his existing resources, the domestic opposition to the Covenanters in Scotland, concentrated in the Highlands and the territory of the Gordons of Huntly in Aberdeenshire, as well as troops from Ireland. Scotland was to be enveloped in attacks from without and within.
Charles' strategy was bold but amateurish: he would advance to the borders of Berwickshire with the royal army, while James, Marquess of Hamilton. led an amphibious force into the Firth of Forth, and Randal Macdonnell, Earl of Antrim, advanced from Ireland against Archibald Campbell, Earl of Argyll, a leading Covenanter. Hamilton was given the supplementary aim of aiding the Marquess of Huntly.
But like all such grand strategies the whole scheme fell apart when confronted by the detailed logistical problems that real soldiers always have to face: the men were badly trained and equipped; transport, especially shipping, was a serious problem; there were few secure bases and insufficient stores; and there was no detailed plan of campaign. Thomas Wentworth, Charles' Lord Deputy in Ireland, did little to disguise his contempt for the mercurial Antrim, and refused to extend the necessary support for the planned invasion of Scotland. The Covenanters, though little better prepared than the king, at least had the advantage of superior morale, defending a cause they believed to be just. All internal resistance to the Covenanters was swept aside in June 1639 when the Gordons were defeated by Montrose at the Battle of the Bridge of Dee, the only serious clash of the whole war.
Charles arrived at Berwick at the end of May, camping with the rest of his army a few miles to the west at a place called Birks on the English side of the River Tweed. Things were far from good. Most of the troops were badly prepared, food was scarce, and disease had broken out. All were tormented by lice, known in the grim humour of the camp as "Covenanters." When the weather turned bad few had any shelter, and for miles there were no trees from which to build huts. Smallpox was an ever present hazard; desertions were frequent. Thomas Windebank, son of the king's Secretary of State, carried his own frustrations to an explosive extent. The only thing that kept out the cold and the wet, he wrote,
…was the hope of; Rubbing, fubbing and scrubbing those scurvy, filthy, dirty, nasty, lousy, itchy, scabby, shitten, stinking, slovenly, snotty-nosed, logger-headed, foolish, insolent, proud, beggarly, impertinent, absurd, grout-headed, villainous, barbarous, bestial, false, lying, rougish, devlish, long-eared, short-haired, damnable, atheistic, puritanical crew of the Scottish Covenant.
On the other side of the border the army of the Scots, commanded by Alexander Leslie were little better off than their English opponents. As Archibald Johnston of Warriston relates, Leslie was short of money, horses and provisions. The stand-off could not last indefinitely, but the Scots were unwilling to cross the border. Even if they defeated the king in battle, their position would not be secure, as English national passions would be aroused. With neither side willing to advance or retreat, the only alternative was to open negotiations.

First Bishops' War (1639)
At Birks, Charles had reached a dead end. His last hope disappeared when he received a letter from Wentworth, saying he could expect no help from Ireland and urging him to delay his campaign for a year. The Earl of Bristol and several other noblemen told him frankly that he would have to summon Parliament if he wished to proceed with his war against the Scots. Realising that his whole strategy was falling to pieces he decided to accept the Scots proposal for negotiations.
Talks began in the Earl of Arundel's tent on 11 June, with six Scottish commissioners—headed by John Leslie, earl of Rothes, Johnston of Warriston and Alexander Henderson—facing a similar number of Englishmen. Soon after they began the King appeared in person, frosty at first, then becoming more relaxed. After Charles promised a new Assembly and Parliament to settle the church question, Warriston responded, by accusing him of playing for time. Although Charles expostulated that "The Devil himself could not make a more uncharitable construction," it is unlikely that anyone believed the peace would be permanent. Both sides agreed to disband their armies, however, and Charles, while refusing to accept the decisions of the "pretended" Glasgow Assembly, agreed to summon a new gathering to meet in Edinburgh on 20 August, followed shortly after by a Parliament. On this basis, the Pacification of Berwick was signed on 18 June. It was only to be a short breathing space.

Peace of Berwick
As expected, the Edinburgh Assembly confirmed all the acts passed at Glasgow, without mentioning its predecessor by name. But it went even further, uncovering the real causes of the contest with the King. It was no longer only a struggle over confessional differences and church government; it was over secular political power as well. Not only was Episcopacy abolished, but churchmen were also declared incapable of holding civil office. Worse, from the King's point of view, the appointment of bishops was declared not only wrong in practice but also contrary to the law of God. (Charles had accepted the argument that Episcopacy might be set aside in the Scottish church as a temporary expedient. However, to declare it contrary to scripture meant that its rejection could not be limited by time or space. If Episcopacy was universally unlawful, how could it be maintained in England and Ireland?) Parliament, which met soon after the Assembly, in effect confirmed a revolution: in Scotland royal power, absolute royal power, was dead.
It was an impossible situation for Charles to accept: he could not rule as a constitutional monarch in one kingdom and hope to retain the powers of an absolute monarch in the other two. For England, the situation was particularly invidious because of its more advanced tradition of constitutional law. For Charles to summon a new Westminster assembly any time before the outbreak of the First Bishops' war would have been a risky enterprise; after the Edinburgh Assembly and Parliament it was a step fraught with suicidal implications.

Primary

Donald, P., An Uncounselled King. Charles I and the Scottish Troubles, 1637–1641, 1990.
Fissel, M. C., The Bishops' Wars. Charles I's Campaigns against Scotland, 1638–1640, 1994.
Lee, M., The Road to Revolution. Scotland under Charles I, 1985.
McCoy, F. N., Robert Baillie and the Second Scots Reformation, 1974.
MacInnes, A. I., Charles I and the Making of the Covenanting Movement, 1991.
Russel, C, The Fall of the British Monarchies, 1637–1642, 1991.
Stevenson, D., The Scottish Revolution, 1637–1644, 1973

2008-04-16T09:50:00.001-07:00

History
Most residents commute to Liverpool to work either by car, bus or on the electric train service from Blundellsands & Crosby and Hall Road stations.

Amenities
Famous residents of the town have included:
Coordinates: 53°29′N, 3°01′W

Cherie Booth, the wife of Tony Blair
the composer Simon Rattle
footballer Kenny Dalglish
footballer Steve McManaman
writer Helen Forrester
broadcaster Anne Robinson

2008-04-15T08:28:00.001-07:00

History
Telluride Association seeks out young people with the desire and the ability to contribute to society, and helps them develop intellectually and as community members. Telluride Association promotes no particular political or religious viewpoint.
Telluride Houses, or Branches, have operated at Cornell University since 1911 and at the University of Michigan since 1999. Each house is populated by a diverse group of graduate students and undergraduates who share an interest in self-government and intellectual community. Students participate in a year-round public speaking program and plan academic seminars. The houses are largely self-governed, with somewhat different focuses: residents of Cornell Branch take on such responsibilities such as hiring employees and maintaining and renovating the house, while residents of Michigan Branch plan and execute an annual project linking practical work in the community with theoretical and academic inquiry. A handful of faculty also live at the houses for limited terms. Distinguished faculty guests of the Cornell Branch have included Michel Foucault, Richard Feynman, Frances Perkins, Linus Pauling, and Allan Bloom.
Telluride Houses have formerly existed in Pasadena, California, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Chicago.
Telluride Association Summer Programs, or TASPs, are six-week educational experiences for rising high school seniors offering intellectual challenges rarely found in secondary school or even in college. They are designed to bring together young people from around the world who share a passion for learning. Telluride students, or TASPers, attend an intensive seminar led by college and university faculty members and participate in many other educational and social activities outside the classroom. Like the Telluride houses, each TASP receives a discretionary budget, whose use is democratically distributed via weekly house meetings
Admission to TASP is based on an application that includes six essay prompts and for some, an interview. Out of approximately 950 applicants, about 180 are given an interview with members of the Telluride Association or TASP alumni. Admission is very competitive; in recent years, fewer than 10 percent of TASP applicants have been admitted. A total of 86 students are admitted to the five TASPs. Many students are invited to apply based on strong standardized test scores or the nomination of educators who are familiar with TASP. However, any high school junior may request an application, and acceptance largely ignores standardized test scores and graded academic performance. Like other Telluride programs, TASPs are free.
Since the first TASP was held in 1954, TASPs have been held at college and university campuses across the United States. Nationally known faculty who have taught TASP include: John Schaar (UC Santa Cruz), Hanna Pitkin (UC Berkeley), Donald Kagan (Yale), Kurt Heinzelman and Sue Heinzelman (University of Texas), Herbert Storing (University of Chicago), Robert Nozick (Harvard), Leon Kass (University of Chicago), and Thomas Palaima (University of Texas). Alumni of TASPs and Telluride Houses include political economist Francis Fukuyama, literary critic Gayatri Spivak, political theorist William Galston, former Stanford Law dean Kathleen Sullivan, Nobel laureate in physics Steven Weinberg, literary critic Paul Wang, and former World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz.
Telluride Association Sophomore Seminars, or TASSes, are also six-week summer programs. TASSes, which are offered to high school sophomores, have an academic focus on African American studies and related fields. Their basic plan is similar to that of the TASPs, and some TASS alumni choose to attend a TASP the following summer.
TASSes have been held at Indiana University since 1993 and at the University of Michigan since 2002.

Awards
Telluride Association consists of about 100 volunteer members. Members are elected to membership, usually while in their early twenties, on the basis of demonstrated leadership and commitment to Telluride's educational goals. The Association's membership is comprised mainly of current and former participants of its programs and a few who are alumni of Deep Springs College, a separate two-year college founded by Nunn in 1917.

2008-04-14T08:59:00.001-07:00

Count Napoleon Stanisław Adam Ludwik Zygmunt Krasiński (Paris, France, February 19, 1812 – February 23, 1859) is traditionally ranked with Mickiewicz and Słowacki as one of Poland's trio of great Romantic poets.

Life and work
Krasiński was the son of Wincenty Krasiński, of the aristocratic Krasiński family. He studied law in Warsaw (Warsaw University) and in Geneva, where he met Adam Mickiewicz.
Krasiński was more sociopolitically conservative than the other two poets. He is best known for his philosophical Messianist ideas. His drama, Nie-boska Komedia (The Un-Divine Comedy, 1835), portrays the tragedy of an old-world aristocracy defeated by a new order of communism and democracy, and is a poetic prophecy of class conflict and of Russia's October Revolution (see also Okopy Świętej Trójcy); and his drama, Irydion (1836), deals, in the context of Christian ethics, with the struggle of a subjugated nation against its oppressor.
Krasiński's Agaj-Han (1834) is also well known in Poland. Later (1844-1848) he wrote Psalmy Przyszłości (Psalms of the Future).
He published much of his work anonymously.
Krasiński was married to Polish noblewoman and Countess Eliza Branicka (1820-1876). He married her on 26 July 1843.

2008-04-13T09:35:00.001-07:00

Sir John Richard Gray Drummond CBE (25 November 1934, London - 6 September 2006) was an English arts administrator who spent most of his career at the BBC. He was the son of a master mariner in the British India line and an Australian lieder singer.
He was educated at Canford School and, after his National Service in the Navy, read History at Trinity College, Cambridge. At Cambridge he was a member of the Marlowe Society, performing in Christopher Marlowe's Edward II, which was broadcast on the Third Programme in 1958 with Derek Jacobi in the title role. At the time he had already gained a BBC general traineeship (Carpenter p316).
His early career at the BBC was as a foreign correspondent (Drummond spoke fluent French and Russian) and then director/producer of arts programmes for BBC Television; ultimately he became Assistant Head of Music and Arts before becaming director of the Edinburgh International Festival at the end of 1977. Drummond's period at the Festival was particularly successful, and Norman Lebrecht commended him in a tribute for his multi-disciplinary approach in a celebration of 'fin de siècle' Vienna in 1983.[1]
After leaving his post in Edinburgh in 1983, he returned to the BBC and was appointed Controller, Music (in tandem with his predecessor Robert Ponsonby for a year as Controller, Designate) in 1985 and then Controller of Radio 3 (1987-92) when the two posts were merged. He was succeeded by Nicholas Kenyon as Controller of Radio 3, but Drummond continued to be responsible for the Proms until his last season in 1995. While Controller of Radio 3, Drummond introduced the co-ordination of interval talks with the evening concert, doubled the length of the Saturday morning Record Review programme and scheduled the first Jazz concert at the Proms with Loose Tubes in 1987. Drummond had a low opinion of the Radio 3 audience, which he saw as consisting of "thirty minority tastes, each of which is characterised by its intense dislike of the other twenty-nine" (Carpenter p335).
Drummond attacked Nigel Kennedy in 1991 for wearing a black cloak while performing Berg's Violin Concerto,[2] and comparing Kennedy's usual punk clothing to the vulgarity of Liberace (Carpenter p335). Most opinion in the media sided with Kennedy.
Having chosen not to renew his contract as Radio 3 Controller for a second five-year term in 1992, he became openly critical of the Birt regime at the BBC, for its managerial and populist instincts. For Drummond, the BBC "has been an organisation which has seen itself as leading society, not following taste. If it no longer wishes to be that, I can't see any reason for its existence."[3] At about the same time, he called Tony Blair a "professional philistine" and attacked the Blair government for destroying "the national sense of culture".[4]
John Drummond was chairman of the Theatres Trust near the end of his life (1998-2001). He had also been on the Council of Management of the early music group, the Fires of London.

2008-04-12T08:38:00.001-07:00

History
h2g2 is really two separate but complementary Guides, one Edited and one Unedited. The Unedited Guide is described in a separate section below. The Edited Guide consists of articles (usually called 'Entries') which have passed through a peer review process, and then been checked and tidied up first by a volunteer sub-editor and then, more briefly, by an in-house editor. The 7,000th entry was added to the Edited Guide on April 8, 2005. [3]

Editing process
On h2g2, entries are peer reviewed by any members of the community who feel like spending a little time reading and commenting. Some of these may be specialists on the topic, but generally most are not, and it soon becomes obvious, therefore, whether the average Researcher can understand an Entry. While this has the advantage that Entries are generally written in terms that the layman can understand, it also means that mistakes can occasionally slip into the Edited Guide [4].
Once an entry has been picked by a Scout (see later) and leaves Peer Review, a copy is made and editing rights are handed to a Sub-editor. After the Entry has its day on the Front Page of h2g2 and becomes part of the Edited Guide it can only be modified or updated by its author either by requesting minor changes through the Editorial Feedback section of h2g2, or by submitting it to the Update Forum if larger changes or a rewrite are needed. However, the author can still update the unedited version, which remains in the wider unedited guide. Many authors choose to delete the original (unedited) version, so that it does not show up in search results.

Peer Review
Sub-editors, likewise, are not generally experts on the material they are editing, which is assigned on a more or less random basis. Sub-editing is mainly limited to ensuring readability and conformity to the h2g2 house style, though the amount of changes made varies from one Entry to another.
Some sub-editors tend to discuss changes with the Researcher who wrote the Entry to make sure that they are correct in their information and written in the right way. However, this is entirely at the individual sub-editor's discretion. h2g2 lacks an effective change control system, and this often leads to errors creeping in at this stage.

Sub-editing
After years of discussion, h2g2 has now adopted a formal update system. This consists of an Update Forum, which works in the same way as Peer Review, allowing a new version of an existing entry to be submitted for full review.
Smaller changes to Edited Entries can be made by posting to the Editorial Feedback page. The Editors and the Curators (a volunteer group) will attend to them. This can include typos, minor errors, and other small changes.[5] [6] It can also include the addition of extra information:
If the information is more than a few paragraphs, but less than a full reworking, the information can be submitted via Editorial Feedback. For us to accept the update, however, it must be presented with explicit directions as to why the update is required, as well as directions as to what goes where/replaces what and it should be in full GuideML, including links.[7]

Updating
If an article is not yet ready for submission to Peer Review, there exists an Edited Guide Writing Workshop, where other researchers can post suggestions and corrections, so that the author can improve their work, and bring it up to the standard required of the Edited Guide. There is another review forum, the Flea Market, where abandoned Entries from Peer Review are moved, so that other researchers can adopt them. An Entry might be moved to the Flea Market if, for example, its author leaves h2g2 (called 'Elvising').
There is also an Alternative Writing Workshop, where entries that don't adhere to the Writing Guidelines can be worked on. Entries from this workshop are candidates for the UnderGuide (see below).

The workshops
The Edited Guide forms only a small part of h2g2 as a whole. Most of the site's 'cultural life' takes place in the far larger Unedited Guide, which contains, amongst other things, various clubs and societies, discussion areas, Researchers' h2g2 homepages (known as their 'personal spaces'), and writing workshops. The Unedited Guide can also contain fiction, although this cannot be submitted for inclusion to the Edited Guide, which only contains factual information.
If an article does not make it through the Peer Review process, the original (unedited) entry can still be viewed, as before, in the Unedited Guide. It can, of course, also be rewritten by the author(s) and submitted again at a later date.

The Unedited Guide
The UnderGuide is h2g2's most ambitious attempt to bring the attention of the community to the best entries that fall outside of the Edited Guide's Guidelines. The UnderGuide and its volunteers have a similar structure to the Edited Guide's volunteers. They have scouts, but call them Miners. They have sub editors, but their name is Gem Polishers. Miners inhabit the Alternative Writing Workshop to comment on entries and pick them for the UG.

The UnderGuide
The bulk of site activity takes place in the United Kingdom (GMT/BST) daytime, which is when the in-house London based team (known as 'The Italics', see below), is there. But at other times, the US, Canadian and Australian researchers are also very active.

The community
The Italics (technically 'the Editors'), the inhouse editors of h2g2, are the only people on the site who get paid (by the BBC) for what they do. They monitor the content of the Edited Guide and oversee the general development of community life. They are named for the way their names appear in conversations, in bold italics, to keep people from impersonating them. There are informal nicknames for the editors such as 'The Powers That Be', 'The Towers', 'The Powers in the Towers' and 'Pisa People'.
The core personnel have changed considerably since h2g2 started in 1999. Of the original TDV team, only Technical Lead Jim Lynn remains working on the site, although most of his time is spent developing the DNA software base for other uses within the BBC. The first full-time editor, Mark Moxon, left in 2002, and with the exception of Community Editor Peta Haigh, all other Italics have moved on.

The Italics
There are seven different kinds of volunteer on the site, with varying responsibilities. Any researcher can apply to become a volunteer; if accepted, they gain a badge for their Personal Space, advertising their status as a member of that particular group:

Aces (the name is an acronym for Assistant Community Editor) are responsible for welcoming new users and assisting them in becoming active and experienced members of h2g2. No statistics are publicly available, but this approach ensures that a large proportion of initially active Researchers continue to contribute. Aces are also expected to take a responsible role within the community, encouraging discussion and debate.
Gurus help Researchers later on with technical issues, such as with GuideML, a custom markup language designed to allow additional features (such as formatting for headings and subheadings, and graphical emoticons), whilst removing unwanted HTML tags (such as JavaScript and embedded images and sounds).
Scouts are responsible for making sure that quality work does not languish in Peer Review for too long. They keep an eye open for entries that have received a favourable response from other Researchers, and pick a few each month to recommend for inclusion in the Edited Guide. The picks are reviewed by the 'Italics' and then forwarded to a sub-editor.
Sub-editors check and edit Entries to be added to the Edited Guide. After that is done, the new Edited Entry is posted to the front page for a day and one in three articles is awarded its own professionally drawn picture. Once Edited, the original authors cannot change the articles anymore, although there is a small team of Curators who continuously trawl old edited entries repairing broken links, making updates, and so forth. These were the first volunteers, originally hand picked, who used to do the jobs of scouts as well prior to the creation of Peer Review.
Community Artists contribute the art that illustrates many of the entries. The volunteer group provides graphics frequently, in order to meet the one-in-three requirement mentioned above. They are always credited on the pages they have illustrated. Everyone on h2g2 has some respect for the artists.
University Field Researchers write groups of entries based around a common theme, aiming to provide a comprehensive guide to a specific subject. These projects often become quite involved and take several months to complete. Once finished, they are usually featured on the h2g2 home page for a week. This scheme was discontinued on June 25, 2003, though previous Field Researchers retained their badges. [8] In late 2005, the scheme was reinstated and projects began to be featured on the Front Page again.
Curators are long-term responsible Researchers who have demonstrated a commitment to the Edited Guide. They have been granted the power to edit Entries in the Edited Guide. They work with the Italics to keep the Edited Guide tidy and up-to-date. Their duties include correcting typos which have slipped through the editing process, cross-linking newer Entries to older ones and removing broken links, and taking care of requests for minor changes which have been posted to the Editorial Feedback forum. Volunteers
h2g2 is large enough to have many unofficial clubs and societies, set up and maintained by researchers. Examples include:

The Musicians' Guild - self explanatory; this is a place for musicians to gather and discuss musical topics.
The Zaphodistas - Loosely based on Mexico's Zapatista rebels, the Zaphodistas campaign for researcher rights, for example, to include external images on h2g2 pages.
The Freedom from Faith Foundation - An organization of free-thinkers, the FFFF is a forum for non-dogmatic discussion of philosophical and religious issues.
The Society for the Addition of a Towel Smiley - This is a group that campaigned (successfully) to have a graphic representing a towel added to the extensive list of h2g2 smileys.
The Thingites - This is a group that campaigns (not yet successfully) to have the days of the week renamed (chiefly to rename 'Thursday' as 'Thing'). The group is also attempting (as yet also unsuccessfully) to have one of their threads ('No no no!!') recognised by the Guinness Book of Records as the longest thread in any chat community in the world. (As of April 2007, that particular thread had over 90,000 posts, so maybe they have a point.)
The Thursdayites - This group campaigns to have the days of the week as they are now
The Terranic Army - This virtual army used to have online battles on their own World War battlefield. The army is now in general disuse, although many copycat societies have emerged.
United Friends of h2g2space - One of the largest clubs at the site, United Friends is simply a celebration of the friendliness of h2g2. Membership is open to any researcher. Clubs and societies
Among the most popular Talk Forums on the site are:

Ask the h2g2 Community - usually abbreviated to Ask. This is a general forum where Researchers can ask members of the community questions on various subjects. It also contains long-running conversations such as "My penis and I - what do women think of penises?", "What Films have you seen recently?" and "(The Return of) What book are you reading at this time?".
The Forum - The Forum contains many similar conversations to Ask, but they tend to be of a more serious nature.
SEx - Science Explained Forum - an area for Researchers to discuss all things scientific. Many of the Researchers are experts in particular fields, and so are able to provide explanations on a broad range of subjects.
Miscellaneous Chat - an area devoted to conversations about anything and everything
Talking heads of h2g2 - A place for general chatting. Talk forums
The Post is h2g2's own virtual broadsheet newspaper, published weekly by a team of community members. It includes cartoons, regular columns, fiction, poetry and feature stories written and submitted by the h2g2 Researchers. It is edited by a few dedicated h2g2 Researchers, not paid in-house editors. The Post provides an outlet for comment and for sharing experiences, and often features content that is not intended to form a part of the Edited Guide.
The h2g2 community also investigates its own progress at times, for example in the h2g2 Reports, written by a varied group of Researchers on a relatively infrequent basis.

The Post
In order to contribute to the site, it is necessary to register and to agree to the h2g2 "House Rules" and the general BBC Terms and Conditions. Registered users are called Researchers. Researchers retain the copyright to their articles, but grant the BBC a non-exclusive license to do pretty much whatever it likes with them.
The House Rules prohibit various things, including racism, "hard-core" swearing, spamming, flooding, languages other than English, and "otherwise objectionable" material. The Terms and Conditions are more legalistic, and prohibit material that is not the submitter's own and original work, defamatory material, etc.
When the site became part of BBCi, the BBC insisted on moderating all contributions to the site soon after they were made. However, they were eventually persuaded that the h2g2 Community could be trusted to a system of "Reactive Moderation", in which posts are not checked by moderators unless a complaint is made. Individual user accounts are sometimes put on "pre-moderation", meaning that any posts they make are not displayed until they have been reviewed by a moderator.
Occasionally, there has been an issue that is particularly contentious and discussion of this issue may be moderated differently. For example:
Additionally, several of the more contentious Entries submitted for review have had to be hidden pending moderation for fear of litigation, with two articles about the Nestlé boycott having been pulled in the past.

Political Discussions during any Elections in the United Kingdom are restricted to specific forums. These forums have all posts read by moderators to ensure that the BBC cannot be seen to break the tight rules that govern the UK media during such elections.
During the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, extra rules were put in place and, for example, the username OBL was deemed unacceptable.
On 17 March 2003, h2g2 issued guidelines for discussions during the 2003 Iraq war, including saying that "Postings and Entries on the subject of the conflict posted to h2g2 will be removed".
In February 2006, various posts linking to the Muhammad cartoons were removed. Terms and conditions
The software for h2g2 - and all of its related 'sister' communities in the BBC, such as "606", "Film Network", "Action Network", "Comedy Soup", "British Film" and "collective" – is affectionately known as DNA, after the initials of author and site founder Douglas Noel Adams. The DNA technology was introduced a few months after the BBC takeover. Before this technology, there was "Ripley", which was named after the character from the film Aliens, in homage to the quote "I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure." Before that there was a technology with no particular name, which subsequently gained the retronym Llama, due to the code holding the site together being written mostly in Perl.
All of the BBC message boards moved onto the DNA engine in 2005.
Adams himself was rather involved in the website in its early days. His account name (of course) was DNA, and his user number was 42, a reference to the famous joke in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything is 42. When Adams died, in May 2001, his personal space was the focus for a huge reaction from the community. Tributes and messages poured in at a rate of about one every two minutes.
Adams' legacy is still felt on h2g2, and naturally the site is peppered with references to the Hitchhiker books; it is, however, not a fan site, and was never intended as such.

DNA
h2g2 has four different skins which are different ways of viewing the site. Users can set their options menu to view the site in one or other of the skins when they are logged in. Some skins are more popular than others; some even have fanclubs. It is possible to switch between skins while not logged in by altering the URL, for example changing http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/classic/A352487 to http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/A352487 would alter the skin from Classic Goo to Alabaster.

Classic Goo was the first skin. It has large white text on a blue background. The first programmers of h2g2 nicknamed it 'Goo' but it appears as /classic in the URL.
Alabaster was the second skin. Its layout is most like the rest of the internet, featuring small black text on a white background with chunks of orange and green. Originally called 'the corporate skin', its design was considered necessary to increase registrations from visitors who might previously have been intimidated by Goo. Launch editor Tim Browse suggested the name Alabaster to the development team, who were immediately delighted by the concept and suggested further possibilies along the lines of Porcelain, Ivory and China. It wasn't mentioned at the time that the suggestions, whilst reflecting the change to a white design from the classic blue, were also associated with toilets.
Brunel is the newest official skin, and consequently it is the default format for visitors who are not logged in. It has black text on white backgrounds, and was designed to look more like the rest of the BBC. The border colours vary depending on what type of Entry is being viewed, and can be determined by creators of Entries by using special GuideML tags; the h2g2 Front Page changes its colour scheme with its content. This skin is generally considered as having the best layout, as it has several useful buttons that are not on the other skins.
Plain was designed for Digibox, Palm and Pocket PC users who can't load the more graphic alabaster, brunel or classic. The Plain skin is not officially supported on the site, so it has not undergone the same level of testing as the other skins and has a few small problems. Unlike the other site skins, plain allows registered site users to define and use their own Style Sheet if they so wish.
pda for mobile phones. Contains Edited Guide only. Articles are cut into sections at headers. Does not contain conversation fora. Notes

Internet encyclopedia project - for similar online projects
Collective
Science humour

2008-04-11T10:26:00.001-07:00

TheSoundEx, also known as "The Sound Explosion" are a self-proclaimed Rock n' Soul band from Newcastle upon Tyne, England.
Their self titled debut album was released in March 2005 on the Durham based inde label Captains of Industry. When they were all 20, The Soundex co-headlined The Nokia New School of Rock Tour with The Answer and The Tokyo Dragons. The band have also toured with The Datsuns, Hell Is for Heroes, The Mooney Suzuki, International Noise Conspiracy, Million Dead, The 5678's and The Glitterati.
Early 2005 brought a headline tour, a pilgrimage to Dublin, a brainstorming session with Gordon Raphael who recorded the B-side to Apollo entitled Let It Turn Inside Itself), lots of positive reviews from the press and a nasty bite from the NME. After releasing their debut single "Apollo" in November, the band signed to Red Ink, Sony in January, and completed recording their second album with Paul Reeve in October.

Members

Kit Endean - Guitar + Vocals
Glen Roughead - Guitar + Vocals
Stevey Gibson - Drums
Euan Macfarlane - Bass

2008-04-10T09:24:00.001-07:00

Over its history, the BBC has employed many journalists and newsreaders to present its news programmes as well as to provide news reports and interviews. The following list as of August 2007 contains the names of those individuals who for whatever reason are no longer employed by the BBC in its news division BBC News.

B

Stephen Cole - presenter on BBC World and of technical programme Click Online
Alistair Cooke - broadcaster, presented Letter from America until October 2004, he died later in the same month. C

Jill Dando - presenter of BBC News programmes as well as others including Holiday and Crimewatch UK until her murder in 1999.
Sir Robin Day - political broadcaster and commentator, he died in 2000.
Robert Dougall - one of the first BBC Television News newsreaders, together with Richard Baker and Kenneth Kendall. He died in 1999. D

Anna Ford - presenter of the One O'Clock News from 1999 until 2006. She had also worked across other BBC News programmes, having been the first female newsreader at ITN. She left the BBC in 2006 to follow other interests.
Sir David Frost - veteran broadcaster, presented Breakfast with Frost from 1993 to 2005, when he left the corporation. F

Andrew Gilligan - journalist implicated in the Hutton Report of 2003 following his report on BBC Radio 4's The Today Programme regarding the content of a British government briefing paper. Resigned following publication of the report's findings in the same year. G

Andrew Harvey - presenter of main BBC News programme as well as regional news programmes later including BBC Points West and South Today. Left the corporation to join rival ITN.
Philip Hayton - veteran broadcaster, presented the One O'Clock News as well as regional news in the North of England. Presented on BBC World and BBC News 24, resigning from the corporation in 2005 citing "incompatibility" with his new co-presenter Kate Silverton. He had been with the BBC for 37 years. H

Anna Jones - presented the morning 9-1pm shift alongside Phillip Hayton on BBC News 24 from 2003. She had been with the channel since its 1997 launch, originally as a business presenter. She left in 2005, after 12 years at the BBC, to become a presenter on Sky News.
Darren Jordon - originally sports correspondent on BBC News 24, he moved up within the department to present BBC Breakfastand was later deputy presenter of the BBC One O'Clock News and weekend bulletins. He left the corporation in October 2006 to become a main presenter on the Al Jazeera English service, based in Doha. K

Martyn Lewis - was the first presenter of the BBC One O'Clock News when it launched in 1986. He also presented the BBC Six O'Clock News and the BBC Nine O'Clock News. He left BBC News in 1999. P

Valerie Sanderson - was a presenter for BBC News 24 from its 1997 launch until 2003. She presented the 1-4pm shift alongside Bill Turnbull, and later Chris Eakin.
Moira Stuart - presented many of the BBC's main bulletins, including the Six O'Clock News and the Nine O'Clock News, during a long career with the BBC. She was dropped from her weekend slot by the BBC in 2007, leading to accusations of ageism.

2008-04-09T08:17:00.001-07:00

Refectories and monastic culture
Refectories varied in size and dimension, based primarily on the wealth and size of the monastery, as well as the period in which the room was built. They shared certain design features. Monks ate at long benches; important officials sat at raised benches at one end of the hall. Outside the refectory usually stood a lavabo, or large basin for hand-washing. Other factors were also largely fixed by tradition. In England, the refectory was generally built on an undercroft (perhaps in an allusion to the upper room in which the Last Supper reportedly took place) on the side of the cloister opposite the church. Benedictine models were generally laid out on an east-west axis, while Cistercian models lay north-south.
Norman refectories could be as large as 160 feet long by 35 feet wide (as is that in the abbey at Norwich). Even relatively early refectories might have windows, but these became larger and more elaborate in the high medieval period: the refectory at Cluny Abbey was lit through thirty-six large glazed windows. That in the twelfth-century abbey at Mont Saint-Michel had six windows, five feet wide by twenty feet high.

Eastern Orthodox

Adams, Henry, Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres. New York: Penguin, 1986.
Fernie, E. C. The Architecture of Norman England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Harvey, Barbara. Living and Dying in England, 1100-1450. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995.
Singman, Henry. Daily Life in Medieval Europe. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999.
Webb, Geoffrey. Architecture in Britain: the Middle Ages. Baltimore: Penguin, 1956.

2008-04-08T09:22:00.001-07:00

Harold Pinter, CH, CBE (born 10 October 1930) is an English playwright, screenwriter, poet, actor, director, author, and political activist, best known for his plays The Birthday Party (1957), The Caretaker (1959), The Homecoming (1964), and Betrayal (1978), and also for his screenplay adaptations of novels by others, such as The Servant (1963), The Go-Between (1970), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1980), and The Trial (1993).
The recipient of scores of awards and honorary degrees, Pinter received the Nobel Prize in Literature from the Swedish Academy in December 2005. In its citation, the Academy states that "Harold Pinter is generally regarded as the foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the 20th century."

Biography
Beginning in autumn 1948, for two semesters, he attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA). Later that year, he was "called up for National Service," registered as a conscientious objector, was brought to trial twice, and ultimately fined by the magistrate for refusing to serve. He "loath[ed]" RADA, mostly cut classes, and dropped out in 1949. He had a minor role in Dick Whittington and His Cat at the Chesterfield Hippodrome in 1949-50. From January to July 1951, he attended "two terms" at the Central School of Speech and Drama (a constituent college of the University of London since 2005). From 1951-52, he toured Ireland with the Anew McMaster repertory company, playing over a dozen roles; in 1952 he began regional repertory acting jobs in England; and from 1953-54, he worked for the Donald Wolfit Company, King's Theatre, Hammersmith, performing nearly ten roles. From 1954 until 1959, Harold Pinter acted under the stage name David Baron.

Early theatrical training and stage experience
From 1956 until 1980, Pinter was married to Vivien Merchant, a rep actress whom he met on tour, probably best known for her performance in the original film Alfie (1966). Their son, Daniel, was born in 1958. Through the early 70s, Merchant appeared in many of Pinter's works, most notably The Homecoming on stage (1965) and screen (1973). The marriage was turbulent and began disintegrating in the mid-1960s. For seven years, from 1962-69, Pinter was engaged in a clandestine affair with Joan Bakewell, which informed his play Betrayal (1978). According to his own program notes for that play, between 1975 and 1980, he lived with historian Lady Antonia Fraser, wife of Sir Hugh Fraser. In 1975, Merchant filed for divorce.
Chairman of the Gaieties Cricket Club, Pinter has called cricket one of his three great "loves." The other two are "love" (of women) and "writing" (Gussow, Conversations with Pinter 28-29). "Running" (as a teenage sprinter [29]) and "reading" are two other pleasures that he mentions at times in interviews. Pinter is an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society.

Personal life
Pinter is the author of twenty-nine plays, fifteen dramatic sketches, over twenty-one screenplays and filmscripts for cinema and television, a novel, and other prose fiction and essays, and co-author of two works for stage and radio. Along with the 1967 Tony Award for Best Play for The Homecoming and several other American awards and award nominations, he and his plays have received many awards in the UK and elsewhere throughout the world. His screenplays for The French Lieutenant's Woman and Betrayal were nominated for Academy Awards in the category of "Writing: Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium" in 1981 and 1983, respectively. (See Honors.)
Pinter's first play, The Room, written in 1957, was a student production at the Bristol University directed by (later acclaimed) actor Henry Woolf, who also originated the role of Mr. Kidd in that play (which he reprised in 2001). After his longtime friend Pinter had mentioned that he had an "idea" for a play, Woolf asked him to write it so that he could direct it as part of fulfilling requirements for his postgraduate work. Pinter wrote it in three days. There was also a revival of The Caretaker in the West End.
Late in 2001, Pinter was diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus, for which, in 2002, he underwent a successful operation and chemotherapy. During the course of his treatment, he directed a production of his play No Man's Land, wrote and performed in his new sketch "Press Conference" for a two-part otherwise-retrospective program of his dramatic sketches at the National Theatre, and was seen on television in America in the role of Vivian Bearing's father in the HBO film version of Margaret Edson's Pulitzer Prize-winning play Wit. Since then, having become increasingly politically "engaged" as "citizen Pinter", Pinter has continued to write and present politically-charged poetry, essays and speeches, a dramatic collaborative work for radio (Voices), and two new screenplay adaptations of plays by Shakespeare King Lear (unfilmed) and Anthony Shaffer's play Sleuth.

Main career (1957-2005)
On 28 February 2005, in an interview with Mark Lawson on the BBC Radio 4 program Front Row, Pinter announced publicly that he would retire from writing plays to dedicate himself to his political activism and writing poetry: "I think I've written 29 plays. I think it's enough for me. I think I've found other forms now. My energies are going in different directions—over the last few years I've made a number of political speeches at various locations and ceremonies . . . I'm using a lot of energy more specifically about political states of affairs, which I think are very, very worrying as things stand."

Public announcement of retirement from playwriting (2005)
Pinter was an early member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the United Kingdom and supported the British Anti-Apartheid Movement (1959-94), participating in British artists' refusal to permit professional productions of their work in South Africa in 1963 and in subsequent related campaigns). In both his writing and his public speaking, as McDowell observes,
Pinter's precision of language is immensely political. Twist words like "democracy" and "freedom", as he believes Blair and Bush have done over Iraq, and hundreds of thousands of people die. Earlier this year [March 2006], when he was presented with the European Theatre Prize in Turin, Pinter said he intended to spend the rest of his life railing against the United States. Surely, asked chair Ramona Koval, he was doomed to fail? "Oh yes — me against the United States!" he said, laughing along with the audience at the absurdity, before adding: "But I can't stop reacting to what is done in our name, and what is being done in the name of freedom and democracy is disgusting." (Qtd. by McDowell)

Political activism
Pinter was appointed CBE in 1966 and became a Companion of Honour in 2002 (having previously declined a knighthood in 1996). He has also received the 1995 David Cohen Prize for Literature , in recognition of a lifetime's achievement in literature, the 1996 Laurence Olivier Special Award for a lifetime's achievement in the theater; a 2001 World Leaders Award for "creative genius"; the 2004 Wilfred Owen Award for Poetry—"in recognition of Pinter's lifelong contribution to literature, 'and specifically for his collection of poetry entitled War, published in 2003,'" and the Europe Theatre Prize, in recognition of lifetime achievements pertaining to drama and theater (conferred March 2006).
Further information: #Artist and Citizen: 50 Years of Performing Pinter

Honors
On 13 October 2005 the Swedish Academy announced that it had decided to award the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2005 to "Harold Pinter", "who in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms."

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2005
In his controversial Nobel Lecture "Art, Truth & Politics", speaking with obvious difficulty while seated in a wheelchair, Pinter distinguishes between the search for truth in art and the avoidance of truth in politics.

Art, Truth & Politics: The Nobel Lecture
In his first public appearance in Britain since he won the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature, Pinter participated in "Meet the Author" with Ramona Koval, at the Edinburgh Book Festival, in Edinburgh, Scotland, in the evening of 25 August 2006. Prior to the interview, Pinter read a scene from his play The Birthday Party. (Other recent and "upcoming events" [updated periodically] are listed on the home page of Pinter's official website and through its menu of links to the "Calendar".)

Subsequent interviews, media appearances, and productions (2006 – the present)
Among his other honors, Pinter is the recipient of over fifteen honorary degrees conferred by European and American academic institutions, as well as an Honorary Fellow of the Modern Language Association of America (MLA) (1970). He received the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters from the University of Leeds School of English on 13 April 2007.

Pinter and Academia
In 1986, a group of American academic scholars formed the Harold Pinter Society (an Allied Organization of the MLA); members and individual and institutional subscribers receive The Pinter Review: Collected Essays, at first an academic journal and now a biennial book publication published by the University of Tampa Press since 1987.

Artist and Citizen: 50 Years of Performing Pinter
Goldsmiths College, University of London, established the Pinter Centre for Performance and Creative Writing, inaugurated in June 2003, with Harold Pinter as Honorary President. It is "an interdisciplinary research centre, involving principally the Departments of English & Comparative Literature and of Drama, the latter organising and hosting the Centre, and with links in Media and Communications, Music, PACE and the Digital Studios." So far it has planned three conferences, "one on the work of Stephen Sondheim, and another on African Women Playwrights." Its third conference, Ravenhill 10, was a symposium on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the first production of Mark Ravenhill's play Shopping and Fucking (11-12 Nov. 2006). The Pinter Centre will sponsor additional conferences in the future, "including one on Black British Drama and a major conference in 2008 to be entitled, 'Pinter, Postmodernism and Contemporary Writing'."

The Pinter Centre for Performance and Creative Writing

Characteristics of Pinter's work
"That [Harold Pinter] occupies a position as a modern classic is illustrated by his name entering the language as an adjective used to describe a particular atmosphere and environment in drama: 'Pinteresque'" ("Bio-bibliography"), placing him in the company of authors considered unique or influential enough to elicit eponymous adjectives. Susan Harris Smith observes: "The term 'Pinteresque' has had an established place in the English language for almost thirty years. The OED defines it as 'of or relating to the British playwright, Harold Pinter, or his works'; thus, like a snake swallowing its own tail the definition forms the impenetrable logic of a closed circle and begs the tricky question of what the word specifically means" (103). The Online OED (2006) defines Pinteresque more explicitly: "Resembling or characteristic of his plays. . . . Pinter's plays are typically characterized by implications of threat and strong feeling produced through colloquial language, apparent triviality, and long pauses."
"Pinteresque"
Once asked what his plays are about, Pinter lobbed back a phrase "the weasel under the cocktail cabinet", which he regrets has been taken seriously and applied in popular criticism:
Once many years ago, I found myself engaged uneasily in a public discussion on theatre. Someone asked me what was my work 'about'. I replied with no thought at all and merely to frustrate this line of enquiry: 'the weasel under the cocktail cabinet'. This was a great mistake. Over the years I have seen that remark quoted in a number of learned columns. It has now seemingly acquired a profound significance, and is seen to be a highly relevant and meaningful observation about my own work. But for me the remark meant precisely nothing.
"The weasel under the cocktail cabinet"
Among the most-commonly cited of Pinter's comments on his own work are his remarks about two kinds of silence ("two silences"), including his objections to "that tired, grimy phrase 'failure of communication'," as defined in his speech to the National Student Drama Festival in Bristol in 1962, incorporated in his published version of the speech entitled "Writing for the Theatre":
There are two silences. One when no word is spoken. The other when perhaps a torrent of language is being employed. This speech is speaking of a language locked beneath it. That is its continual reference. The speech we hear is an indication of that which we don't hear. It is a necessary avoidance, a violent, sly, anguished or mocking smoke screen which keeps the other in its place. When true silence falls we are still left with echo but are nearer nakedness. One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness. We have heard many times that tired, grimy phrase: 'failure of communication'...and this phrase has been fixed to my work quite consistently. I believe the contrary. I think that we communicate only too well, in our silence, in what is unsaid, and that what takes place is a continual evasion, desperate rearguard attempts to keep ourselves to ourselves. Communicaton is too alarming. To enter into someone else's life is too frightening. To disclose to others the poverty within us is too fearsome a possibility. I am not suggesting that no character in a play can never say what he in fact means. Not at all. I have found that there invariably does come a moment when this happens, when he says something, perhaps, which he has never said before. And where this happens, what he says is irrevocable, and can never be taken back.

"Two silences": a "continual evasion" of "communication"
One of the "two silences"–when Pinter's stage directions indicate pause and silence when his characters are not speaking at all–has become a "trademark" of Pinter's dialogue called the "Pinter pause": "During the 1960s, Pinter became famous–nay, notorious–for his trademark: 'The Pinter pause.'"

The "Pinter pause"

Pinter's cultural influence
A line in "The Ladies Who Lunch", a song in Company, the 1970 Broadway musical by George Furth and Stephen Sondheim, alludes to "a Pinter play."

Some literary allusions to Pinter and his work in Anglo-American popular culture
See main article: Works of Harold Pinter Further information: Works of Harold Pinter#Awards and nominations for plays, Works of Harold Pinter#Awards and nominations for screenwriting, and Works of Harold Pinter#Awards for poetry

Works
One of the actors in Harold Pinter[']s The Birthday Party at the Lyric, Hammersmith, announces in the programme that he read History at Oxford, and took his degree with Fourth Class Honours. Now I am well aware that Mr Pinter[']s play received extremely bad notices last Tuesday morning. At the moment I write these it is uncertain even whether the play will still be in the bill by the time they appear, though it is probable it will soon be seen elsewhere. Deliberately, I am willing to risk whatever reputation I have as a judge of plays by saying that The Birthday Party is not a Fourth, not even a Second, but a First; and that Pinter, on the evidence of his work, possesses the most original, disturbing and arresting talent in theatrical London. . . . Mr Pinter and The Birthday Party, despite their experiences last week, will be heard of again. Make a note of their names.
Pinteresque, adj. (and n.) Brit. /pntrsk/, U.S. /pn(t)rsk/ [< the name of Harold Pinter (b. 1930), British playwright + -ESQUE suffix. Cf. PINTERISH adj.] Of or relating to Harold Pinter; resembling or characteristic of his plays. Also occas. as n. Pinter's plays are typically characterized by implications of threat and strong feeling produced through colloquial language, apparent triviality, and long pauses.

Notes

Baker, William, and John C. Ross. Harold Pinter: A Bibliographical History. London: The British Library and New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll P, 2005. ISBN 1-58456-156-4.
Batty, Mark. About Pinter: The Playwright and The Work. London: Faber and Faber, 2005. ISBN 0-571-22005-3.
Bensky, Lawrence M. "The Art of Theater No. 3: Harold Pinter" (Interview). The Paris Review 39 (Fall 1966). 30 June 2006.
Billington, Michael. The Life and Work of Harold Pinter. 1996; rpt. London: Faber and Faber, 1997. ISBN 0-571-17103-6. Updated 2nd ed. retitled Harold Pinter. London: Faber and Faber, 2007. ISBN 978-0-571-23476-9.
–––. "Passionate Pinter's Devastating Assault On US Foreign Policy: Shades of Beckett As Ailing Playwright Delivers Powerful Nobel Lecture". The Guardian 8 Dec. 2005. 31 July 2006.
–––, comp. "'They said you've a call from the Nobel committee. I said, why?': Harold Pinter in His Own Words". The Guardian 14 Oct. 2005. 31 July 2006.
"Bio-bibliography" for Harold Pinter: The Nobel Prize in Literature 2005. Nobel Foundation and Swedish Academy. NobelPrize.org. Oct. 2005. 31 July 2006.
Bond, Paul. "Harold Pinter's Artistic Achievement". World Socialist Web Site 29 Dec. 2005. 31 July 2006.
Brown, Mark. "What Is It (War) Good for?" Socialist Review Sept. 2003. 31 July 2006.
"Bush and Blair slated by Pinter". BBC News 7 Dec. 2005. 31 July 2006. [Features related links.]
Chrisafis, Angelique, and Imogen Tilden. "Pinter Blasts 'Nazi America' and 'deluded idiot' Blair". The Guardian 11 June 2003.
Eden, Richard, and Tim Walker. "Mandrake: A Pinteresque Silence". Sunday Telegraph 27 Aug. 2006, accessed 31 Aug. 2006.
Freed, Donald. "The Courage of Harold Pinter". Presentation at the conference Artist and Citizen: Fifty Years of Performing Pinter. University of Leeds. 13 April 2007. Online posting. Another America. © Donald Freed, Apr. 2007. Accessed 28 May 2007.
Gardner, M.C. "Harold Pinter's War". Book rev. Another America Journal (Lightning Source, Inc., 2003). Online posting. Another America. Updated May 2007. Accessed May 28, 2007.
Grimes, Charles. Harold Pinter's Politics: A Silence Beyond Echo. Madison & Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson UP; Cranbury, NJ: Associated UP, 2005. ISBN 0-8386-4050-8.
Gussow, Mel. Conversations with Pinter. London: Nick Hern Books, 1994. ISBN 1-85459-201-7. Rpt. New York: Limelight, 2004. ISBN 0-87910-179-2.
Higgins, Charlotte. "Edinburgh Festival: Two-act rant from Sean and Harold". The Guardian 26 Aug. 2006. Accessed 26 Aug. 2006.
Hitchens, Christopher. "Commentary: The Sinister Mediocrity of Harold Pinter". Wall Street Journal 17 Oct. 2005, A18. (Online ed. of this article restricted to subscribers.) The Silver Christopher. Znet 18 Oct. 2005. 4 July 2006.
Howard, Jennifer. "Nobel Prize in Literature Goes to Harold Pinter, British Playwright Widely Studied in Academe". Chronicle of Higher Education 13 Oct. 2006. 8 July 2006.
Koval, Ramona. "Books and Writing with Ramona Koval: Harold Pinter". Radio National (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) 15 Sept. 2002. Transcript of interview of Harold Pinter conducted at Edinburgh Book Festival, Edinburgh, Scotland, Aug. 2002.
–––. "Harold Pinter, Nobel Prize-Winning Playwright and Poet, at Edinburgh International Book Festival (transcript available)". The Book Show, Radio National (Australian Broadcasting Corporation), 25 Sept. 2006. Downloadable audio file (MP3) and printable transcript of interview of Harold Pinter conducted at Edinburgh International Book Festival (transcript available)",] Edinburgh, Scotland, 25 Aug. 2006, The Book Show, Radio National (Australian Broadcasting Corporation), 25 Sept. 2006, accessed 26 Sept. (The audio file includes Pinter's dramatic reading of a scene from his play The Birthday Party.)
Lawson, Mark. "Pinter 'to give up writing plays'". Interview with Harold Pinter. Incl. "Pinter on Front Row". Broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Online posting. Last updated 28 Feb. 2005. BBC News. (RealPlayer audio.) 11 Nov. 2006.
Lyall, Sarah. "Playwright Takes a Prize and a Jab at U.S." New York Times 8 Dec. 2006. Correction appended 10 Dec. 2005. 1 Aug. 2006. (Site registration required.)
[McDowell, Leslie.] "Book Festival Reviews: Pinter at 75: The Anger Still Burns: Harold Pinter". The Scotsman 26 Aug. 2006: 5. (Updated 27 Aug. 2006.) 31 Aug. 2006.
Merritt, Susan Hollis. Pinter in Play: Critical Strategies and the Plays of Harold Pinter. Paperback ed. 1990; Durham and London: Duke UP, 1995. ISBN 0-8223-1674-9.
–––. "Talking about Pinter". (On the Lincoln Center 2001: Harold Pinter Festival Symposia.) The Pinter Review: Collected Essays 2001 and 2002. Ed. Francis Gillen and Steven H. Gale. Tampa: U of Tampa P, 2002. 144-67.
–––, comp. "Harold Pinter Bibliography". The Pinter Review 1987- .
Moss, Stephen. "The Guardian Profile: Harold Pinter: Under the Volcano". The Guardian 4 Sept. 1999. 7 July 2006.
Pilger, John. "The Silence of Writers". ZNet 16 Oct. 2005. 5 July 2006.
Pinter, Harold. Art, Truth & Politics: The Nobel Lecture. Presented on video in Stockholm, Sweden. 7 Dec. 2005. Nobel Foundation and Swedish Academy. NobelPrize.org 8 Dec. 2005. (RealPlayer streaming audio and video as well as text available). London: Faber and Faber, 2006. ISBN 0-571-23396-1 (10). ISBN 9780571233960 (13). Rpt. also in The Essential Pinter. New York: Grove P, 2006, as listed below. Rpt. in Not One More Death. London: Stop the War Coalition, 2006. Rpt. in PMLA (Publications of the Modern Language Association) 121 (2006): 811-18.
–––. "Campaigning Against Torture: Arthur Miller's Socks" (1985). ("Written as a tribute to Arthur Miller, on the occasion of his 80th birthday".) HaroldPinter.org 3 July 2006. Rpt. in Various Voices 56-57.
–––. Death etc. 1990; New York: Grove P, 2005. ISBN 0-8021-4225-7.
–––. The Dwarfs. New York: Grove P, 2006. ISBN 0-8021-3266-9.
–––. The Essential Pinter: Selections from the Work of Harold Pinter. New York: Grove P, 2006. ISBN 0-8021-4269-9. [Incl. "Art, Truth & Politics", Harold Pinter's Nobel Lecture.]
–––. "Evacuees". The Pinter Review: Annual Essays 1994. Ed. Francis Gillen and Steven H. Gale. Tampa: U of Tampa P, 1994. 8-13. (First publication of an interview with Pinter conducted by B.S. Johnson in 1968.)
–––. Various Voices: Prose, Poetry, Politics 1948-2005. Rev. ed. 1998; London: Faber and Faber, 2005. ISBN 0-571-23009-1.
–––. War. London: Faber and Faber, 2003. ISBN 0-571-22131-9. (Book rev. by Gardner.)
"Pinter 'to give up writing plays.'" Online posting. BBC News 28 Feb. 2005. 2 July 2006.
"Pinter Wins Nobel Literary Prize". BBC News 13 Oct. 2005. 8 July 2006.
Riddell, Mary. "Comment: Prophet without Honour: Harold Pinter can be cantankerous and puerile. But he is a worthy Nobel prizewinner." The Observer 11 Dec. 2005. 3 July 2006.
–––. "The New Statesman Interview: Harold Pinter". New Statesman 8 Nov. 1999. 1 July 2006. (Limited access.)
Robinson, David. "Books: Doyle Returns to an Old Favourite in New Work; . . . Harold Pinter." The Scotsman 28 Aug. 2006, Living. 28 Aug. 2006.
–––. "I'm Written Out, Says Controversial Pinter". The Scotsman 26 Aug. 2006: 6. 9 Sept. 2006.
Rockley, John. "Neil Pearson Drops in for a Morning Coffee!" BBC Radio Gloucestershire 7 Mar. 2007. 17 Mar. 2007. [Interview with actor Neil Pearson about performing in Old Times at the Everyman Theatre in Cheltenham, England.]
Rose, Charlie. "A Conversation with Harold Pinter". Interview of Harold Pinter. The Charlie Rose Show WNET-TV (New York City) (Public Broadcasting Service). First broadcast on 19 July 2001 from 11:00 p.m. EST to 12:00 a.m. EST. Also broadcast on PBS affiliate channels at various scheduled times. 58 mins. (3-min. preview video clip posted by copyright owner Charlie Rose on Google.) Full-length streaming video accessible directly from the show's website. Accessed May 30, 2007.
–––. "A Conversation with Harold Pinter". Interview of Harold Pinter. The Charlie Rose Show. WNET-TV (New York City) (Public Broadcasting Service). First broadcast on 1 Mar. 2007 from 11:00 p.m. ET to 12:00 a.m. ET. Also broadcast on PBS affiliate channels at various scheduled times. WXXI-TV (Rochester, New York) (Public Broadcasting Service). Broadcast 1 Mar. 2007 from 11:00 p.m. ET to 12:00 a.m. ET. 52 mins., 21 secs. Full-length streaming video accessible directly from the show's website. Accessed May 30, 2007.
Smith, Susan Harris. "'Pinteresque' in the Popular Press". The Pinter Review: Collected Essays 2003 and 2004. Ed. Francis Gillen and Steven H. Gale. Tampa: U of Tampa P, 2004. 103-8.
Sofer, Andrew. "The Cheese-Roll under the Cocktail Cabinet: Pinter's Object Lessons". The Pinter Review: Collected Essays 2003 and 2004. Ed. Francis Gillen and Steven H. Gale. Tampa: U of Tampa P, 2004. 29-38.
"Special Report: The Nobel Prize for Literature: 2005 Harold Pinter". The Guardian Dec. 2005. 30 June 2006. 1 Aug. 2006. [Features related links.]
Traub, James. "The Way We Live Now: Their Highbrow Hatred of Us." New York Times Mag. 30 Oct. 2005. 2 July 2006.
Wark,Kirsty. "Harold Pinter on Newsnight Review". BBC Two 23 June 2006. 1 Aug. 2006. "Interviews: Nobel Prize winning playwright Harold Pinter talks to Kirsty". RealPlayer streaming video of program. 25 June, 4 Sept., & 6 Nov. 2006. Further resources

Harold Pinter: Art, Truth & Politics. © Copyright 2006 Illuminations. All Rights Reserved. Transmission Channel 4, 2005. DVD. 46 mins. (Digital video disc and VHS video recording.) Additional essays and speeches by Harold Pinter

"Harold Pinter's Poetry". Authorized official webpage (incl. "Harold Pinter's Most Recent Poetry", periodically updated).
"Poetry by Harold Pinter". Online posting (with permission of author). Another America. Updated May 2007. Accessed May 28, 2007.
Pinter's print publications of his poems in various collections (such as Death etc., The Essential Pinter, The Pinter Review, Various Voices, and War), and related book reviews (such as "Harold Pinter's War", by M.C. Gardner), as listed above in #References and #Works.

2008-04-07T10:11:00.001-07:00

The Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC in old-spelling Dutch, literally "United East Indian Company") was established in 1602, when the States-General of the Netherlands granted it a 21-year monopoly to carry out colonial activities in Asia. It was the first multinational corporation in the world and the first company to issue stock. It remained an important trading concern for almost two centuries, paying an 18% annual dividend for almost 200 years, until it became bankrupt and was formally dissolved in 1800, its possessions and the debt being taken over by the government of the Batavian Republic.

Organization

History
In the late sixteenth century, considerable pressure was upon the United Provinces of the Netherlands to expand overseas.

Background
At the time, it was customary for a company to be set up only for the duration of a single voyage, and to be liquidated right after the return of the fleet. As the competition between companies intensified, the profitability of the new trade was threatened, but consolidation was not possible as the merchants of different provinces were unwilling to cooperate. In 1602, the Dutch government forced the issue, sponsoring the creation of a single "United East Indies Company" that was granted a monopoly over the Asian trade. In 1603, the first permanent Dutch trading post in Indonesia was established in Banten, West Java and in 1611, another was established at Jayakarta (later 'Batavia' and then 'Jakarta'). Although this caused outrage in Europe and a diplomatic crisis, the English quietly withdrew from most of their Indonesian activities (except trading in Bantam) and focused on other Asian interests.
In 1619, Jan Pieterszoon Coen was appointed Governor-General of the VOC. He was not afraid to use brute force to put the VOC on a firm footing. On 30 May that year, Coen, backed by a force of nineteen ships, stormed Jayakarta driving out the Banten forces, and from the ashes, established Batavia as the VOC headquarters. In the 1620s, almost the entire native population of Banda Islands, the source of nutmeg was deported, driven away, starved to death or killed in an attempt to replace them with Dutch colonial slave labour.
The VOC traded throughout Asia. Ships coming into Batavia from the Netherlands carried silver from Spanish mines in Peru and supplies for VOC settlements in Asia. Silver, combined with copper from Japan, was used to trade with India and China for textiles. These products, such as cotton, silk and ceramics, were either traded within Asia for the coveted spices or brought back to Europe. The VOC was also instrumental in introducing European ideas and technology to Asia. The Company supported Christian missionaries and traded modern technology with China and Japan.
A more peaceful VOC trade post on Dejima, an artificial island off the coast of Nagasaki, was for a long time the only place where Europeans could trade with Japan.
In 1640, the VOC obtained the port of Galle, Sri Lanka, from the Portuguese and broke the latter's monopoly of the cinnamon trade. In 1658, Gerard Hulft laid siege to Colombo, which was captured with the help of King Rajasinghe II of Kandy. By 1659, the Portuguese had been expelled from the coastal regions, which were then occupied by the VOC, securing for it the monopoly over cinnamon.
In 1652, Jan van Riebeeck established an outpost at the Cape of Good Hope (the southwestern tip of Africa, currently in South Africa) to re-supply VOC ships on their journey to East Asia. This post later became a fully-fledged colony, the Cape Colony, when more Dutch and other Europeans started to settle there. VOC outposts were also established in Persia (now Iran), Bengal (now Bangladesh, but then part of India), Malacca (Melaka, now in Malaysia), Siam (now Thailand), mainland China (Canton), Formosa (now Taiwan) and southern India. In 1662, Koxinga expelled the Dutch from Taiwan (see History of Taiwan).
By 1669, the VOC was the richest private company the world had ever seen, with over 150 merchant ships, 40 warships, 50,000 employees, a private army of 10,000 soldiers, and a dividend payment of 40%.

Formation
From 1720 on, the market for sugar from Indonesia declined as the competition from cheap sugar from Brazil increased and European markets became saturated. Dozens of Chinese sugar traders went bankrupt which led to massive unemployment, which in turn led to gangs of unemployed coolies. The Dutch government in Batavia did not adequately respond to these problems. In 1740, rumours of deportation of the gangs from the Batavia area led to widespread rioting. The Dutch military searched houses of Chinese in Batavia searching for weapons. When a house accidentally burnt down, military and impoverished citizens started slaughtering and pillaging the Chinese community. This incident was deemed sufficiently serious for the board of the VOC to start an official investigation into the Government of the Dutch East Indies for the first time in its history the company was dissolved, four years after the States-General were replaced by the French supported Batavian Republic. This was soon replaced by French occupation. After the defeat of the French empire, the previously privately owned East Indies territories were granted to the newly created Kingdom of the Netherlands by the Congress of Vienna in 1815.

Decline

Replicas have been constructed of several VOC ships, marked with an (R)

Amsterdam (R)
Arnhem
Batavia (R)
Braek
Duyfken ("Little Dove") (R)
Eendracht (1615) ("Unity")
Galias
Grooten Broeck ("Great Brook")
Gulden Zeepaert ("Golden Seahorse")
Halve Maen ("Half moon") (R)
Heemskerck
Hollandia
Klein Amsterdam ("Small Amsterdam")
Leeuwerik ("Lark")
Leyden
Limmen
Pera
Prins Willem (R)
Ridderschap van Holland ("Knighthood of Holland")
Rooswijk
Sardam
Texel
Utrecht
Vergulde Draeck ("Gilded Dragon")
Vianen
Vliegende Hollander ("Flying Dutchman")
Vliegende Swaan ("Flying Swan")
Wapen van Hoorn ("Arms of Hoorn")
Wezel ("Weasel")
Zeehaen ("Sea Cock")
Zeemeeuw ("Seagull")
Zuytdorp ("South Village") Notable VOC ships

Jan Pieterszoon Coen
Chartered companies
The British East India Company, founded in 1600
The Danish East India Company, founded in 1616
The Dutch West India Company, founded in 1621
The French East India Company, founded in 1664
The Swedish East India Company, founded in 1731
Spice wars
Engelbert Kaempfer
Carl Peter Thunberg
Isaac Titsingh
Philipp Franz von Siebold

2008-04-06T09:26:00.001-07:00

The Megyeri Bridge, previously known as the Northern M0 Danube bridge, is a new cable-stayed road bridge currently under construction that will span the River Danube between Buda and Pest, respectively the west and east sides of Budapest, the capital of Hungary. As a continuation of the M0 motorway, it will be the last section to complete the M0 ringroad around Budapest. The bridge will be 4 km long and will cost 61.9 billion forints (approx. US$300M). It is due to open in August 2008. It has received much media attention due to the naming poll started to name the bridge.

Results
On September 28, 2006, it was announced that the bridge will be named "Megyeri Bridge", even though that name did not make it to the second round. The Hungarian Geographical Name Committee justified the final name by explaining that the bridge connects Káposztásmegyer and Békásmegyer.

2008-04-05T10:31:00.001-07:00

SD may refer to:
South Dakota, United States postal abbreviation
San Diego

The San Diego Padres, or San Diego Chargers
Sales and Distribution, business
SanDisk, US-based multinational corporation which designs and markets flash memory card products
SafeDisc, a CD/DVD copy protection solution by Macrovision Corporation
Secure Digital card, flash memory card format used in portable device, including digital cameras and handheld computers
Self Destruct, in some video games.
Siamese Dream, a rock music album from the band The Smashing Pumpkins
Sicherheitsdienst, Security Police, the intelligence service of the Nazi SS
Sindhi language
Snare drum
Social Democrats (Slovenia), a left-wing Slovenian political party
Software Distributor, an HP-UX software package management system
Standard-definition television
Standard Deviation, statistics
Stronnictwo Demokratyczne, a defunct Polish party
Structured design, a computer programming concept
Sub-Divisions of India, an administrative unit of certain states of India
Sudan, ISO country code
Sudan Airways, IATA airline designator
Super Dave Osborne, an alter-ego of comedian Bob Einstein
Super deformed, an exaggerated drawing style used in anime and manga
Super Dollfie, a doll by Japanese company Volks
Suppressed, a suffix placed at the end of a firearm's model name to note it is fitted with a suppressor.
Sustainable Development, Environmental, economic and social development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the needs of future generations
Significant digits, a method of expressing error in measurement
SharpDevelop, a free and open source IDE for the C# Visual Basic .NET programming languages
Snoop Dog (famous rapper)
Scooby Doo

2008-04-04T09:29:00.001-07:00

John Russell (January 3, 1921 – January 19, 1991) was an American actor most noted for playing Marshal Dan Troop in the western television series Lawman from 1958 to 1962.
Born John Lawrence Russell in Los Angeles, California, he fit the Hollywood image of tall, dark, and handsome. He attended the University of California as a student athlete. Following the outbreak of World War II, he joined the United States Marines, received a battlefield commission as lieutenant at Guadalcanal, and returned home after the war, a highly decorated veteran.
He was discovered by a talent agent while in a Beverly Hills restaurant and made his film debut in 1945. Russell was contracted to 20th Century Fox in several supporting roles, and later was signed with Republic Pictures. He primarily played secondary roles, often in western films, but in 1952 starred opposite Judy Canova in Oklahoma Annie. In 1955 Russell was given the lead role in a television drama called "Soldiers of Fortune." The half-hour adventure show placed him and his sidekick, played by Chick Chandler, in a dangerous jungle setting. While the show proved popular with young boys, it did not draw enough adult viewers to its prime slot and was canceled in 1957.
A year later, Russell was cast in his most memorable role as Marshal Dan Troop, the lead character in Lawman, an ABC western series that ran for five years. Co-starring with Peter Brown, who played Deputy Johnny McKay, Russell played a U.S. frontier peace officer mentoring his younger compatriot.
Russell appeared in other motion pictures, notably as a supporting player in the Howard Hawks 1959 western, Rio Bravo, which starred John Wayne, Dean Martin, and Walter Brennan. Through the 1960s to the 1980s, he returned to secondary roles, appearing in more than twenty films including three directed by his friend Clint Eastwood.
Russell appeared in the second season of the Filmation childrens science fiction series Jason of Star Command. He played the role of Commander Stone, a blue skinned alien from Alpha Centauri. He replaced James Doohan who played the Commander in the previous season but left to start working on Star Trek The Motion Picture.
John Russell died from emphysema in 1991 and was interred in the Los Angeles National Cemetery, a former U.S. Veterans Administration cemetery in Los Angeles, California.

2008-04-03T10:34:00.001-07:00

Michael Paul Underwood is a British television presenter who famously won a six week CBBC presenting contract on Gaby Roslin's BBC television show Whatever You Want. He had previously made it to the last four in interviews for the Blue Peter vacancy subsequently filled by Simon Thomas. Michael graduated from Plymouth University's Rolle College, Exmouth with a BEd (Hons) Drama & Performance.

2008-04-02T08:19:00.001-07:00

Curtis Martin (born May 1, 1973 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) is a former American football running back. He is an alumnus of Taylor Allderdice High School in Pittsburgh and the University of Pittsburgh. Martin played in the National Football League (NFL) for the New England Patriots and the New York Jets. He officially announced his retirement from the NFL on July 26, 2007, [1] ranking fourth overall among NFL rushing backs in rushing yards all-time.

New England Patriots (1995-1997)
New York Jets (1998-2006)
Pro Bowl (x5)
3,518 career rushing attempts (3rd all-time)
14,101 career rushing yards (4th all-time)
17,430 career yards from scrimmage (7th all-time)
90 career rushing touchdowns (12th all-time)
100 career rushing/receiving touchdowns (19th all-time)
Led league in Rushing Yards 1 time
Led league in Rushing Attempts 1 time New England Patriots
Following the 1997 season, Martin was a restricted free agent, and signed an offer sheet with the New York Jets for $36 million over six years. The Patriots, who had the opportunity to match the offer, declined to do so and instead received a first and third round draft pick from the Jets[2] This reunited Martin with his former Patriot coach Bill Parcells. In his first seven seasons with the Jets, Martin missed only one game, in Week 6 of the 1998 season, and earned three more Pro Bowl selections. In 1998, Martin led the Jets to the AFC Championship Game, gaining 182 yards from scrimmage and scoring two touchdowns against the Jacksonville Jaguars in a Jets playoff win. Martin won the NFL rushing title in the 2004 NFL season with 1,697 yards (one more than runner-up Shaun Alexander, the closest margin in NFL history). He also won the FedEx Ground Player of the Year Award in 2004.
In 2005, Martin failed in his quest to become the first running back in NFL history to start his career with 11 straight 1,000 rushing yard seasons. He missed the December 11th game vs. the Oakland Raiders with a knee injury and was placed on injured reserve shortly thereafter, meaning that he also missed the final three games of the regular season. Martin finished with 735 rushing yards, giving him a career total of 14,101 rushing yards. Martin began the 2006 campaign on the Physically Unable to Perform list due to complications from the injury. On November 1, 2006, it was announced that he would miss the rest of the regular season with a bone-on-bone condition in his right knee. Curtis officially announced his retirement on July 26, 2007. He will be eligible for the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2011.

New York Jets
Martin rushed for over 1,000 yards in his first 10 professional seasons, a feat previously accomplished only by Barry Sanders. On November 6, 2005, he scored his 100th career touchdown, joining an elite group of only 16 players to do so. Martin is currently 4th on the all-time rushing yardage list, and on November 27, 2005, in the first quarter against the New Orleans Saints, he became the 4th running back in NFL history, behind Emmitt Smith, Walter Payton, and Barry Sanders, to pass the 14,000-yard rushing mark. He is the all-time Jets leader with 10,302 rushing yards with the team.[3] He is also fourth in the same category for the Patriots with 3799 yards.[4] Additionally, Martin happens to have a 'perfect' passer rating of 158.3: 2 completions on 2 pass attempts, 2 TD passes, and an average of 18.0 yards per attempt. The New York Jets will honor Curtis Martin at half time against the Steelers on November 18th.

2008-04-01T10:43:00.001-07:00

"The Will to Believe" is the title of William James's classic lecture (published in 1897) defending the adoption of beliefs as hypotheses and self-fulfilling prophecies even without prior evidence of their truth. James' idea that people have a right to do so is an uncontroversial part of his doctrine since many philosophers would agree with him that we have a right to hypothesize and adopt self-fulfilling beliefs without evidence. However, James extends this idea to argue that, using this doctrine, adopting beliefs like God, freewill, possibility, and morality would cause evidence to come, thus verifying beliefs that could not have been verified otherwise. James' rationale for this more controversial idea is in combining it with his pragmatic theory of truth, the idea that a belief is verified if it causes better interaction with the world. For example, while no evidence can justify the initial adoption of a belief in God, the adoption of such a belief as a hypothesis without evidence would cause one to succeed better in the world, thus verifying the belief. This does not entail that it will be verified for everyone, but rather, for many, that it would cause their lives to be better, thus making it true for them (see James' pluralism regarding truth).

See also

2008-03-29T09:24:00.001-07:00

The Courier & Advertiser, more commonly known as simply The Courier, is a broadsheet newspaper published by DC Thomson in Dundee, Scotland. It is printed in six daily editions: the Early edition, and regional editions for Fife, north-east Fife, Perth, Angus and Dundee.
Established in 1801 as the Dundee Courier & Argus, the entire front page of The Courier used to contain classified advertisements - a traditional newspaper format for many years. As one of the UK's biggest selling morning regional newspapers [1] with daily circulation of around 80,000 [2], The Courier was unusual in maintaining this format until 1992, when it adopted a conventional 'headline news' format.
The editorials, in particular, used to be noted for their brevity, with a separate paragraph for each short sentence and no long words - which probably made it one of the easiest to read, or most straightforward, of broadsheet newspapers.

See also

List of newspapers in Scotland

2008-03-28T10:19:00.001-07:00

A workflow is a reliably repeatable pattern of activity enabled by a systematic organization of resources, defined roles and mass, energy and information flows, into a work process that can be documented and learned. Workflows are always designed to achieve processing intents of some sort, such as physical transformation, service provision, or information processing.
Workflows are closely related to other concepts used to describe organizational structure, such as silos, functions, teams, projects, policies and hierarchies. Workflows may be viewed as one primitive building block of organizations. The relationships among these concepts are described later in this entry.

Related concepts
Workflows are a distinctly modern phenomenon. While one might imagine individual efforts in rational organization of labor in the construction of historical artifacts such as the pyramids, the idea that one can create value by studying the nature of work itself and organizing it better is a distinctly modern one that should probably be attributed to Adam Smith. It is easiest to understand the development of the notions of workflow in terms of loosely defined eras, with a great deal of overlap.
Beginnings in Manufacturing (1900-1950): Notions of workflow are best understood in terms of the historical development of the conceptualization of work itself. The modern history of workflows can be traced to F. W. Taylor (Taylor, 1919) and H. Gantt. Together they launched the study of the deliberate, rational organization of work, in the context of manufacturing. The types of workflow of concern to Taylor and his contemporaries primarily involved mass and energy flows, and these were studied and improved using time and motion studies. Information-based workflows, however, did begin to grow in the same era. A particularly influential figure was Melvil Dewey who, besides inventing the eponymous Dewey Decimal System, was also responsible for the development of the hanging file folder. While the assembly line remains the most famous example of a workflow from this era, the early thinking around work was far more sophisticated than is commonly understood, and the notion of flow was more than a sequential breakdown of processing. The common conceptual models of modern operations research, including flow shops, job shops and queuing systems (Pinedo, 2001) can be found in evolved forms in early 20th century industry. That said, this early era was still limited by its relatively inflexible notions of information flow and thus is identified with the simplest notions of workflow optimization and productivity: throughput and resource utilization. The cultural impact of this era of workflows can be understood through films such as Chaplin's classic Modern Times. These concepts did not stay confined to the shop floor (one magazine invited housewives to puzzle over the fastest way to toast three slices of bread on a one-side, two-slice grill). The popular cheaper by the dozen introduced the emerging concepts to the context of family life.
Maturation and Growth (1950-1980): The invention of the typewriter and the copier allowed the principles of rational organization of labor, first discovered in the manufacturing shop floor. Paper, filing systems and sophisticated systems of managing physically manifest information flows evolved. Alongside this increasing scope of formalized workflows to information work, two other events provided a huge impetus for the development of thought around workflows. These were the development of mathematical optimization techniques and the maturation of the field of optimization and the impact of World War II and the Apollo program, both unprecedented in their demands for the rational organization of work. In cultural terms, the classic management tome, The Organization Man documented the nature of work in this era.
The Quality Era (1980-1995): By 1980 two glaring flaws in the nature of the supposedly scientific organization of workflows became apparent. The first was that the methods pioneered by Taylor only applied to humans conceptualized as one-dimensional automatons. Considered in the light of human needs for self-actualization, creative engagement in work and growth (the Maslow hierarchy became a popular tool in this critique), the classical industrial-style organization of work was critiqued as being both dehumanizing and suboptimal in its use of the potential of human beings. The second critique had to do with quality. Workflows conceptualized to be rational with respect at a given time, even with the best of intentions, were understood to acquire inertia and rigidity, rendering them irrational with respect to changing work conditions. The first critique did not gain much traction other than acknowledgement as an issue, but quality, in both analytic and synthetic manifestations, transformed the nature of work through a variety of movements ranging from total quality management to six sigma to more qualitative notions of business process re-engineering (Hammers and Champy, 1991). Under the influence of the quality movement, workflows became the subject of much scrutiny and optimization efforts. Acknowledgement of the dynamic and changing nature of the demands on workflows came in the form of recognition of the phenomena associated with critical paths and moving bottlenecks (Goldratt, E., 1996).
The Information Era (1990 - 2002): The experiences with the quality movement made it clear that information flows are fundamentally different from the mass and energy flows which inspired the first forms of rational workflows. The low cost and adaptability of information flows were seen as enabling workflows that were at once highly rational in their organization and highly flexible, adaptable and responsive. These insights unleashed a whole range of information technology at workflows in manufacturing, services and pure information work. Flexible manufacturing systems, just in time inventory management and other highly agile and adaptable systems of workflow are products of this era.
The Virtual Workflow Era (2002): The Internet bust of the early years of the 21st century led to a period of caution towards ambitious conceptualizations of smart workflows. Today, a variety of actors in the economy are returning to a consideration of the problem of developing models of work that are at once rational, flexible and capable of taking advantage of globalization, distributed work practices, while allowing the humans embedded in them to realize their full creative potential. Among the most exciting developments are the serious thought given to apparently anarchic systems of organization that have evolved in the open source software community.

Historical development
The following examples illustrate the variety of workflows seen in various contexts:

In military planning, a Concept of Operations (CONOPS) is a workflow that defines particular mission types
In machine shops, particularly job shops and flow shops, the flow of a part through the various processing stations is a work flow
Insurance claims processing is an example of an information-intensive, document-driven workflow
Wikipedia editing is an example of a stochastic workflow
The Getting Things Done (GTD) system is a model of personal workflow management for information workers Features and phenomenology
The key driver to gain benefit from the understanding of the workflow process in a business context is that the throughput of the workstream path is modelled in such a way as to evaluate the efficiency of the flow route through internal silos with a view to increasing discrete control of uniquely identified business attributes and rules and reducing potential low efficiency drivers. Evaluation of resources, both physical and human is essential to evaluate hand-off points and potential to create smoother transitions between tasks. Several workflow improvement theories have been proposed and implemented in the modern workplace. These include:
As a way of bridging the gap between the two, significant effort is being put into defining workflow patterns that can be used to compare and contrast different workflow engines across both of these domains.

Six Sigma
Total Quality Management
Business process reengineering
Lean systems Workflow improvement theories
A workflow can usually be described using formal or informal flow diagramming techniques, showing directed flows between processing steps. Single processing steps or components of a workflow can basically be defined by three parameters:
Components can only be plugged together if the output of one previous (set of) component(s) is equal to the mandatory input requirements of the following component. Thus, the essential description of a component actually comprises only in- and output that are described fully in terms of data types and their meaning (semantics). The algorithms' or rules' description need only be included when there are several alternative ways to transform one type of input into one type of output - possibly with different accuracy, speed, etc..
Especially when the components are non-local services that are invoked remotely via a computer network, like Web services, additional descriptors like QoS, availability, etc. have to be considered, too.

input description: the information, material and energy required to complete the step
transformation rules, algorithms, which may be carried out by associated human roles or machines, or a combination
output description: the information, material and energy produced by the step and provided as input to downstream steps. Workflow components
Main article: Workflow application
Many software systems to support workflows in particular domains exist. Such systems manage tasks such as automatic routing, partially automated processing and integration between different functional software applications and hardware systems that contribute to the value-addition process underlying the workflow.

See also

2008-03-27T09:23:00.001-07:00

Beta (uppercase Β, lowercase β and internal ϐ) is the second letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 2. It was derived from the Phoenician letter Beth . Letters that arose from Beta include the Roman B and the Cyrillic letters Б and В.
In Modern Greek, it represents a voiced labiodental fricative /v/, but in Ancient Greek, it represented a /b/.
Beta should not be confused with the German ligature eszett (ß), which closely resembles the lower case letter beta but is otherwise unrelated.
The Modern Greek name of the letter is [ˈviˑta]. The American pronunciation is [ˈbeɪɾə] whereas the British pronunciation is [ˈbiːtə]. See: American and British English pronunciation differences, IPA
In high-quality print, a variant of the letter is sometimes used that does not have a descender except at the beginning of a word: "βίβλος" is written "βίϐλος".

2008-03-26T08:04:00.001-07:00

Background
MacMahon assembled the Ulster army in Loughgall in south Armagh, with 4000 infantry and 600 cavalry. They were, however short of ammunition and over half of their men carried pikes rather than muskets (whereas the norm at the time was one pike for two muskets). His aim was to march through the centre of Ulster and drive a wedge between Coote's garrison at Derry in the west of province and Venables' command at Carrickfergus in the east. With the Parliamentarian troops tied down by the activities of Irish guerrillas or "tories", the Ulster army marched up to Ballycastle on the northern coast of Ulster and left a string of garrisons along the centre of the province. They then marched west, towards Coote's army , which was in Lifford, near Derry. Fending off an attack by the English cavalry as they crossed the river Finn, the Irish encamped on a mountain side at Scarrifholis, south of Letterkenny along the road to Donegal town and near the river Swilly. The local Protestant population fled to the fortified towns in the area, as the war in Ulster had, from its outset, been characterised by atrocities committed against civilians by both sides. Meanwhile, Parliamentarian reinforcements had joined Coote from eastern Ulster, bringing his forces up to 3000 men, compared to 4000 Irish. However, the British force had more ammunition and more cavalry than their enemies. MacMahon's officers warned him not to leave their strong defensive position and risk battle, as the Parliamentary army was tactically superior to them. Rather, they should stay put and wait for the enemy to disperse when their supplies ran out, leaving the Irish free to march back to their stronghold along the border with Leinster. MacMahon however refused to listen to military advice and ordered his troops down from their mountain camp to give battle to the Parliamentary army.

The battle
The battle was a decisive victory for Coote and British Parliamentarians. Over 3000 of the Ulster army were killed – 2000 on the field and another 1000 in the pursuit – about 75% of their total numbers. The Parliamentarians lost only around 100 soldiers killed. Coote ordered that Irish wounded and prisoners taken were to be killed, including Henry O'Neill, Owen Roe O'Neill's son, who had surrendered on terms. MacMahon was captured a week later at Enniskillen and hanged.
The battle marked the destruction of the Ulster army, not only because of the loss of manpower, which could be replaced, but because of the loss of many experienced officers and virtually all their weapons and equipment, which could not. In addition to O'Neill and MacMahon, the Irish lost 9 colonels, 4 lieutenant colonels, 3 majors, 20 captains and hundreds of other junior officers. This represented a huge cull of the Ulster Irish Catholic land-owning class, far bigger than in the famous Flight of the Earls in 1607. For this reason, the battle has been described as "Ulster's Aughrim" – a battle marking the extermination of the province's native aristocracy and assuring the continued existence and supremacy of its Protestant settler population.
Coote went on to march south, taking Sligo and then Galway after a long siege in 1652. The surrender of this city marked the effective end of the Irish resistance to the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland.

2008-03-25T10:34:00.001-07:00

For the non-alcoholic beverage, see Freddie Bartholomew (cocktail)
Freddie Bartholomew (March 28, 1924 – January 23, 1992) was a British child actor, popular in 1930s Hollywood films.
Born Frederick Llewellyn March in Dublin, Ireland, Bartholomew was abandoned by his parents while a baby, and was raised in London by his aunt, whose name he took. While visiting the United States, Bartholomew was reportedly seen by film producer David O. Selznick who was soon to film Charles Dickens' David Copperfield (1935). Selznick had already cast American boy David Holt in the role, but after meeting Bartholomew realised that the character would benefit from being played by a British actor. The all-star film was a success and Bartholomew was cast in a succession of prestigious film productions with some of the most popular stars of the day.
Among his successes of the 1930s were Anna Karenina (1935), with Greta Garbo and Fredric March, Professional Soldier (1935) with Gloria Stuart, Little Lord Fauntleroy (1936) with Dolores Costello, Lloyds of London (1937) with Madeleine Carroll and Tyrone Power, and Captains Courageous (1937) with Spencer Tracy.
By this time Bartholomew's success and level of fame had caused his parents to attempt to gain custody of him. A protracted legal battle saw much of the wealth Bartholomew had amassed spent on legal fees. He continued acting into the 1940s but was much less popular as a teenaged actor, and by the early 1950s had retired from film.
He established a career in advertising and distanced himself from Hollywood. Bartholomew was said to have been bitter over his lost fortune and his experiences in Hollywood, but by the early 1980s he was working as a producer for the soap opera As The World Turns. Shortly before his death he allowed an interview for the television documentary MGM: When the Lion Roars (1992).
He died from emphysema in Sarasota, Florida.
Freddie Bartholomew has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his contribution to motion pictures, at 6667 Hollywood Boulevard.

2008-03-24T09:02:00.000-07:00

India has an extensive diplomatic network, reflecting its significant influence in the world and particuarly in the region in borders - Central Asia, the Middle East, East Africa, Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent. There are also far-flung missions in the Caribbean and the Pacific, locations of historical Indian diaspora communities.
As a Commonwealth country, India has High Commissions in the capitals of other member states. In other cities of Commonwealth countries India calls some of its consulates "Assistant High Commissions".

Europe

Canada

Ottawa (High Commission)
Toronto (Consulate General)
Vancouver (Consulate General)
Cuba
- Havana (Embassy)
  Jamaica
  - Kingston (High Commission)
    Mexico
    - Mexico City (Embassy)
      Panama
      - Panama City (Embassy)
        Trinidad and Tobago
        
        Port of Spain (High Commission)
        United States
        
        Washington DC (Embassy)
        Chicago (Consulate-General)
        Houston (Consulate-General)
        New York (Consulate-General)
        San Francisco (Consulate-General) North America
        
        Argentina
        
        Buenos Aires (Embassy)
        Brazil
        
        Brasília (Embassy)
        São Paulo (Consulate-General)
        Chile
        
        Santiago (Embassy)
        Colombia
        
        Bogotá (Embassy)
        Guyana
        
        Georgetown (High Commission)
        Peru
        
        Lima (Embassy)
        Suriname
        
        Paramaribo (Embassy)
        Venezuela
        
        Caracas (Embassy) South America
        
        Afghanistan
        
        Kabul (Embassy)
        Herat (Consulate-General)
        Jalalabad (Consulate-General)
        Khandahar (Consulate-General)
        Mazari Sharif (Consulate-General)
        Bangladesh
        
        Dhaka (High Commission)
        Chittagong (Assistant High Commission)
        Rajshahi (Assistant High Commission)
        Bhutan
        
        Thimphu (Embassy)
        Phuntsholing (Liaison Office)
        Brunei
        
        Bandar Seri Begawan (High Commission)
        Cambodia
        
        Phnom Penh (Embassy)
        China
        
        Beijing (Embassy)
        Hong Kong (Consulate-General)
        Shanghai (Consulate-General)
        Indonesia
        
        Jakarta (Embassy)
        Medan (Consulate-General)
        Japan
        
        Tokyo (Embassy)
        Osaka (Consulate-General)
        Kazakhstan
        
        Almaty (Embassy)
        Korea, North
        
        Pyongyang (Embassy)
        Korea, South
        
        Seoul (Embassy)
        Kyrgyzstan
        
        Bishkek (Embassy)
        Laos
        
        Vientiane (Embassy)
        Malaysia
        
        Kuala Lumpur (High Commission)
        Maldives
        
        Male (High Commission)
        Mongolia
        
        Ulaanbaatar (Embassy)
        Myanmar
        
        Yangon (Embassy)
        Mandalay (Consulate-General)
        Nepal
        
        Kathmandu (Embassy)
        Birgunj (Consulate)
        Pakistan
        
        Islamabad (High Commission)
        Karachi (Assistant High Commission)
        Philippines
        
        Manila (Embassy)
        Singapore
        
        Singapore (High Commission)
        Sri Lanka
        
        Colombo (High Commission)
        Kandy (Assistant High Commission)
        Tajikistan
        
        Dushanbe (Embassy)
        Thailand
        
        Bangkok (Embassy)
        Chiang Mai (Consulate-General)
        Turkmenistan
        
        Ashkabad (Embassy)
        Uzbekistan
        
        Tashkent (Embassy)
        Vietnam
        
        Hanoi (Embassy)
        Ho Chi Minh City (Consulate-General) Middle East
        
        Algeria
        
        Algiers (Embassy)
        Angola
        
        Luanda (Embassy)
        Botswana
        
        Gaborone (High Commission)
        Burkina Faso
        
        Ouagadougou (Embassy)
        Cote d'Ivoire
        
        Abidjan (Embassy)
        Egypt
        
        Cairo (Embassy)
        Ethiopia
        
        Addis Ababa (Embassy)
        Ghana
        
        Accra (High Commission)
        Kenya
        
        Nairobi (High Commission)
        Mombassa (Assistant High Commission)
        Libya
        
        Tripoli (Embassy)
        Madagascar
        
        Antananarivo (Embassy)
        Mauritius
        
        Port Louis (High Commission)
        Morocco
        
        Rabat (Embassy)
        Mozambique
        
        Maputo (High Commission)
        Namibia
        
        Windhoek (High Commission)
        Nigeria
        
        Abuja (High Commission)
        Lagos (Assistant High Commission)
        Senegal
        
        Dakar (Embassy)
        Seychelles
        
        Victoria, Seychelles (High Commission)
        South Africa
        
        Pretoria (High Commission)
        Cape Town (High Commission/Consulate-General)
        Durban (Consulate-General)
        Johannesburg (Consulate-General)
        Sudan
        
        Khartoum (Embassy)
        Tanzania
        
        Dar es Salam (High Commission)
        Zanzibar (Consulate-General)
        Tunisia
        
        Tunis (Embassy)
        Uganda
        
        Kampala (High Commission)
        Zambia
        
        Lusaka (High Commission)
        Zimbabwe
        
        Harare (Embassy) Africa
        
        Australia
        
        Canberra (High Commission)
        Sydney (Consulate-General)
        Fiji
        
        Suva (High Commission)
        New Zealand
        
        Wellington (High Commission)
        Papua New Guinea
        
        Port Morseby (High Commission) Multilateral organisations
        
        India
        Foreign relations of India

2008-03-23T09:13:00.001-07:00

The Blue Jay (Cyanocitta cristata) is a passerine bird and member of the crow family Corvidae native to North America. It is adaptable, aggressive and omnivorous.

Distribution and habitat
The Blue Jay is generally aggressive toward other birds, and it will chase birds from feeders or other food sources. It may chase birds of prey, such as hawks and owls, which occasionally prey on jays, and will scream if it sees a predator within its territory. It may also be aggressive towards humans who come close to its nest, and if an owl roosts near the nest during the daytime, the Blue Jay attacks it until it takes a new roost. The Blue jay is a slow flier and an easy prey for hawks and owls, when it flies in open lands. It flies with body and tail held level, with slow wing beats.

Behavior
The voice is typical of most jays in being varied, but the most commonly recognized sound is the alarm call, which is a loud, almost gull-like scream. There is also a high-pitched jayer-jayer call that increases in speed as the bird becomes more agitated. Blue Jays will use these calls to band together to drive a predator such as a hawk away from their nest.
Blue Jays also have quiet, almost subliminal calls which they use among themselves in proximity. One of the most distinctive calls of this type is often referred to as the "rusty pump" owing to its squeaky resemblance to the sound of an old hand-operated water pump. In fact, they can make a large variety of sounds, and individuals may vary perceptibly in their calling style. Like other corvids, blue jays may learn to mimic human speech. [1]

Diet
The breeding season begins in mid-March, peaks in mid-April to May, and extends into July. Any suitable tree or large bush may be used for nesting, though an evergreen is preferred, and the nest is built at a height of 3 to 10 m.The adults build a cup-shaped nest of twigs, small roots, bark strips, moss, other plant material, cloth, paper, and feathers, with occasional mud added to the cup.

2008-03-22T08:05:00.001-07:00

Johannes Peter "Honus" Wagner (February 24, 1874 - December 6, 1955), nicknamed "The Flying Dutchman", was an American baseball player who played during the 1890s until the 1910s. In 1936, the Baseball Hall of Fame inducted Wagner as one of the first five members. Although Ty Cobb is frequently cited as the greatest player of the dead-ball era, some contemporaries regarded Wagner as the better all-around player, and most baseball historians consider Wagner to be the greatest shortstop ever. Cobb himself called Wagner "maybe the greatest star ever to take the diamond." (My Life in Baseball: The True Record, Ty Cobb and Al Stump, Doubleday, 1961, p.123)

Louisville Colonels (1897-1899)
Pittsburgh Pirates (1900-1917)
World Series Champion: 1909
National League Pennant: 1903, 1909
NL batting titles (x8)
NL RBI title (x5)
Led the NL in stolen bases (x4)
200-hit seasons (x2) Early life and Family
Wagner began his career with the Louisville Colonels in 1897, and by the next season was already one of the best hitters in the National League. After the 1899 season, the NL contracted from twelve to eight teams, and the Colonels were one of the teams eliminated. Many of the Colonels, including Wagner, were assigned to the Pittsburgh Pirates, and Wagner played the next 18 seasons for his hometown team.
Wagner helped the Pirates win NL pennants in 1901, 1902 and 1903. In 1903 the Pirates played the Boston Puritans (soon to be renamed the Boston Red Sox) in the first World Series, losing five games to three in a best-of-nine series to a team led by pitcher Cy Young and third baseman-manager Jimmy Collins. In 1909 Wagner led the Pirates to another pennant, and they defeated the Detroit Tigers, led by Ty Cobb, to win their first World Series.
Wagner was hailed as the best-fielding shortstop of his day, and spent significant time in the outfield as well. He would eventually play every position except catcher, even making two appearances as a pitcher.
He led the NL in batting average eight times (only Cobb and Tony Gwynn have led a league in batting that often), slugging percentage six times, on-base percentage four times, total bases six times, doubles seven times, triples three times runs batted in five times and stolen bases five times, despite being bow-legged to the point where a contemporary sportswriter described his running as "resembling the gambols of a caracoling elephant."
His batting average peaked at .381 in 1900, his runs batted in at 126 in 1901, and twice, despite playing his entire career in the pre-1920 "Dead Ball Era," he hit 10 home runs in a season. His career totals include a .327 lifetime batting average, 640 doubles, 722 stolen bases, and a career total of 3,415 hits, a major league record until it was surpassed by Cobb in the 1920s and a National League record until it was surpassed by Stan Musial in 1961. He was 2nd player (since MLB officially began in 1876) to reach 3000 hits, joining Cap Anson in the magic circle.
Wagner was the final out of the first World Series ever. He struck out.

Playing career
Wagner served as the Pirates' manager briefly in 1917, but resigned the position after only 5 games. He returned to the Pirates as a coach, most notably as a hitting instructor from 1933 to 1952. Arky Vaughan, Kiki Cuyler, Ralph Kiner and player/manager from 1934-1939, Pie Traynor, all future Hall of Famers were notable "pupils" of Wagner. During this time, he wore uniform number 14, but later changed it to his more famous 33, which was later retired for him. (His entire playing career was in the days before uniform numbers were worn.)
Wagner lived out the remainder of his life in Pittsburgh, where he was well-known as a friendly figure around town. He died on December 6, 1955 at the age of 81, and is buried at Jefferson Memorial Cemetery in the South Hills area of Pittsburgh.

Honors
The T206 Honus Wagner card has long been the most famous baseball card in existence. Known as the "Holy Grail" and the "Mona Lisa of baseball cards", an example of this card was the first baseball card to be sold for over a million dollars. On August 3, 2007 an SGC 10 graded card offered by Mastro Auctions sold for $192,000 to Robert Klevens of Prestige Collectibles, LLC acting on behalf of a client from Japan.

See also

2008-03-21T09:41:00.001-07:00

The Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference, or ASP-DAC is a yearly conference on the topic of electronic design automation. It is typically held in late January in the Far East, as the name implies. It is sponsored by the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society (IEEE CASS), the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)'s Special Interest Group on Design Automation SIGDA, and the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea (IEEK).
ASP-DAC is a combination of a trade show and a technical conference.

2008-03-20T09:35:00.001-07:00

Transmitted programmes

FM-Radio Programmes

List of masts

2008-03-19T09:21:00.001-07:00

This article is part of the series: Politics and government of Malaysia
The Parliament of Malaysia is the national legislature of Malaysia, based on the Westminster system of Parliament. It consists of the Dewan Rakyat (House of Representatives or literally "People's Hall") and the Dewan Negara (literally "Nation's Hall"; commonly referred to as the Senate). Members of the Dewan Rakyat are known as members of Parliament (MPs) while members of the Dewan Negara are called senators.
A general election is held every four or five years to elect representatives to the Dewan Rakyat; members of the Dewan Negara, like those of the House of Lords in the United Kingdom, are appointed. Members of Parliament are commonly referred to as MPs.
The Parliament assembles in the Malaysian Houses of Parliament, located in the national capital city of Kuala Lumpur.

Constitution
Social contract
Yang di-Pertuan Agong

Mizan Zainal Abidin
Cabinet
- Prime Minister
  - Abdullah Ahmad Badawi
    Deputy Prime Minister
    - Najib Tun Razak
      Parliament
      - Dewan Negara
        Dewan Rakyat
        Judiciary
        The Opposition
        Elections
        
        Election Commission
        Political parties
        States
        Foreign relations Scope
        Parliament meets from Monday to Thursday when it is in session, as Friday is part of the weekend in certain states such as Kelantan.
        
        Procedure
        In theory, based on the Constitution of Malaysia, the government is accountable to Parliament. However, there has been substantial controversy over the independence of the Malaysian Parliament, with many viewing it simply as a rubber stamp, approving the executive branch's decisions. Constitutional scholar Shad Saleem Faruqi has calculated that 80% of all bills the government introduced from 1991 to 1995 were passed without a single amendment. According to him, another 15% were withdrawn due to pressure from non-governmental organisations (NGOs) or other countries, while only 5% were amended or otherwise altered by Parliament. Shad concludes that "the legislative process is basically an executive process, not a parliamentary process."
        
        Relationship with the government
        Theoretically, the executive branch of the government is held in check by the legislative and judiciary branches. Parliament largely exerts control on the government through question time, where MPs question members of the cabinet on government policy, and through Select Committees that are formed to look into a particular issue.
        Formally, Parliament exercises control over legislation and financial affairs. However, the legislature has been condemned as having a "tendency to confer wide powers on ministers to enact delegated legislation", and a substantial portion of the government's revenue is not under Parliament's purview; government-linked companies, such as Petronas, are generally not accountable to Parliament.
        
        Checks and balances
        In early October of 2005 the Minister in the Prime Minister's Department in charge of parliamentary affairs, Nazri Aziz, announced the formation of a Department of Parliament to oversee its day-to-day running. The leader of the Opposition, Lim Kit Siang, immediately announced a "Save Parliament" campaign to "ensure that Parliament does not become a victim in the second most serious assault on the doctrine of separation of powers in the 48-year history of the nation".
        
        Current composition
        
        Politics of Malaysia
        Malaysian Houses of Parliament

2008-03-18T10:19:00.001-07:00

The European People's Party (Christian Democrats) and European Democrats is a group in the European Parliament. It comprises the European People's Party and the non-party subgroup European Democrats (not to be confused with the centrist European Democratic Party). The abbreviated name is EPP-ED Group.
The EPP-ED Group is a parliamentary faction of Christian democrat and conservative parliamentarians. Virtually all parties represented in the EPP-ED Group belong to the European People's Party (EPP), the first-ever transnational political party to be formed at European level. The remaining parliamentarians, namely the United Kingdom Conservative Party and the Czech Civic Democratic Party (ODS) form the European Democrats and sit as allied Members of the Group.
Previously called the 'EPP Group', the EPP-ED nomenclature was adopted in 1999 to accommodate the institutional reservations of the British Conservative Party. After the European Parliament elections in 1999, it became the largest faction with 233 of the 626 seats. After the elections of 2004 elections, it remained the largest party group with 268 of the 732 seats. Since the accession of Bulgaria and Romania to the EU in January 2007, it now has 277 of the 785 seats (35%).
The present chair of the EPP–ED Group is French Member of the European Parliament (MEP) Joseph Daul, who was elected to that post on 9 January 2007.
On 13 July 2006, David Cameron, the leader of the British Conservative Party, and Czech Prime Minister-designate Mirek Topolánek, leader of the Civic Democratic Party, announced that their parties will leave the EPP-ED Group and form the Movement for European Reform following the European Parliament elections in 2009. Nevertheless, this attempt has remained limited to these two parties and has been snubbed by all major EPP member-parties. Most analysts doubt that Mr Cameron will be able to surpass the threshold values of MEPs needed from at least six nations, which is required for formal recognition and receipt of funding by the European Parliament.

Chairmen

Political parties of the world
Members of the European Parliament 2004-2009

2008-03-17T08:09:00.001-07:00

Philosophy of mathematics is the branch of philosophy that studies the philosophical assumptions, foundations, and implications of mathematics.
Recurrent themes include:

What are the sources of mathematical subject matter?

What is the ontological status of mathematical entities?

What does it mean to refer to a mathematical object?

What is the character of a mathematical proposition?

What is the relation between logic and mathematics?

What is the role of hermeneutics in mathematics?

What kinds of inquiry play a role in mathematics?

What are the objectives of mathematical inquiry?

What gives mathematics its hold on experience?

What are the human traits behind mathematics?

What is mathematical beauty?

What is the source and nature of mathematical truth?

What is the relationship between the abstract world of mathematics and the material universe?

The terms philosophy of mathematics and mathematical philosophy are frequently used as synonyms. The latter, however, may be used to mean at least three other things. One sense refers to a project of formalizing a philosophical subject matter, say, aesthetics, ethics, logic, metaphysics, or theology, in a purportedly more exact and rigorous form, as for example the labors of Scholastic theologians, or the systematic aims of Leibniz and Spinoza. Another sense refers to the working philosophy of an individual practitioner or a like-minded community of practicing mathematicians. Additionally, some understand the term mathematical philosophy to be an allusion to the approach taken by Bertrand Russell in his book Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy.

What are the sources of mathematical subject matter?
What is the ontological status of mathematical entities?
What does it mean to refer to a mathematical object?
What is the character of a mathematical proposition?
What is the relation between logic and mathematics?
What is the role of hermeneutics in mathematics?
What kinds of inquiry play a role in mathematics?
What are the objectives of mathematical inquiry?
What gives mathematics its hold on experience?
What are the human traits behind mathematics?
What is mathematical beauty?
What is the source and nature of mathematical truth?
What is the relationship between the abstract world of mathematics and the material universe? Historical overview
A perennial issue in the philosophy of mathematics concerns the relationship between logic and mathematics at their joint foundations. While 20th century philosophers continued to ask the questions mentioned at the outset of this article, the philosophy of mathematics in the 20th century was characterized by a predominant interest in formal logic, set theory, and foundational issues.
It is a profound puzzle that on the one hand mathematical truths seem to have a compelling inevitability, but on the other hand the source of their 'truthfullness' remains elusive. Investigations into this issue are known as the foundations of mathematics program.
At the start of the century, philosophers of mathematics were already beginning to divide into various schools of thought about all these questions, broadly distinguished by their pictures of mathematical epistemology and ontology. Three schools, formalism, intuitionism, and logicism, emerged at this time, partly in response to the increasingly widespread worry that mathematics as it stood, and analysis in particular, did not live up to the standards of certainty and rigor that had been taken for granted. Each school addressed the issues that came to the fore at that time, either attempting to resolve them or claiming that mathematics is not entitled to its status as our most trusted knowledge.
Surprising and counterintuitive developments in formal logic and set theory early in the 20th century led to new questions concerning what was traditionally called the foundations of mathematics. As the century unfolded, the initial focus of concern expanded to an open exploration of the fundamental axioms of mathematics, the axiomatic approach having been taken for granted since the time of Euclid as the natural basis for mathematics. Core concepts such as axiom, order, and set received fresh emphasis. In mathematics as in physics, new and unexpected ideas had arisen and significant changes were coming. Inquiries into the consistency of mathematical theories led to the development of a new level of study, a reflective critique in which the theory under review "becomes itself the object of a mathematical study", what Hilbert called metamathematics or proof theory (Kleene, 55).
At the midpoint of the century, a new mathematical theory known as category theory arose as a new contender for the natural language of mathematical thinking (Mac Lane 1998). As the 20th century progressed, however, philosophical opinions diverged as to just how well-founded were the questions about foundations that were raised at its opening. Hilary Putnam summed up one common view of the situation in the last third of the century by saying:
When philosophy discovers something wrong with science, sometimes science has to be changed — Russell's paradox comes to mind, as does Berkeley's attack on the actual infinitesimal — but more often it is philosophy that has to be changed. I do not think that the difficulties that philosophy finds with classical mathematics today are genuine difficulties; and I think that the philosophical interpretations of mathematics that we are being offered on every hand are wrong, and that 'philosophical interpretation' is just what mathematics doesn't need. (Putnam, 169–170).
Philosophy of mathematics today proceeds along several different lines of inquiry, by philosophers of mathematics, logicians, and mathematicians, and there are many schools of thought on the subject. The schools are addressed separately in the next section, and their assumptions explained.

Philosophy of mathematics in the 20th century

Contemporary schools of thought
Mathematical realism, like realism in general, holds that mathematical entities exist independently of the human mind. Thus humans do not invent mathematics, but rather discover it, and any other intelligent beings in the universe would presumably do the same. In this point of view, there is really one sort of mathematics that can be discovered: Triangles, for example, are real entities, not the creations of the human mind.
Many working mathematicians have been mathematical realists; they see themselves as discoverers of naturally occurring objects. Examples include Paul Erdős and Kurt Gödel. Gödel believed in an objective mathematical reality that could be perceived in a manner analogous to sense perception. Certain principles (e.g., for any two objects, there is a collection of objects consisting of precisely those two objects) could be directly seen to be true, but some conjectures, like the continuum hypothesis, might prove undecidable just on the basis of such principles. Gödel suggested that quasi-empirical methodology could be used to provide sufficient evidence to be able to reasonably assume such a conjecture.
Within realism, there are distinctions depending on what sort of existence one takes mathematical entities to have, and how we know about them.

Mathematical realism
Platonism is the form of realism that suggests that mathematical entities are abstract, have no spatiotemporal or causal properties, and are eternal and unchanging. This is often claimed to be the naive view most people have of numbers. The term Platonism is used because such a view is seen to parallel Plato's belief in a "World of Ideas", an unchanging ultimate reality that the everyday world can only imperfectly approximate. The two ideas have a meaningful, not just a superficial connection, because Plato probably derived his understanding from the Pythagoreans of ancient Greece, who believed that the world was, quite literally, generated by numbers.
The major problem of mathematical platonism is this: precisely where and how do the mathematical entities exist, and how do we know about them? Is there a world, completely separate from our physical one, which is occupied by the mathematical entities? How can we gain access to this separate world and discover truths about the entities? One answer might be Ultimate ensemble, which is a theory that postulates all structures that exist mathematically also exist physically in their own universe.
Gödel's platonism postulates a special kind of mathematical intuition that lets us perceive mathematical objects directly. (This view bears resemblances to many things Husserl said about mathematics, and supports Kant's idea that mathematics is synthetic a priori.) Davis and Hersh have suggested in their book The Mathematical Experience that most mathematicians act as though they are Platonists, even though, if pressed to defend the position carefully, they may retreat to formalism (see below).
Some mathematicians hold opinions that amount to more nuanced versions of Platonism. These ideas are sometimes described as Neo-Platonism.

Platonism
Logicism is the thesis that mathematics is reducible to logic, and hence nothing but a part of logic (Carnap 1931/1883, 41). Logicists hold that mathematics can be known a priori, but suggest that our knowledge of mathematics is just part of our knowledge of logic in general, and is thus analytic, not requiring any special faculty of mathematical intuition. In this view, logic is the proper foundation of mathematics, and all mathematical statements are necessary logical truths.
Rudolf Carnap (1931) presents the logicist thesis in two parts:

1.	The concepts of mathematics can be derived from logical concepts through explicit definitions.
2.	The theorems of mathematics can be derived from logical axioms through purely logical deduction.

Gottlob Frege was the founder of logicism. In his seminal Die Grundgesetze der Arithmetik (Basic Laws of Arithmetic) he built up arithmetic from a system of logic with a general principle of comprehension, which he called "Basic Law V" (for concepts F and G, the extension of F equals the extension of G if and only if for all objects a, Fa if and only if Ga), a principle that he took to be acceptable as part of logic.
But Frege's construction was flawed. Russell discovered that Basic Law V is inconsistent (this is Russell's paradox). Frege abandoned his logicist program soon after this, but it was continued by Russell and Whitehead. They attributed the paradox to "vicious circularity" and built up what they called ramified type theory to deal with it. In this system, they were eventually able to build up much of modern mathematics but in an altered, and excessively complex, form (for example, there were different natural numbers in each type, and there were infinitely many types). They also had to make several compromises in order to develop so much of mathematics, such as an "axiom of reducibility". Even Russell said that this axiom did not really belong to logic.
Modern logicists (like Bob Hale, Crispin Wright, and perhaps others) have returned to a program closer to Frege's. They have abandoned Basic Law V in favour of abstraction principles such as Hume's principle (the number of objects falling under the concept F equals the number of objects falling under the concept G if and only if the extension of F and the extension of G can be put into one-to-one correspondence). Frege required Basic Law V to be able to give an explicit definition of the numbers, but all the properties of numbers can be derived from Hume's principle. This would not have been enough for Frege because (to paraphrase him) it does not exclude the possibility that the number 3 is in fact Julius Caesar. In addition, many of the weakened principles that they have had to adopt to replace Basic Law V no longer seem so obviously analytic, and thus purely logical.
If mathematics is a part of logic, then questions about mathematical objects reduce to questions about logical objects. But what, one might ask, are the objects of logical concepts? In this sense, logicism can be seen as shifting questions about the philosophy of mathematics to questions about logic without fully answering them.

Logicism
Empiricism is a form of realism that denies that mathematics can be known a priori at all. It says that we discover mathematical facts by empirical research, just like facts in any of the other sciences. It is not one of the classical three positions advocated in the early 20th century, but primarily arose in the middle of the century. However, an important early proponent of a view like this was John Stuart Mill. Mill's view was widely criticized, because it makes statements like "2 + 2 = 4" come out as uncertain, contingent truths, which we can only learn by observing instances of two pairs coming together and forming a quartet.
Contemporary mathematical empiricism, formulated by Quine and Putnam, is primarily supported by the indispensability argument: mathematics is indispensable to all empirical sciences, and if we want to believe in the reality of the phenomena described by the sciences, we ought also believe in the reality of those entities required for this description. That is, since physics needs to talk about electrons to say why light bulbs behave as they do, then electrons must exist. Since physics needs to talk about numbers in offering any of its explanations, then numbers must exist. In keeping with Quine and Putnam's overall philosophies, this is a naturalistic argument. It argues for the existence of mathematical entities as the best explanation for experience, thus stripping mathematics of some of its distinctness from the other sciences.
Putnam strongly rejected the term "Platonist" as implying an overly-specific ontology that was not necessary to mathematical practice in any real sense. He advocated a form of "pure realism" that rejected mystical notions of truth and accepted much quasi-empiricism in mathematics. Putnam was involved in coining the term "pure realism" (see below).
The most important criticism of empirical views of mathematics is approximately the same as that raised against Mill. If mathematics is just as empirical as the other sciences, then this suggests that its results are just as fallible as theirs, and just as contingent. In Mill's case the empirical justification comes directly, while in Quine's case it comes indirectly, through the coherence of our scientific theory as a whole. Quine suggests that mathematics seems completely certain because the role it plays in our web of belief is incredibly central, and that it would be extremely difficult for us to revise it, though not impossible.
For a philosophy of mathematics that attempts to overcome some of the shortcomings of Quine and Gödel's approaches by taking aspects of each see Penelope Maddy's Realism in Mathematics. Another example of a realist theory is the embodied mind theory (see below).
For experimental evidence suggesting that one-day-old babies can do elementary arithmetic, see Brian Butterworth.

Empiricism
Formalism holds that mathematical statements may be thought of as statements about the consequences of certain string manipulation rules. For example, in the "game" of Euclidean geometry (which is seen as consisting of some strings called "axioms", and some "rules of inference" to generate new strings from given ones), one can prove that the Pythagorean theorem holds (that is, you can generate the string corresponding to the Pythagorean theorem). Mathematical truths are not about numbers and sets and triangles and the like — in fact, they aren't "about" anything at all!
Another version of formalism is often known as deductivism. In deductivism, the Pythagorean theorem is not an absolute truth, but a relative one: if you assign meaning to the strings in such a way that the rules of the game become true (ie, true statements are assigned to the axioms and the rules of inference are truth-preserving), then you have to accept the theorem, or, rather, the interpretation you have given it must be a true statement. The same is held to be true for all other mathematical statements. Thus, formalism need not mean that mathematics is nothing more than a meaningless symbolic game. It is usually hoped that there exists some interpretation in which the rules of the game hold. (Compare this position to structuralism.) But it does allow the working mathematician to continue in his or her work and leave such problems to the philosopher or scientist. Many formalists would say that in practice, the axiom systems to be studied will be suggested by the demands of science or other areas of mathematics.
A major early proponent of formalism was David Hilbert, whose program was intended to be a complete and consistent axiomatization of all of mathematics. ("Consistent" here means that no contradictions can be derived from the system.) Hilbert aimed to show the consistency of mathematical systems from the assumption that the "finitary arithmetic" (a subsystem of the usual arithmetic of the positive integers, chosen to be philosophically uncontroversial) was consistent. Hilbert's goals of creating a system of mathematics that is both complete and consistent was dealt a fatal blow by the second of Gödel's incompleteness theorems, which states that sufficiently expressive consistent axiom systems can never prove their own consistency. Since any such axiom system would contain the finitary arithmetic as a subsystem, Gödel's theorem implied that it would be impossible to prove the system's consistency relative to that (since it would then prove its own consistency, which Gödel had shown was impossible). Thus, in order to show that any axiomatic system of mathematics is in fact consistent, one needs to first assume the consistency of a system of mathematics that is in a sense stronger than the system to be proven consistent.
Hilbert was initially a deductivist, but, as may be clear from above, he considered certain metamathematical methods to yield intrinsically meaningful results and was a realist with respect to the finitary arithmetic. Later, he held the opinion that there was no other meaningful mathematics whatsoever, regardless of interpretation.
Other formalists, such as Rudolf Carnap, Alfred Tarski and Haskell Curry, considered mathematics to be the investigation of formal axiom systems. Mathematical logicians study formal systems but are just as often realists as they are formalists.
Formalists are usually very tolerant and inviting to new approaches to logic, non-standard number systems, new set theories etc. The more games we study, the better. However, in all three of these examples, motivation is drawn from existing mathematical or philosophical concerns. The "games" are usually not arbitrary.
The main critique of formalism is that the actual mathematical ideas that occupy mathematicians are far removed from the minute string manipulation games mentioned above. While published proofs (if correct) could in principle be formulated in terms of these games, the effort required in space and time would be prohibitive (witness Principia Mathematica.) In addition, the rules are certainly not substantial to the initial creation of those proofs. Formalism is also silent to the question of which axiom systems ought to be studied.

Formalism

Main article: Mathematical intuitionism Intuitionism

Main article: Mathematical constructivism Constructivism
Fictionalism was introduced in 1980 when Hartry Field published Science Without Numbers, which rejected and in fact reversed Quine's indispensability argument. Where Quine suggested that mathematics was indispensable for our best scientific theories, and therefore should be accepted as a body of truths talking about independently existing entities, Field suggested that mathematics was dispensable, and therefore should be considered as a body of falsehoods not talking about anything real. He did this by giving a complete axiomatization of Newtonian mechanics that didn't reference numbers or functions at all. He started with the "betweenness" of Hilbert's axioms to characterize space without coordinatizing it, and then added extra relations between points to do the work formerly done by vector fields. Hilbert's geometry is mathematical, because it talks about abstract points, but in Field's theory, these points are the concrete points of physical space, so no special mathematical objects at all are needed.
Having shown how to do science without using mathematics, he proceeded to rehabilitate mathematics as a kind of useful fiction. He showed that mathematical physics is a conservative extension of his non-mathematical physics (that is, every physical fact provable in mathematical physics is already provable from his system), so that the mathematics is a reliable process whose physical applications are all true, even though its own statements are false. Thus, when doing mathematics, we can see ourselves as telling a sort of story, talking as if numbers existed. For Field, a statement like "2 + 2 = 4" is just as false as "Sherlock Holmes lived at 221B Baker Street" — but both are true according to the relevant fictions.
By this account, there are no metaphysical or epistemological problems special to mathematics. The only worries left are the general worries about non-mathematical physics, and about fiction in general. Field's approach has been very influential, but is widely rejected. This is in part because of the requirement of strong fragments of second-order logic to carry out his reduction, and because the statement of conservativity seems to require quantification over abstract models or deductions. Another objection is that it is not clear how one could have certain results in science, such as quantum theory or the periodic table, without mathematics. If what distinguishes one element from another is *precisely* the number of electrons, neutrons and protons, how does one distinguish between elements without a concept of number?

Fictionalism
Embodied mind theories hold that mathematical thought is a natural outgrowth of the human cognitive apparatus which finds itself in our physical universe. For example, the abstract concept of number springs from the experience of counting discrete objects. It is held that mathematics is not universal and does not exist in any real sense, other than in human brains. Humans construct, but do not discover, mathematics.
With this view, the physical universe can thus be seen as the ultimate foundation of mathematics: it guided the evolution of the brain and later determined which questions this brain would find worthy of investigation. However, the human mind has no special claim on reality or approaches to it built out of math. If such constructs as Euler's identity are true then they are true as a map of the human mind and cognition.
Embodied mind theorists thus explain the effectiveness of mathematics — mathematics was constructed by the brain in order to be effective in this universe.
The most accessible, famous, and infamous treatment of this perspective is Where Mathematics Comes From, by George Lakoff and Rafael E. Núñez. In addition, mathematician Keith Devlin has investigated similar concepts with his book The Math Instinct. For more on the science that inspired this perspective, see cognitive science of mathematics.

Embodied mind theories
Social constructivism or social realism theories see mathematics primarily as a social construct, as a product of culture, subject to correction and change. Like the other sciences, mathematics is viewed as an empirical endeavor whose results are constantly evaluated and may be discarded. However, while on an empiricist view the evaluation is some sort of comparison with 'reality', social constructivists emphasize that the direction of mathematical research is dictated by the fashions of the social group performing it or by the needs of the society financing it. However, although such external forces may change the direction of some mathematical research, there are strong internal constraints- the mathematical traditions, methods, problems, meanings and values into which mathematicians are enculturated- that work to conserve the historically defined discipline.
This runs counter to the traditional beliefs of working mathematicians, that mathematics is somehow pure or objective. But social constructivists argue that mathematics is in fact grounded by much uncertainty: as mathematical practice evolves, the status of previous mathematics is cast into doubt, and is corrected to the degree it is required or desired by the current mathematical community. This can be seen in the development of analysis from reexamination of the calculus of Leibniz and Newton. They argue further that finished mathematics is often accorded too much status, and folk mathematics not enough, due to an over-emphasis on axiomatic proof and peer review as practices. However, this might be seen as merely saying that rigorously proven results are overemphasized, and then "look how chaotic and uncertain the rest of it all is!"
The social nature of mathematics is highlighted in its subcultures. Major discoveries can be made in one branch of mathematics and be relevant to another, yet the relationship goes undiscovered for lack of social contact between mathematicians. Social constructivists argue each speciality forms its own epistemic community and often has great difficulty communicating, or motivating the investigation of unifying conjectures that might relate different areas of mathematics. Social constructivists see the process of 'doing mathematics' as actually creating the meaning, while social realists see a deficiency either of human capacity to abstractify, or of human's cognitive bias, or of mathematicians' collective intelligence as preventing the comprehension of a real universe of mathematical objects. Social constructivists sometimes reject the search for foundations of mathematics as bound to fail, as pointless or even meaningless. Some social scientists also argue that mathematics is not real or objective at all, but is affected by racism and ethnocentrism. Some of these ideas are close to postmodernism.
Contributions to this school have been made by Imre Lakatos and Thomas Tymoczko, although it is not clear that either would endorse the title. More recently Paul Ernest has explicitly formulated a social constructivist philosophy of mathematics. [1] Some consider the work of Paul Erdős as a whole to have advanced this view (although he personally rejected it) because of his uniquely broad collaborations, which prompted others to see and study "mathematics as a social activity", e.g. via the Erdős number. Reuben Hersh has also promoted the social view of mathematics, calling it a 'humanistic' approach [2], similar to but not quite the same as that associated with Alvin White [3]; one of Hersh's co-authors, Philip J. Davis, has expressed sympathy for the social view as well.
A criticism of this approach is that it is trivial, based on the trivial observation that mathematics is a human activity. To observe that rigorous proof comes only after unrigorous conjecture, experimentation and speculation is true, but it is trivial and noone would deny this. So it's a bit of a stretch to characterize a philosophy of mathematics in this way, on something trivially true. The calculus of Leibniz and Newton was reexamined by mathematicians such as Weierstrauss in order to rigorously prove the theorems thereof. There is nothing special or interesting about this, as it fits in with the more general trend of unrigorous ideas which are later made rigorous. There needs to be a clear distinction between the objects of study of mathematics and the study of the objects of study of mathematics. The former doesn't seem to change a great deal; the latter is forever in flux. The latter is what the Social theory is about, and the former is what Platonism et al. are about.

Social constructivism or social realism
Rather than focus on narrow debates about the true nature of mathematical truth, or even on practices unique to mathematicians such as the proof, a growing movement from the 1960s to the 1990s began to question the idea of seeking foundations or finding any one right answer to why mathematics works. The starting point for this was Eugene Wigner's famous 1960 paper The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences, in which he argued that the happy coincidence of mathematics and physics being so well matched seemed to be unreasonable and hard to explain.
The embodied-mind or cognitive school and the social school were responses to this challenge, but the debates raised were difficult to confine to those.

Beyond the traditional schools
One parallel concern that does not actually challenge the schools directly but instead questions their focus is the notion of quasi-empiricism in mathematics. This grew from the increasingly popular assertion in the late 20th century that no one foundation of mathematics could be ever proven to exist. It is also sometimes called 'postmodernism in mathematics' although that term is considered overloaded by some and insulting by others. Quasi-empiricism argues that in doing their research, mathematicians test hypotheses as well as proving theorems. A mathematical argument can transmit falsity from the conclusion to the premises just as well as it can transmit truth from the premises to the conclusion. Quasi-empiricism was developed by Imre Lakatos, inspired by the philosophy of science of Karl Popper.
Lakatos's philosophy of mathematics is sometimes regarded as a kind of social constructivism, but this was not his intention.
Such methods have always been part of folk mathematics by which great feats of calculation and measurement are sometimes achieved. Indeed, such methods may be the only notion of proof a culture has.
Hilary Putnam has argued that any theory of mathematical realism would include quasi-empirical methods. He proposed that an alien species doing mathematics might well rely on quasi-empirical methods primarily, being willing often to forgo rigorous and axiomatic proofs, and still be doing mathematics - at perhaps a somewhat greater risk of failure of their calculations. He gave a detailed argument for this in New Directions (ed. Tymockzo, 1998).

Quasi-empiricism
Some practitioners and scholars who are not engaged primarily in proof-oriented approaches have suggested an interesting and important theory about the nature of mathematics. For example, Judea Pearl claimed that all of mathematics as presently understood was based on an algebra of seeing - and proposed an algebra of doing to complement it - this is a central concern of the philosophy of action and other studies of how knowledge relates to action. The most important output of this was new theories of truth, notably those appropriate to activism and grounding empirical methods.

Action
Few philosophers are able to penetrate mathematical notations and culture to relate conventional notions of metaphysics to the more specialized metaphysical notions of the schools above. This may lead to a disconnection in which some mathematicians continue to profess discredited philosophy as a justification for their continued belief in a world-view promoting their work.
Although the social theories and quasi-empiricism, and especially the embodied mind theory, have focused more attention on the epistemology implied by current mathematical practices, they fall far short of actually relating this to ordinary human perception and everyday understandings of knowledge.

Unification
Innovations in the philosophy of language during the 20th century renewed interest in the question as to whether mathematics is, as if often said, the language of science. Although most mathematicians and physicists (and many philosophers) would accept the statement "mathematics is a language", linguists believe that the implications of such a statement must be considered. For example, the tools of linguistics are not generally applied to the symbol systems of mathematics, that is, mathematics is studied in a markedly different way than other languages. If mathematics is a language, it is a different type of language than natural languages. Indeed, because of the need for clarity and specificity, the language of mathematics is far more constrained than natural languages studied by linguists. However, the methods developed by Gottlob Frege and Alfred Tarski for the study of mathematical language have been extended greatly by Tarski's student Richard Montague and other linguists working in formal semantics to show that the distinction between mathematical language and natural language may not be as great as it seems.
See also philosophy of language.

Language
Many practising mathematicians have been drawn to their subject because of a sense of beauty they perceive in it. One sometimes hears the sentiment that mathematicians would like to leave philosophy to the philosophers and get back to mathematics- where, presumably, the beauty lies.
In his work on the divine proportion, H. E. Huntley relates the feeling of reading and understanding someone else's proof of a theorem of mathematics to that of a viewer of a masterpiece of art - the reader of a proof has a similar sense of exhilaration at understanding as the original author of the proof, much as, he argues, the viewer of a masterpiece has a sense of exhilaration similar to the original painter or sculptor. Indeed, one can study mathematical and scientific writings as literature.
Philip Davis and Reuben Hersh have commented that the sense of mathematical beauty is universal amongst practicing mathematicians. By way of example, they provide two proofs of the irrationality of the √2. The first is the traditional proof by contradiction, ascribed to Euclid; the second is a more direct proof involving the fundamental theorem of arithmetic that, they argue, gets to the heart of the issue. Davis and Hersh argue that mathematicians find the second proof more aesthetically appealing because it gets closer to the nature of the problem.
Paul Erdős was well-known for his notion of a hypothetical "Book" containing the most elegant or beautiful mathematical proofs. There is not universal agreement that a result has one "most elegant" proof; Gregory Chaitin has argued against this idea.
Philosophers have sometimes criticized mathematicians' sense of beauty or elegance as being, at best, vaguely stated. By the same token, however, philosophers of mathematics have sought to characterize what makes one proof more desirable than another when both are logically sound.
Another aspect of aesthetics concerning mathematics is mathematicians' views towards the possible uses of mathematics for purposes deemed unethical or inappropriate. The best-known exposition of this view occurs in G.H. Hardy's book A Mathematician's Apology, in which Hardy argues that pure mathematics is superior in beauty to applied mathematics precisely because it cannot be used for war and similar ends. Some later mathematicians have characterized Hardy's views as mildly dated

Aesthetics

See also

Axiomatic set theory
Axiomatic system
Category theory
Formal language
Formal system
Foundations of mathematics
Golden ratio
History of mathematics
Intuitionistic logic
Logic
Mathematical beauty
Mathematical constructivism
Mathematical logic
Mathematical proof
Metamathematics
Model theory
Naive set theory
Non-standard analysis
Philosophy of language
Philosophy of science
Philosophy of probability
Proof theory
Rule of inference
Science studies
Scientific method
Set theory
Truth
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences Related topics

The Analyst
Euclid's Elements
Gödel's completeness theorem
Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy
Kaina Stoicheia
New Foundations
Principia Mathematica
The Simplest Mathematics Related works

History and philosophy of science
History of mathematics
History of philosophy

2008-03-16T10:14:00.001-07:00

Falmouth and Camborne is a county constituency represented in the House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. It elects one Member of Parliament (MP) by the first past the post system of election.

Boundaries
Following its review of parliamentary representation in Cornwall, the Boundary Commission for England has created a new constituency of Camborne and Redruth, which takes many electoral wards from this seat.

2008-03-15T09:24:00.001-07:00

Louis Stanton Auchincloss (born September 27, 1917) is a prolific American novelist, historian, and essayist. Born in New York City, he grew up in the privileged classes about whom he would write, attending St. Bernard's School, The Groton School, and Yale University, where he was editor of the Yale Literary Magazine, and a member of Scroll and Key Society. After serving in the Navy in World War II, Auchincloss wondered whether to become a writer or a lawyer; finally, he realised both (despite not completing undergraduate studies at Yale, he was admitted to and attended law school of the University of Virginia), writing a novel per year whilst working as a wills and trusts attorney with Hawkins, Delafield & Wood.
Among Auchincloss's best-known books are the multi-generational sagas The House of Five Talents; Portrait in Brownstone, and East Side Story; The Rector of Justin, the tale of the beloved headmaster of a school like Groton trying to deal with changing times; and The Embezzler, a look at white-collar crime. Auchincloss has patterned his writing after that of Henry James and Edith Wharton.
Auchincloss was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1965. He received the National Medal of Arts in 2005.

Selected works

The Indifferent Children (1947)
Sybil (1952)
A Law for the Lion (1953)
The Great World and Timothy Colt (1956)
Venus in Sparta (1958)
Pursuit of the Prodigal (1959)
The House of Five Talents (1960)
Portrait in Brownstone (1962)
The Rector of Justin (1964)
The Embezzler (1966)
A World of Profit (1968)
I Come as a Thief (1972)
The Dark Lady (1977)
The Country Cousin (1978)
The House of the Prophet (1980)
The Cat and the King (1981)
Watchfires (1982)
Exit Lady Masham (1983)
The Book Class (1984)
Honourable Men (1986)
Diary of a Yuppie (1987)
The Golden Calves (1988)
Fellow Passengers: A Novel in Portraits (1989)
The Lady of Situations (1990)
Three Lives (1993)
The Education of Oscar Fairfax (1995)
Her Infinite Variety (2000)
The Scarlet Letters (2003)
East Side Story (2004)
The Headmaster's Dilemma (2007)

2008-03-14T08:43:00.001-07:00

The French Air Force, officially the Armée de l'Air (Army of the Air), is the air force branch of the French Armed Forces. Formed in 1909, it is the oldest air force in the world.

General description
As the chief of the Armed Forces, the President of France makes defense policy. The Prime Minister is responsible for national defense. The Minister for Defense is responsible for the execution of military policy. He is advised by the Head of Staff of Armies (CEMA) with regard to the use of forces and the control of military operations. The Head Of Staff of the Air Force (CEMAA) determines doctrine for the Air Force and advises the CEMA on how to use French aerial forces. He is also responsible for the preparation and support of the Air Force. The CEMAA is assisted by the staff of the Air Force (EMAA), directed by the general major general (GMG), and by the services of the police headquarters, responsible for military staff management of the Air Force (DPMAA), service of the police station of the air, service of the material of the Air Force, service of the infrastructure of the air, and the integrated structure of maintenance in operational condition of the aeronautical materials of Defense (SIMMAD). Finally, the CEMAA is assisted by two inspections: the inspection of the Air Force (IAA) and the inspection of the health services of the Air Force (ISSAA).

First level: the central level of command
The French Air Force is founded on the principle of separation of responsibilities between two main types of commands: operational commands (responsible for force projection) and organic commands (in charge of conditioning and logistical support).

Second level: Main commands
The air base is the essential combat tool of the Air Force, whose operational activity never ceases.
The commander of an air base has authority over all units stationed on the base, approximately 600 to 3,500 people. He supervises their conditioning and the execution of orders. Flying activity in France is carried out by a network of bases, platforms and radars of air defense. It is supported by a dozen bases, which are supervised and maintained by staff, centers of operations, warehouses, workshops, and schools.
The bases are organized for flexibility and rapid response. Both in France and abroad, bases have similar infrastructure to provide standardized support. Naval units are spread to give themselves certainty that, on all air bases, they will find the necessary means to execute their missions. This operational mode allows for fast and easy creation of air bases outside of France.
Overseas, a collection of fighters, transport aircraft, and helicopters allow for quick responses to any request for assistance that falls within international agreements. It also ensures the defense of French interests. On average, a base platform, made up of about 2,200 men and women (or nearly 5,500 people including family members), provides an economic boost of about 60 million euros per annum. Consequently, determining the sites for air bases constitutes a major part of regional planning.

History
The French Air Force operates a wide-ranging fleet of aircraft, everything from fighters to transport aircraft and passenger transports to helicopters. It currently maintains some 560 aircraft. 150 comprise the air mobility force (CFAP) and include aircraft such as the C-160 and the C-130 Hercules. The CFAP also includes 80 helicopters like the Super Puma and the Ecureuil. 330 fighter aircraft are incorporated into 19 squadrons charged with different missions. Finally, the French Air Force has a fleet of aircraft, including Alpha Jet, Xingu, Epsilon, and Tucano, to meet training requirements. These air assets are supported by ground units and a sophisticated infrastructure.
The "Future French Forces 2015" concept allows for 300 front-line fighters, mainly composed of the new generation fighter, the Rafale.

Aircraft inventory

Main article: List of French Air Force bases Bases

Main article: List of French Air Force aircraft squadrons Units
The surveillance and communications command is charged with detection and communication.

Strategic air command (CFAS)

2/3 Normandie-Niemen

2008-03-13T08:45:00.001-07:00

See also École spéciale des travaux publics
ESTP (Extroverted Sensing Thinking Perceiving) is one of the sixteen personality types from the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), and the Keirsey Temperament Sorter.
Referring to Keirsey, ESTPs belong to the Artisan temperament and are called "Promoters".

Myers-Briggs Characteristics
According to Keirsey, ESTPs, or "Promoter Artisans", are the most adept among the types at manipulating other people. The ESTP knows everyone who matters and everything there is to do. They like to indulge themselves in the finer things in life and to bring other people with them. Their goal in life is to sell themselves and their ideas to others. Dramatic and debonair, they are gifted at earning others' confidence.

2008-03-12T09:08:00.001-07:00

The following is a list of emperors of the Byzantine Empire belonging to the Macedonian dynasty, who were of Greek and Armenian descent and which is associated with the Macedonian Renaissance:

Basil I the Macedonian (Βασίλειος Α') (811 - 886, ruled 867 - 886) - married Eudokia Ingerina, mistress of Michael III; died in hunting accident
Leo VI the Wise (Λέων ΣΤ' ο Σοφός) (866 - 912, ruled 886 - 912) – likely either son of Basil I or Michael III;
Alexander (Αλέξανδρος του Βυζαντίου) (870 - 913, ruled 912 - 913) – son of Basil I, regent for nephew
Constantine VII the Purple-born (Κωνσταντίνος Ζ' ο Πορφυρογέννητος) (905-959, ruled 913 - 959) – son of Leo VI
Romanos I Lekapenos (Ρωμανός Α' ο Λεκαπηνός) (870 - 948, ruled 919 - 944) – father-in-law of Constantine VII; coemperor, deposed by his sons & entered monastery
Romanos II the Purple-born (Ρωμανός Β' ο Πορφυρογέννητος) (939 - 963, ruled 959 - 963) – son of Constantine VII
Nikephoros II Phocas (Νικηφόρος Β' Φωκάς ή Νικηφόρος Β' ο Φωκάς) (912 - 969, ruled 963 - 969) – Strategos; married Romanus II's widow, regent for Basil; assassinated
John I Tzimiskes (Ιωάννης Α' Κουρκούας ο Τσιμισκής) (925 - 976, ruled 969 - 976) – brother-in-law of Romanus II, lover of Nicephorus's wife but banned from marriage, regent for Basil
Basil II the Bulgar-slayer (Βασίλειος Β' ο Βουλγαροκτόνος) (958 - 1025, ruled 976 - 1025) – son of Romanus II
Constantine VIII (Κωνσταντίνος Η')(960-1028, ruled 1025 - 1028) – son of Romanus II; silent coemperor with Basil II
Zoe I (Ζωή Α') ((c. 978 - 1050, ruled 1028 - 1050) – daughter of Constantine VIII
Romanos III Argyros (Ρωμανός Γ' ο Αργυρός) (968 - 1034, ruled 1028 - 1034) – eparch of Constantinople; Zoe's first husband, arranged by Constantine VIII; murdered
Michael IV the Paphlagonian (Μιχαήλ Δ' ο Παφλαγών) (1010 - 1041, ruled 1034 - 1041) – Zoe's second husband
Michael V the Caulker (Μιχαήλ Ε' ο Καλαφάτης) (1015 - 1042, ruled 1041 - 1042) – Michael IV's nephew, Zoe's adopted son
Theodora (Θεοδώρα) (980 - 1056, ruled 1042) – daughter of Constantine VIII, coempress with Zoe
Constantine IX Monomachos (Κωνσταντίνος Θ' ο Μονομάχος) (1000 - 1055, ruled 1042 - 1055) – Zoe's third husband
Theodora (Θεοδώρα) (ruled 1055 - 1056) – restored

2008-03-11T10:25:00.001-07:00

The Committee on Standards in Public Life is an advisory non-departmental public body of the United Kingdom Government.
The committee was established in 1994 by Prime Minister John Major in response to concerns that conduct by some politicians was unethical - for example, allegations of taking cash for putting down parliamentary questions.
The Committee's original terms of reference were:
'To examine current concerns about standards of conduct of all holders of public office, including arrangements relating to financial and commercial activities, and make recommendations as to any changes in present arrangements which might be required to ensure the highest standards of propriety in public life.'
Public Office covers Ministers, civil servants and advisers; Members of Parliament and UK Members of the European Parliament; Members and senior officers of all non-departmental public bodies and of national health service bodies; non-ministerial office holders; members and other senior officers of other bodies discharging publicly-funded functions; and elected members and senior officers of local authorities'
In 1997 Tony Blair extended the Committee's terms of reference 'To review issues in relation to the funding of political parties, and to make recommendations as to any changes in present arrangements'
The Committee on Standards in Public Life is constituted as a standing body with its members appointed for up to three years. Sir Alistair Graham succeeded Sir Nigel Wicks as Chair on 26 April 2004. Sir Nigel succeeded Lord Neill as Chairman on 1 March 2001, and Lord Neill succeeded Lord Nolan, the Committee's first Chairman, on 10 November 1997.

2008-03-10T08:56:00.001-07:00

Nikos Barlos (Greek: Νίκος Μπάρλος; born July 12, 1979 in Patras, Greece) is a Greek professional basketball player who currently plays for AEK Athens BC. He was a member of the national team that won the silver medal in the 2005 Mediterranean Games