milotis78

Haruhi Suzumiya

2009-04-10T00:14:00.001-07:00

Haruhi Suzumiya is the title character of the Haruhi Suzumiya series, created by Nagaru Tanigawa and developed into a media franchise. First introduced in the light novels, which were then adapted into two manga and an anime series, with a forthcoming sequel, she is the main focus of the series. In an interview with Tanigawa, he stated that the idea for her character came during a sleepless night at the beginning of the 21st century.

In the beginning of the story, she is initially shown as anti-social and displayed various personality quirks, but as the series progressed, she became more open with her emotions, whilst still remaining highly active. She became the founder of, and recruiter for, the SOS Brigade, forcibly enlisting Kyon, Yuki Nagato (the only member of the Literature Club), Mikuru Asahina, and Itsuki Koizumi. She is responsible for organizing most of their activities as a group.

Unknown to her, she has the power to change, destroy, or create a new reality based on her inner desires and feelings. She is described in various ways; Yuki states that she has 'the potential for auto-evolution', Mikuru believes that she is the originator of a large time-quake and finally Itsuki declares her to be 'God'. Due to this, she is the main focus of the Integrated Data Entity, the Organization, and an organization of future humans.

2008-05-02T09:09:00.001-07:00

History of Etruscan literacy
Inscriptions have been found in north-west and west-central Italy, in the region that even now bears the name of the Etruscans, Tuscany (from Latin tuscī "Etruscans"), as well as in today's Latium north of Rome, in today's Umbria west of the Tiber, around Capua in Campania and in the Po valley to the north of Etruria. Presumably this range is a maximum Italian homeland where the language was at one time spoken.
Outside of Italy inscriptions have been found in Africa, Corsica, Elba, Gallia Narbonensis, Greece, the Balkans and the Black Sea. By far the greatest concentration is in Italy.
A Etruscan inscription found on Lemnos in 1886, which is in an alphabet practically identical.

Geographic distribution
The majority consensus is that Etruscan is related only to other members of what is called the Tyrsenian language family which in itself is isolate, that is, unrelated to other language groups by any known relationship. Since Rix (1998) it is widely accepted that Tyrsenian is composed of Rhaetic and Lemnian together with Etruscan.
In the 1st century BC the Greek historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus stated that the Etruscan language was unlike any other.

Classification
The Etruscan language has been difficult to analyze, which is attributable to its being an isolate. The phonology is known through the alternation of Greek and Etruscan letters in some inscriptions (for example, the Iguvine Tables), and many individual words are known through loans into or from Greek and Latin, as well as explanations of Etruscan words by ancient authors. A few concepts of word formation have been formulated (see below). Knowledge of the language is incomplete.
Speculators nevertheless continue to compare known languages to Etruscan searching for a pattern match. Speculative decipherments utilize partial pattern matches. The key follows the formula: "Etruscan is really a form of X" where X is the known language or language group. None of these have found general academic credibility.

Speculative relationships
The interest in Etruscan antiquities and the mysterious Etruscan language found its modern origin in a book by a Dominican monk, Annio da Viterbo, called "il Pastura", the cabalist and orientalist who guided Pinturicchio's allegorical frescoes for Pope Alexander VI's Vatican apartments. In 1498 Annio published his antiquarian miscellany titled Antiquitatum variarum (in 17 volumes) where he put together a fantastic theory in which both the Hebrew and Etruscan languages were said to originate from a single source, the "Aramaic" spoken by Noah and his descendants, founders of Etruscan Viterbo. Annio also started to excavate Etruscan tombs, unearthing sarcophagi and inscriptions, and made a bold attempt at deciphering the Etruscan language.

Semitic hypothesis
A recent (2003) study by linguist Mario Alinei has proposed the idea that Etruscan may have been an archaic form of Hungarian. Alinei's theory is based on similarities between certain words (magistrature names), agglutination, vowel harmony, construction of personal pronouns when used together with prepositions, etc. This theory has not been widely accepted in academic circles, and it has been rejected by practically all specialists of Uralic comparative linguistics. Critics accuse Alinei's work of being the product of mass comparison, a methodology that is not accepted by comparative linguists.

Hungarian hypothesis
In 1861 Robert Ellis proposed that Etruscan was related to Armenian, assert that the Tyrsenian family is distantly related to the Indo-European family. Proponents of this hypothesis put together similarities of phonetics, vocabulary and syntax that they see.

Indo-European hypothesis
Frederik Woudhuizen has developed a theory that the Tyrsenians came from Anatolia, including Lydia, when they were driven out by the Cimmerians in the early Iron Age, 750-675 BC, leaving some colonists on Lemnos. He makes a number of comparisons of Etruscan to Luvian and asserts that Etruscan is modified Luvian. He accounts for the non-Luvian features as a Mysian influence: "deviations from Luwian ... may plausibly be ascribed to the dialect of the indigenous population of Mysia." According to Woudhuizen, the Etruscans were colonizing the Latins and the Villanovan and all preceding cultures were Indo-European. The Etruscans brought the alphabet from Anatolia. Dionysius of Halicarnassus was right for his time, but the Iron Age inhabitants of Lydia were Luvian.

Luvian
Etruscan words have been successfully explained from the resources of the Armenian, the Albanian, and the Rhaeto-Romansch languages.

Writing system
The Latin alphabet that is used in English owes its existence to the Etruscan writing system, which was adapted for Latin in the form of the Old Italic alphabet. The Etruscan alphabet

Alphabet
Writing was from right to left except in archaic inscriptions, which might use boustrophedon. A local variant at Cerveteri used left to right. In the earliest inscriptions the words are continuous; from the 6th century they are separated by a dot or a colon, which might also separate syllables. Writing was phonetic; the letters represented the sounds and not conventional spellings. On the other hand, many inscriptions are highly abbreviated and often casually formed, so that the identification of many individual letters is in doubt among specialists. Spelling might vary from city to city, probably reflecting differences of pronunciation.

Text
Speech featured a heavy stress on the first syllable of a word, causing syncopation by weakening of the remaining vowels, which then were not represented in writing: Alcsntre for Alexandros, Rasna for Rasena. regarded this variation in vowels as "instability in the quality of vowels" and accounted for the second phase (e.g., Herecele) as "vowel harmony, i.e., of the assimilation of vowels in neighboring syllables ...."

Impossible consonants
The writing system had two historical phases: the archaic, 7th to 5th century BC, which used the early Greek alphabet, and the later, 4th to 1st century BC, which modified some of the letters. In the later period syncopation increased.
The alphabet went on in modified form after the language disappeared. In addition to being the source of the Roman alphabet, it has been suggested that it passed northward into Venetic and from there through Raetia into the Germanic lands, where it became the Futhark, a system of runes.

Phases

The media
The Pyrgi Tablets are a bilingual text in Etruscan and Phoenician engraved on three gold leaves, one for the Phoenician and two for the Etruscan. The Etruscan is in 16 lines, 37 words. The date is roughly 500 BC.

Bilinguals
According to Rix and his collaborators only two unified (though fragmentary) texts are available in Etruscan:
Some additional longer texts are:

The Liber Linteus used for mummy wrappings (now at Zagreb, Croatia). Roughly 1200 words of readable text, mainly repetitious prayers yielding about 50 lexical items. about 40 legible words having to do with ritual fomulae. Dated to about 500 BC.
The Cippus Perusinus, a stone slab (cippus) found at Perugia. Contains 46 lines, 130 words.
The Tabula Cortonensis, a bronze tablet from Cortona recording a legal contract. About 200 words.
The Piacenza Liver, a bronze model of a sheep's liver representing the sky, with the engraved names of the gods ruling different sections. Longer texts
The main material repository of Etruscan civilization is or was its tombs. Public and private buildings were dismantled and the stone reused centuries ago. The tombs remain as they were except for the ravages of time and the activities of plunderers. More tombs continue to be found regularly.
The tombs are the main source of portables in collections throughout the world, provenience unknown. The Etruscans lived well and valued art. Their objets d'art are of incalculable value, causing a brisk black market and equally brisk law enforcement effort. It is against the law to remove objects from Etruscan tombs unless authorized by the Italian government.
The total number of tombs is unknown due to the magnitide of the task of cataloging them. They are of many different types. Especially fruitful are the hypogeal or "underground" chamber or system of chambers cut into tufa and covered by a tumulus. The interior of the tomb represents a habitation of the living stocked with furniture and favorite objects. The walls may display painted murals, the predecessor of wallpaper. Tombs are identified as Etruscan dating form the Villanovan period to about 100 BC, when presumably the cemeteries were abandoned in favor of Roman ones.
Inner walls and doors of tombs and sarcophagi.
Engraved steles (tombstones)
ossuaries Inscriptions on monuments

Inscriptions on portable objects
Votive gifts

Votives
A speculum is a circular or oval hand-mirror used predominantly by Etruscan women. Speculum is Latin; the Etruscan word is malena or malstria. Specula were cast in bronze as one piece or with a tang into which a wooden, bone or ivory handle fit. The reflecting surface was created by polishing the flat side. A higher percentage of tin in the mirror improved its ability to reflect. The other side was convex and featured intaglio or cameo scenes from mythology. The piece was generally ornate.

Specula
A cista is a bronze container of circular, ovoid or more rarely rectangular shape used by women for the storage of sundries. They are ornate, often with feet and lids to which figurines may be attached. The internal and external surfaces bear carefully crafted scenes usually from mythology, usually intaglio, rarely part intaglio, part cameo.
Cistae date from the Roman Republic of the 4th and 3rd centuries BC in Etruscan contexts. They may bear various short inscriptions concerning the manufacturer or owner or subject matter. The writing may be Latin, Etruscan or both.
Excavations at Praeneste, an Etruscan city turned Roman, turned up about 118 cistae, one of which has been termed "the Praeneste cista" or "the Ficoroni cista" by art analysts, with special reference to the one manufactured by Novios Plutius and given by Dindia Macolnia to her daughter, as the archaic Latin inscription says. All of them are more accurately termed "the Praenestine cistae."

Cistae
Among the most plunderable portables from the Etruscan tombs of Etruria are the finely engraved gemstones set in patterned gold to form circular or ovoid pieces intended to go on finger rings. Of the magnitude of one centimeter, they are dated to the Etruscan floruit from the 2nd half of the 6th to the 1st centuries BC. The two main theories of manufacture are native Etruscan
The materials are mainly dark red cornelian with agate and sard coming in from the 3rd to the 1st centuries BC along with purely gold finger rings of a hollow engraved bezel. The engravings, mainly cameo, but sometimes intaglio, depict scarabs at first and then scenes from Greek mythology, often with heroic personages called out in Etruscan. The gold setting of the bezel bears a border design, such as cabling.

Rings and ringstones
Etruscan-minted coins date ca. 500-200 BC. Use of the Euboïc-Syracusan standard, based on the silver litra of 13.5 grams maximum, indicates the custom, like the alphabet, came from Greece. Roman coinage supplanted Etruscan, but the basic Roman coin, the sesterce, is believed to have been based on the 2.5 denomination Etruscan coin. Etruscan coins have turned up in caches or individually in tombs and in excavations seemingly at random, concentrated, of course, in Etruria.
Etruscan coins were in gold, silver and bronze, the gold and silver usually having been struck on one side only. The coin bore a denomination, a minting authority name, and a cameo motif. Gold denominations were in units of silver; silver, in units of bronze. Full or abbreviated names are mainly pupluna (Populonia), Vatl or Veltuna (Vetulonia), Velathri (Volaterrae), Velzu or Velznani (Volsinii) and Cha for Chamars (Camars). Insignia are mainly heads of mythological characters or depictions of mythological beasts arranged in a symbolic motif: Apollo, Zeus, Janus, Athena, Hermes, griffin, gorgon, sphinx, hippocamp, bull, snake, eagle, etc.

Coins
A book of gold sheets bound with gold rings went on display in May 2003 at the National History Museum in Sofia, Bulgaria. It consists of six bound sheets of 24-carat (100%) gold, with low-reliefs of a horseman, a mermaid, a harp and soldiers, with text. It was claimed to have been discovered about 1940 in a tomb uncovered during digging for a canal along the Strouma river in south-western Bulgaria, kept secretly and anonymously donated by its 87-year-old owner, living in Macedonia.

Recent discoveries
In the tables below, conventional letters used for transliterating Etruscan are accompanied by likely pronunciation in IPA symbols within the square brackets, followed by examples of the early Etruscan alphabet which would have corresponded to these sounds:

Sounds
The Etruscan vowel system consisted of four distinct vowels. Vowels "o" and "u" appear to have not been phonetically distinguished based on the nature of the writing system where only one symbol is used to cover both in loans from Greek (e.g. Greek κώθων kōthōn > Etruscan qutun "pitcher").

Vowels

Consonants

Table of consonants
The Etruscan consonant system primarily distinguished between aspirated and non-aspirated stops. Voiced stops such as English "b", "d" or "g" were non-distinct from [p], [t] and [k], respectively. When words were borrowed that had voiced stops, the stops were unvoiced: Greek thriambos to Latin triumpus and triumphus through Etruscan.

Voiced stops missing
Based on standard spellings by Etruscan scribes that appear otherwise to lack vowels or that have strings of clusters that as they occur seem phonetically impossible to pronounce, as seen in words like cl "of this (gen.)" and lautn "freeman", it is likely that "m", "n", "l" and "r" were sometimes written for syllabic resonants. Thus cl /kl̩/ and lautn /'lɑwtn̩/.
Rix postulates several syllabic consonants, namely /l, r, m, n/ and palatal /lʲ, rʲ, nʲ/ as well as a labiovelar spirant /xʷ/ and some scholars such as Mauro Cristofani also view the aspirates as palatal rather than aspirated but these views are not shared by most Etruscologists. Rix supports his theories by means of variant spellings such as amφare/amφiare, larθal/larθial, aranθ/aranθiia.

Syllabic theory
Etruscan was inflected, varying the endings of nouns, pronouns and verbs. It also had adjectives, adverbs and conjunctions, which were uninflected.

Word formation
Etruscan substantives had five cases, a singular and a plural. All five cases are not attested for every word. Nouns merge the nominative and accusative; pronouns do not generally. Gender appears in personal names (masculine and feminine) and in pronouns (animate, or either masculine and feminine, and inanimate or neuter); otherwise, it is not marked.

Nouns
Personal pronouns refer to persons; demonstrative point out: English this, that.

Pronouns
The first person personal pronoun has a nominative mi ("I") and an accusative mini ("me"). The second person has a dative singular une ("to thee"), an accusative singular un ("thee") and an accusative plural unu ("you"). The third person has a personal form an ("he" or "she") and an inanimate in ("it").

Personal
The demonstratives are ca and ta used without distinction. The nominative/accusative singular forms are: ica, eca, ca, ita, ta; the plural: cei, tei. There is a genitive singular: cla, tla, cal and plural clal. The accusative singular: can, cen, cn, ecn, etan, tn; plural cnl. Locative singular: calti, ceithi, clth(i), eclthi; plural caiti, ceithi.

Demonstrative
Though uninflected, adjectives fall into a number of types formed from nouns with a suffix:

quality, -u, -iu or -c: ais/ais-iu, "god/divine"; zamathi/zamthi-c, "gold/golden."
possession or reference, -na, -ne, -ni: pacha/pacha-na, "Bacchus, Bacchic"; laut/laut-ni, "family/familiar" (in the sense of servant)
collective, -cva, -chva, -cve, -chve, -ia: sren/sren-cva: "figure/figured"; etera/etera-ia, "slave/servile" Adjectives
Adverbs are unmarked: etnam, "again"; thui, "now"; thuni, "at first." Most Indo-European adverbs are formed from the oblique cases, which become unproductive and descend to fixed forms. Cases such as the ablative are therefore called "adverbial." If there is any such system in Etruscan it is not obvious from the relatively few surviving adverbs.

Adverbs
Verbs had an indicative mood and an imperative mood. Tenses were present and past. The past tense had an Active voice and a Passive voice.

Verbs
Etruscan uses a verbal root with a zero suffix or -a without distinction to number or person: ar, ar-a, "he, she, we, you, they make."

Present active
The -ce or -ke suffix to the root produces a third person singular active, which has been called variously a "past", a "preterite" or an "aorist." In contrast to Indo-European, this form is not marked for aspect, nor are the roots, apparently, distinguished for their aspect; they are simply actions that went on in the past. Examples: tur/tur-ce, "gives/gave"; sval/sval-ce, "lives/lived."

Past or preterite active
The third person past passive is formed with -che: mena/mena-ce/mena-che, "offers/offered/was offered."

Past passive
See the list of Etruscan words and list of words of Etruscan origin at Wiktionary, the free dictionary and Wikipedia's sibling project
The Etruscan vocabulary is now a few hundred words known with some certainty. The exact count depends on whether the different forms and the expressions are included. The Wiktionary list referenced above is in alphabetic order. Below is a table of some of the words grouped by topic.
What these numerals show, beyond any shadow of a doubt, is the non-Indo-European nature of the Etruscan language. Basic words like numbers and names of relationships are often similar in the Indo-European languages, for they derive from the same root.

Vocabulary

Notes

(2003) Bilingualism and the Latin Language. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521817714. Available for preview on Google Books.
Bonfante, Giuliano; Bonfante, Larissa (2002). The Etruscan Language: an Introduction. Manchester: University of Manchester Press. ISBN 0-7190-5540-7. Preview available on Google Books.
Bonfante, Larissa (1990). Etruscan. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-07118-2. Preview available at Google Books.
Mario Alinei (2003). Etrusco: una forma arcaica di ungherese. Bologna: Le edizioni del Mulino.
Cristofani, Mauro; et al (1984). Gli Etruschi: una nuova immagine. Firenze, Giunti Martello.
Cristofani, Mauro (1979). The Etruscans: A New Investigation (Echoes of the ancient world). Orbis Pub. ISBN 0-85613-259-4.
Pallottino, Massimo (1955). The Etruscans. Penguin Books. Translated from the Italian by J. Cremona.
Rix, Helmut (1991). Etruskische Texte. G. Narr. ISBN 3-8233-4240-1. 2 vols.
Steinbauer, Dieter H. (1999). Neues Handbuch des Etruskischen. Scripta Mercaturae. ISBN 3-89590-080-X.
Woudhuizen, Frederik Christiaan. April 2006. The Ethnicity of the Sea Peoples. Doctoral dissertation; Rotterdam: Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam, Faculteit der Wijsbegeerte. Bibliography

Corpus Inscriptionum Etruscarum
Etruscan alphabet
Etruscan civilization
Etruscan documents

Liber Linteus — An Etruscan linen book that ended as mummy wraps in Egypt.
Tabula Cortonensis — An Etruscan inscription.
Cippus perusinus — An Etruscan inscription.
Pyrgi Tablets — Bilingual Etruscan-Phoenician golden leaves.
Etruscan mythology
Etruscan numerals
Lemnian language
List of English words of Etruscan origin
List of Spanish words of Etruscan origin
Raetic language
Tyrsenian languages See also

Inscriptions

An Etruscan Vocabulary at web.archive.org. A short, one-page glossary with numerals as well.
Etruscan Vocabulary, a vocabulary organized by topic at etruskisch.de, in English.
Etruscan-English Dictionary at iolairweb.co.uk. An extensive lexicon compiled from other lexicon sites. Links to the major Etruscan glossaries on the Internet are included.

2008-05-01T08:11:00.001-07:00

The Eastern Shore of Maryland is composed of the state's nine counties east of the Chesapeake Bay. The counties are Caroline County, Cecil County, Dorchester County, Kent County, Queen Anne's County, Somerset County, Talbot County, Wicomico County, Worcester County. Some dispute Cecil County as a true Shore county, however, because of the presence of I-95 and related development, proximity to and influence from nearby urban areas such as Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Wilmington, Delaware, and the state of New Jersey, as well as its position straddling the Elk River - leaving half of the county geographically west of the Shore, instead connected to the Western Shore's Harford County.
Although the Eastern Shore comprises more than a third of Maryland's land area, it only has a population of 420,792 (2004 census estimate), about 8% of Maryland's population.
The main economic activities on the Eastern Shore are vegetable and grain truck farming, seafood, large-scale chicken breeding (the Perdue Company began in Salisbury, Maryland), and services related to tourism. Ocean City is an oft-visited resort destination on the Eastern Shore. It must be noted that most business at Ocean City are owned not by natives but by Baltimoreans, thus rendering the flavor of Ocean City life unlike that of the rest of the Shore. The Ocean City skyline, featuring many tall hotels and condominiums, is also a stark contrast to the rest of Delmarva. Other picturesque tourist destinations include the town of St. Michael's on a neck surrounded by water; colonial Chestertown; and isolated Smith Island. The population of fish and other marine life is threatened by pollution and environmental factors. Duck hunting from raised platforms ("blinds") is popular, and carved wooden duck decoys are prized as works of art.
The Eastern Shore has always been a distinctive region, and has often attempted to split off from the state of Maryland. Proposals have been debated in the Maryland General Assembly in 1833-1835, 1852 and recently in 1999 for the Eastern Shore becoming its own state. Early proposals encompassed a state of the entire Delmarva Peninsula. The proposal in 1999 by State Senators Richard F. Colburn and J. Lowell Stoltzfus did not specify the status of the nine counties of the Eastern Shore after secession.
Transportation across the Chesapeake Bay was by ferries until 1952, when the first Chesapeake Bay Bridge was opened for traffic. The bridge spans 4.35 miles (7.00 km) of the Chesapeake Bay and is the longest continuous over-water steel structure. A second parallel span was added in 1973 and a third is in the planning stages.
The advent of easy transportation and tourism to the Eastern Shore did much to erode its distinctive culture and its many accents that date to the 17th and 18th centuries, but which persist in remote places like Smith Island.
An Eastern Shore Baseball League operated on three different occasions between the 1922 and 1949. It was a Class D minor league with teams in all three states of Delmarva.
Though seven of the nine counties have a majority of Democratic-registered voters, most elected officials are Republicans. The entire Eastern shore is in Maryland's 1st congressional district.

2008-04-30T09:39:00.001-07:00

The United States Census Bureau has defined 4 Combined Statistical Areas (CSAs),

2008-04-29T10:11:00.001-07:00

A chain reaction is a sequence of reactions where a reactive product or by-product causes additional reactions to take place.

The neutron-fission chain reaction: a neutron plus a fissionable atom causes a fission resulting in a larger number of neutrons than was consumed in the initial reaction.
Chemical reactions, where a product of a reaction is itself a reactive particle which can cause more similar reactions. For example, every step of H₂ + Cl₂ chain reaction consumes one molecule of H₂ or Cl₂, one free radical H· or Cl· producing one HCl molecule and another free radical.
Electron avalanche process: Collisions of free electrons in a strong electric field forming "new" electrons to undergo the same process in successive cycles.

2008-04-27T08:49:00.001-07:00

The Chorister School is a pre-preparatory and preparatory day and boarding school for boys and girls aged 4-13 in Durham, England. It is located at 9 The College, a Grade I listed building adjacent to Durham Cathedral. The majority of the pupils at the school attend on a "day" basis, with about 30 boarders of both sexes making up the balance. Boys who are Choristers all board. Pupils are taught in small classes in a collection of historic buildings all of which form part of the College, or Cathedral Close.

History

Tony Blair (b. 1953), former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
Rowan Atkinson (b. 1955), comedian, "Mr Bean"
Rear Admiral Jonathan A Burch, CBE, Director General Aircraft (Navy)
Sir John Laws, The Rt Hon Lord Justice Laws High Court Judge between 1992 and 1999, when he came to the Court of Appeal.
Sir Donald Limon, Assistant Clerk then Clerk to the House of Commons 1956-2006
Patrick McDermott "Paddy MacDee" BBC television and radio programme host, newsreader and commentator
Dr Peter Scott, Vice-Chancellor of Kingston University
John C N Slater, Q.C. Recorder of the Crown Court, Deputy High Court Judge and Arbitrator
Sir Peter Vardy, businessman and educationalist
Dr Dyfri Williams, Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum.

2008-04-26T09:31:00.001-07:00

The UEFA Euro 2004 (or just Euro 2004) was the twelfth edition of UEFA's quadriennial European Football Championship and was held in Portugal, for the first time, between June 12 and July 4, 2004. Like in the previous two editions, in England and Netherlands/Belgium, sixteen teams contested the final tournament after going through a qualification round which began in 2002. The tournament took place in ten venues located in eight cities — Aveiro, Braga, Coimbra, Guimarães, Faro/Loulé, Leiria, Lisbon and Porto.
During the tournament there were several surprises: the German, Italian and Spanish national football teams were knocked out during the group stage; the title-holders France were eliminated in the quarterfinals by unfancied Greece, and the Portuguese hosts managed a winning streak towards the final, following their opening defeat, by beating Spain, England and The Netherlands along the way. For the first time, the final featured the same teams as the opening match, with the hosts losing both of them also for the first time. Portugal was beaten by Greece on both occasions. Greece's triumph was even more outstanding considering that in their only other appearance, back in 1980, they did not win a single game.
During the opening ceremony, the Portuguese portrayed a ship, symbolizing the voyages of the Portuguese explorers, sailing through a sea which gave place to the flags of all competing countries.

Qualifying
The sixteen teams that participated in the final tournament were:

Bulgaria
Croatia
Czech Republic
Denmark
England
France
Germany
Greece
Italy
Latvia
Netherlands
Portugal (host)
Russia
Spain
Sweden
Switzerland Venues
Twelve referees were selected for the tournament:

Kim Milton Nielsen
Mike Riley
Gilles Veissière
Markus Merk
Pierluigi Collina
Terje Hauge
Lucílio Batista
Valentin Ivanov
Ľuboš Micheľ
Manuel Mejuto González
Anders Frisk
Urs Meier Match officials

First round

Tie-breakers

For teams which finish level on points, the following tie-breakers are used:
greater number of points in the matches between the teams in question;
greater goal difference in matches between the teams in question;
greater number of goals scored in matches between the teams in question;
greater goal difference in all group games;
greater number of goals scored in all group games;
higher coefficient derived from EURO 2004 and 2002 World Cup qualifiers (points obtained divided by number of matches played);
fair play conduct in EURO 2004;
drawing of lots. Notes

Main article: 2004 UEFA European Football Championship - Group A Group A

Main article: 2004 UEFA European Football Championship - Group B Group B

Main article: 2004 UEFA European Football Championship - Group C Group C

Main article: 2004 UEFA European Football Championship - Group D Group D

Main article: 2004 European Football Championship knockout stage Knockout stages

Quarter-finals

Semi-finals

Final

Result

Statistics
Euro 2004 Top Scorers

Milan Baroš
Ruud van Nistelrooy
Wayne Rooney
Jon Dahl Tomasson
Frank Lampard
Zinedine Zidane
Angelos Charisteas
Henrik Larsson
Marek Heinz
Jan Koller
Thierry Henry
Antonio Cassano
Cristiano Ronaldo
Maniche
Rui Costa
Zlatan Ibrahimović
Martin Petrov
Dado Prso
Igor Tudor
Milan Rapaić
Niko Kovac
Vladimír Šmicer
Jesper Grønkjær
Michael Owen
Paul Scholes
Steven Gerrard
David Trézéguet
Michael Ballack
Torsten Frings
Angelos Basinas
Giorgos Karagounis
Traianos Dellas
Zisis Vryzas
Simone Perrotta
Maris Verpakovskis
Roy Makaay
Wilfred Bouma
Hélder Postiga
Nuno Gomes
Fernando Morientes
Juan Carlos Valeron
Fredrik Ljungberg
Marcus Allbäck
Mattias Jonson
Dmitri Bulykin
Dmitri Kirichenko
Johann Vonlanthen
Igor Tudor (vs. France)
Jorge Andrade (vs. Netherlands) Top scoring players

Czech Republic
England
Portugal
Sweden
France
Greece
Netherlands
Denmark
Croatia
Italy
Germany
Russia
Spain
Latvia
Switzerland
Bulgaria Top scoring teams
2 Minutes : Dmitri Kirichenko (Russia vs Greece)

Awards

2004 UEFA European Football Championship squads
UEFA Euro 2004 Qualifying

2008-04-25T08:04:00.001-07:00

Caernarfon is a parliamentary constituency represented in the House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Originally known as Caernarvon Boroughs, it is named after Caernarfon, the main town within the constituency. Its most famous member was David Lloyd George, who was MP for 55 years. When Lloyd George became prime minister in 1916 it became the first Welsh constituency to be represented by a serving prime minister.
Plaid Cymru have held the seat continuously since 1974, longer than they have held any other seat.

Boundaries

1660 – 1661: William Glynne
1661 – 1679: William Griffith
1679 – 1685: Thomas Mostyn
1685 – 1689: John Griffith
1689 – 1698: Sir Robert Owen
1698 – 1705: Sir John Wynn, 5th Baronet
1705 – 1708: Thomas Bulkeley
1708 – 1713: William Griffith
1713 – 1749: Sir Thomas Wynn
1749 – 1754: Sir William Wynn
1754 – 1761: Robert Wynne
1761 – 1768: Sir John Wynn
1768 – 1790: Glyn Wynn
1790 – 1796: Henry William Paget
1796 – 1806: Edward Paget
1806 – 1826: Charles Paget
1826 – 1830: Lord William Paget
1830 – 1831: William Ormsby-Gore
1831 – 1833: Sir Charles Paget, Liberal
1833 – 1833: Owen Jones Ellis Nanney, Conservative
1833 – 1835: Sir Charles Paget, Liberal
1835 – 1837: Love Parry Jones Parry, Liberal
1837 – 1859: William Bulkeley Hughes, Conservative
1859 – 1865: Charles Wynne, Conservative
1865 – 1882: William Bulkeley Hughes, Liberal
1882 – 1886: Love Jones-Parry, Liberal
1886 – 1890: Edmund Swetenham, Conservative
1890 – 1945: David Lloyd George, Liberal
1945 – 1945: Seaborne Davies, Liberal
1945 – 1950: David Price-White, Conservative
1950 – 1974: Goronwy Roberts, Labour
1974 – 2001: Dafydd Wigley, Plaid Cymru
2001 – present: Hywel Williams, Plaid Cymru Members of Parliament

Elections

Elections in the 2000s

Elections in the 1940s

Elections in the 1930s
In the 1922 UK general election, David Lloyd George, National Liberal was elected unopposed.

Elections in the 1910s

Elections in the 1900s

Elections in the 1880s

List of Parliamentary constituencies in Gwynedd

2008-04-24T09:15:00.000-07:00

Coordinates: 55.008° N 4.042° W
Parton is a village situated on the banks of the River Dee in Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland.
Prominent mathematical physicist James Clerk Maxwell lived at the nearby Glenlair House. He was famous for developing formulae governing electricity and magnetism as well as the Maxwell distribution in the kinetic theory of gases. Maxwell is buried under the family gravestone in the churchyard of Parton Kirk and a plate on the wall of the church commemorates him.
Red Kites have recently been introduced to the area and can be seen at Parton viewing station
Parton railway station was part of the Portpatrick line, but closed in 1965.

2008-04-23T10:15:00.001-07:00

The literature of Singapore comprises a collection of literary works by Singaporeans in the country's four main languages: English, Chinese, Malay and Tamil.
While Singaporean literary works may be considered as also belonging to the literature of their specific languages, the literature of Singapore is viewed as a distinct body of literature portraying various aspects of Singapore society and forms a significant part of the culture of Singapore. A number of Singaporean writers such as Tan Swie Hian and Kuo Pao Kun have contributed work in more than one language. However, this cross-linguistic fertilisation is becoming increasingly rare and it is now increasingly thought that Singapore has four sub-literatures instead of one.

Literature in English
Fiction writing in English did not start in earnest until after independence. Short stories flourished as a literary form, the novel arrived much later. Goh Poh Seng remains a pioneer in writing novels well before many of the later generation, with titles like If We Dream Too Long (1972) – widely recognised as the first true Singaporean novel – and A Dance of Moths.
Although she began as a short story writer, Penang-born Catherine Lim has been Singapore's most widely read author, thanks partly to her first two books, Little Ironies: Stories of Singapore (1978) and Or Else, The Lightning God and Other Stories (1980), which gained prestige by being incorporated into texts for the GCSE. Lim's themes of Asian male chauvinistic gender-dominance marked her as a distant cousin to Asian-American writers such as Amy Tan. She has also been writing novels, such as The Bondmaid (1998) and Following the Wrong Gods Home (2001), and publishing them to an international audience since the late 1990s.
Han May is the pseudonym of Joan Hon who is better known for her non-fiction books. Her science-fiction romance Star Sapphire (1985) won a High Commendation Award from the Book Development Council of Singapore in 1986, the same year when she was also awarded a Commendation prize for her better-known book Relatively Speaking on her family and childhood memories.
Rex Shelley hails from an earlier colonial generation, although he began publishing only in the early 1990s. His first novel The Shrimp People (1991) won a National Book Prize.
Another National Book Prize winner Su-Chen Christine Lim's works are much more feminist-inclined, although she has moved beyond such distinctions in her latest novel A Bit of Earth (2000).
Gopal Baratham, a neurosurgeon, started as a short story writer and later wrote politically-charged works like A Candle or the Sun (1991) and Sayang (1991), which courted some controversy when first published. Augustine Goh Sin Tub who began his writing career writing in Malay, burst on the literary scene after his retirement with more than a dozen books of short stories, most of which were founded on his own personal history, thus making them part fiction and part non-fiction. Works like One Singapore and its two sequels One Singapore 2 and One Singapore 3 have found fans among the different strata of Singapore society and well acclaimed by all.
Around this time, younger writers emerged. Clare Tham and Ovidia Yu wrote short stories, while playwright Stella Kon put forth her lesser-known science-fiction novel, Eston. Of the younger generation, Philip Jeyaretnam has shown promise but has not published a new novel since Abraham's Promise (1995), while Colin Cheong can lay claim to being one of Singapore's most prolific contemporary authors.

Fiction

Aaron Lee, poet and lawyer
Abdul Ghani Bin Abdul Hamid
Alfian Sa'at, playwright, poet and fiction writer
Muhammad Ariff Ahmad
Gopal Baratham, neurosurgeon and writer
Boey Kim Cheng, poet
Colin Cheong, poet and novelist
Felix Cheong, Poet
Michael Chiang, playwright
Rohani Din
Ivy Goh Nair, Journalist and writer
Goh Poh Seng, poet and novelist
Han May, novelist and writer
Philip Jeyaretnam, novelist and lawyer
Rama Kannabiran
Russell Lee
Jeffery T.H. Lee, poet
Lee Tzu Pheng, poet
Liang Wern Fook
Catherine Lim, novelist
Su-Chen Christine Lim, novelist
Shirley Lim, poet and critic
Chandran Nair, poet and Artist
Alvin Pang, poet and editor
Villayil Raman Gopala Pillai, Malayalam Novelist
Daren Shiau, poet, novelist and lawyer
Rex Shelley, novelist
Robert Yeo, playwright and Poet
Kirpal Singh, poet and critic
Huzir Sulaiman, playwright
Hwee Hwee Tan, novelist
Colin Tan, poet
Tan Swie Hian, poet, translator, calligrapher, and artist
Simon Tay, poet and lawyer
Tan Tarn How, playwright
Edwin Thumboo, poet and academic
I Ulaganathan
James Villanueva, textbook-writer, poet, novelist, playwright
Cyril Wong, poet and countertenor
Eleanor Wong, academic lawyer and playwright
Arthur Yap, poet
Yeow Kai Chai, poet and journalist
Yim Kein Kwok, novelist and businessman
Yong Shu Hoong, poet
Ovidia Yu, playwright and novelist List of Singaporean writers

Selected works

After the Hard Hours, This Rain - Chandran Nair (1975)
Army Daze - Michael Chiang (1984)
Star Sapphire - Han May (1985)
Below: Absence - Cyril Wong (2002)
The Bondmaid - Catherine Lim (1995)
The Brink of an Amen - Lee Tzu Pheng (1991)
Eight Plays - Huzir Sulaiman (2002)
First Loves - Philip Jeyaretnam (1988)
Fistful Of Colours - Su-Chen Christine Lim (1993)
Foreign Bodies - Hwee Hwee Tan (1997)
Frottage - Yong Shu Hoong (2005)
I Chose to Climb - Colin Tan (2001)
I Remember May - Yim Kein Kwok (2001)
If We Dream Too Long - Goh Poh Seng (1973)
Mammon Inc. - Hwee Hwee Tan (2001)
Man Snake Apple - Arthur Yap (1988)
Once the Horsemen and Other Poems' - Chandran Nair (1972)
Ricebowl - Su-Chen Christine Lim (1984)
Singapore Accent - Ivy Goh Nair,aka B J Wu (1980)
The Sea is Never Full - Jeffery T.H. Lee (1994)
The Shrimp People - Rex Shelley (1991)
The Space of City Trees - Arthur Yap (2000)
The Stolen Child - Colin Cheong (1989)
A Third Map - Edwin Thumboo (1993)
City of Rain - Alvin Pang (2003)
Unmarked Treasure - Cyril Wong (2004)
The Visage of Terrorism - The Hounds of Hell - James Villanueva (2006/2004)
A Visitation of Sunlight - Aaron Lee (1997) English

Chinese

Jangan Tak Ada (collection of poems) - Muhammad Ariff Ahmad (1990)
Diari Bonda (Mother's Diary) - Rohani Din (1997)
Anugerah Buat Syamsiah (An Award for Syamsiah) - Rohani Din (2001)

2008-04-22T09:17:00.001-07:00

Twin Towers is a 2003 short documentary film directed by Bill Guttentag and Robert David Port, depicting the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. The film was awarded an Oscar for best Documentary Short Subject.

2008-04-21T08:46:00.000-07:00

Peachtree Creek is a major stream in Atlanta. It is located entirely within both the city and Fulton County, Georgia, and flows almost due west into the Chattahoochee River just south of Vinings. Like other "Peachtree" names in the area, the name is most likely a corruption of "pitch tree", from the area's many pines and their sticky sap.
Its two major tributaries are North Fork Peachtree Creek and South Fork Peachtree Creek. The northern fork begins at the edge of Gwinnett County and flows southwest, almost perfectly parallel to Interstate 85 through DeKalb County. It ends at its confluence with the southern fork, next to where the highway meets Georgia 400. The southern fork begins in Clarkston and flows west, crossing under part of the Stone Mountain Expressway and quickly back again, west (inside) of the Perimeter. The southern edge of its watershed borders the Eastern Continental Divide.
Since 1912, the river gauge on Peachtree Creek is located where it crosses Northside Drive just east of Interstate 75, just northwest of the Brookwood Split (where Interstate 85 leaves 75). It is located at 33°49′10″N, 84°24′28″W, at 764 feet or 233 meters above mean sea level. A one-inch (25.4 mm) rainfall puts approximately 1.5 billion gallons or almost 6 billion liters into the watershed, by USGS calculations. That watershed (above the gauge only) is 86.8 square miles or 224.8 square kilometers. There is also water quality monitoring equipment there, all transmitted to GOES weather satellites and back down to the USGS in real time. Prior to this current system, daily flow and water quality sampling were done as far back as 1958 and 1959, respectively. Records for this site are maintained by the USGS Georgia Water Science Center.
Flood stage is 17.0 feet or 5.2 meters depth, and due to the heavy urbanization in the area, it often reaches above this mark during heavy storms. Peachtree Creek suffered massive flooding after Hurricane Frances was followed by Hurricane Ivan in September 2004. It reached its highest official flood record ever, which actually washed away its gauge. Late on September 16th, it reached a stage of 22.63 feet or 6.90 meters, a flow of 14,200 cubic feet (106,223 gallons) or 402 cubic meters (402,100 liters) per second, and a width of 450 feet or 137 meters. This is about ten times its normal width, three times its normal speed, and 300 times its normal flow.
The worst flood ever occurred in 1919, when on January 29th it reached a flow of about 21,000 cubic feet (160,000 gallons) or 600 cubic meters (600,000 liters) per second. Another occurred in 1912 just above the 2004 event, another in 1915 just below it. (Prior to the 1940s, there are no records for depth.) Base flow for the stream is about 67 cubic feet per second, and a depth of about 3 feet or 0.9 meters.
Peachtree Creek is also an important part of the area history. Fort Peachtree was built near the creek and the Chattahoochee River to guard against the Cherokee, who were in the Cherokee County territory northwest of the river. During the American Civil War, the Battle of Peachtree Creek was a major battle of the Atlanta Campaign. Pace's Ferry was built across the river near the creek, and Paces Ferry Road still runs roughly parallel to the creek.
Other major creeks in Atlanta include Nancy Creek (which its meets at its end), and Proctor Creek.

2008-04-20T10:11:00.001-07:00

David Brewster is the name of:
David Brewster (1781-1868), Scottish scientist, inventor and writer
David Josiah Brewer (1837-1910), American jurist
David P. Brewster (1801-1876), U.S. Representative from New York
David Brewster, President, COO, & Co-Founder of EnerNOC

2008-04-19T08:24:00.001-07:00
Life
Bentham has a complicated publishing history. Most of his writing was never published in his own lifetime; much of that which was published (see this list of published works) was prepared for publication by others.
Works published in Bentham's lifetime included:
The essay Offences Against One's Self, argued for the liberalisation of laws prohibiting homosexuality.
Several of Bentham's works appeared first in French translation, prepared for the press by Étienne Dumont. Some made their first appearance in English in the 1820s as a result of back-translation from Dumont's 1802 collection (and redaction) of Bentham's writing on civil and penal legislation.
John Bowring, a British politician who had been Bentham's trusted friend, was appointed his literary executor and charged with the task of preparing a collected edition of his works. This appeared in 11 volumes in 1838-1843: Bowring based his edition on previously published editions (including those of Dumont) rather than Bentham's own manuscripts, and did not reprint Bentham's works on religion at all.
In 1952-54 Wilhelm Stark published a three-volume set, "Jeremy Bentham's Economic Writings," in which he attempted to bring together all of Bentham's writings on economic matters, including both published and unpublished material. Not trusting Bowring's edition, he painstakingly reviewed thousands of Bentham's original manuscripts and notes, a task made monumentally more difficult due to the manner in which they had been left by Bentham and organized by Bowring.
Bentham left manuscripts amounting to some 5,000,000 words. Since 1968, the Bentham Project at University College London have been busy working on an edition of his collected work. So far, 25 volumes have appeared; there may be as many still to come before the project is completed.

Fragment on Government (1776). This was an unsparing criticism of some introductory passages relating to political theory in William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England. The book, published anonymously, was well-received and credited to some of the greatest minds of the time. Bentham disagreed with Blackstone's defence of judge-made law, his defence of legal fictions, his theological formulation of the doctrine of mixed government, his appeal to a social contract and his use of the vocabulary of natural law. Bentham's "Fragment" was only a small part of a "Commentary on the Commentaries", which remained unpublished until the twentieth century.
Introduction to Principles of Morals and Legislation (printed for publication 1780, published 1789)
Defence of Usury (1787)
Panopticon (1787, 1791). The proposed Panopticon was a prison-house, the architectural principles of which incorporated novel principles of prison discipline and administration.
Emancipate your Colonies (1793)
Traité de Législation Civile et Penale (1802, edited by Étienne Dumont. 3 vols)
Punishments and Rewards (1811)
A Table of the Springs of Action (1815)
Parliamentary Reform Catechism (1817)
Church-of-Englandism (printed 1817, published 1818)
Elements of the Art of Packing (1821)
The Influence of Natural Religion upon the Temporal Happiness of Mankind (1822, written with George Grote and published under the pseudonym Philip Beauchamp)
Not Paul But Jesus (1823, published under the pseudonym Gamaliel Smith)
Book of Fallacies (1824)
A Treatise on Judicial Evidence (1825) Works
Bentham's ambition in life was to create a "Pannomion", a complete Utilitarian code of law. Bentham not only proposed many legal and social reforms, but also expounded an underlying moral principle on which they should be based. This philosophy, utilitarianism, argued that the right act or policy was that which would cause "the greatest happiness of the greatest number" — a phrase of which he is generally, though erroneously, regarded as the author — though he later dropped the second qualification and embraced what he called "the greatest happiness principle," often referred to as the principle of utility.
Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think...
He attributed his theory to Joseph Priestley: "Priestley was the first (unless it was Beccaria) who taught my lips to pronounce this sacred truth:- That the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation."
He also suggested a procedure for estimating the moral status of any action, which he called the Hedonic or felicific calculus. Utilitarianism was revised and expanded by Bentham's student, John Stuart Mill. In Mill's hands, "Benthamism" became a major element in the liberal conception of state policy objectives.
It is often said that Bentham's theory, unlike Mill's, faces the problem of lacking a principle of fairness embodied in a conception of justice. In "Bentham and the Common Law Tradition", Gerald J. Postema states, "No moral concept suffers more at Bentham's hand than the concept of justice. There is no sustained, mature analysis of the notion ..." (ibid, p. 148). Thus, some critics object, it would be moral, for example, to torture one person if this would produce an amount of happiness in other people outweighing the unhappiness of the tortured individual - cf. "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas". However, as P. J. Kelly argued in his book, Utilitarianism and Distributive Justice: Jeremy Bentham and the Civil Law, Bentham had a theory of justice that prevented such consequences. According to Kelly, for Bentham the law "provides the basic framework of social interaction by delimiting spheres of personal inviolability within which individuals can form and pursue their own conceptions of well-being." (ibid, p. 81). They provide security, a precondition for the formation of expectations. As the hedonic calculus shows "expectation utilities" to be much higher than natural ones, it follows that Bentham does not favour the sacrifice of a few to the benefit of the many.

Utilitarianism
His opinions about monetary economics were totally different from those of Ricardo; however, they had some similarities to those of Thornton. He focused on monetary expansion as a means of helping to create full employment. He was also aware of the relevance of forced saving, propensity to consume, the saving-investment relationship and other matters that form the content of modern income and employment analysis. His monetary view was close to the fundamental concepts employed in his model of utilitarian decision making. Bentham stated that pleasures and pains can be ranked according to their value or "dimension" such as intensity, duration, certainty of a pleasure or a pain. He was concerned with maxima and minima of pleasures and pains, and they set a precedent for the future employment of the maximization principle in the economics of the consumer, the firm and the search for an optimum in welfare economics (Spiegel, p. 341-343).

Economics
Bentham is widely recognised as one of the earliest proponents of animal rights. He argued that animal pain is very similar to human pain, and that "[t]he day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been witholden from them but by the hand of tyranny."

Animal rights
Bentham's ideas were severely criticised by, among others, free market economist Murray Rothbard in his essay, Jeremy Bentham: The Utilitarian as Big Brother published in his work, Classical Economics. The Canadian author Brebner wrote in 1948 that "British laissez faire was a political and economic myth...Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, who have been commonly represented as typical, almost fundamental, formulators of laissez faire, were in fact the opposite, that is, the formulator of state intervention for collectivist ends and his devout apostle."

See also

Robinson, Dave & Groves, Judy (2003). Introducing Political Philosophy. Icon Books. ISBN 1-84046-450-X.
Spiegel (1991). "The growth of Economic Thought", Ed.3. Duke University. ISBN 0-8223-0973-4.
Murray N. Rothbard (1995).Classical Economics: An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought. Edward Elgar Publishing. ISBN 1-85278-962-X

2008-04-18T08:08:00.001-07:00

Acts of English Parliament to 1601 Acts of English Parliament to 1641 Acts and Ordinances (Interregnum) to 1660 Acts of English Parliament to 1699 Acts of English Parliament to 1706 Acts of Parliament of Scotland Acts of Irish Parliament to 1700 Acts of Irish Parliament to 1800
1707–1719 | 1720–1739 | 1740–1759 1760–1779 | 1780–1800 | 1801–1819 1820–1839 | 1840–1859 | 1860–1879 1880–1899 | 1900–1919 | 1920–1939 1940–1959 | 1960–1979 | 1980–1999 2000–Present
The Representation of the People Act 1918 was an Act of Parliament passed to reform the electoral system in the United Kingdom. It is sometimes known as the Fourth Reform Act.
Following the horrors of World War I, millions of returning soldiers were still not entitled to vote. This posed a dilemma for politicians since they could not withhold the vote from the very men who were considered to have fought to preserve the British political system.
The Representation of the People Act 1918 widened suffrage by abolishing practically all property qualifications for men and by enfranchising women over 30 who met minimum property qualifications. The enfranchisement of this latter group was accepted as recognition of the contribution made by women defence workers. However, women were still not politically equal to men (who could vote from the age of 21); full electoral equality wouldn't occur until the Representation of the People Act 1928.
These changes saw the size of the electorate triple from 7.7 million to 21.4 million. Women now accounted for about 43% of the electorate. It is worth noting that had women been enfranchised based upon the same requirements as men, they would have been in the majority, due to the loss of men in the war. This may explain why the age of 30 was settled on.
In addition to the suffrage changes, the Act also instituted the present system of holding general elections on one day, (as opposed to being staggered over a period of weeks), and brought in the annual electoral register.
The first election held under the new system was the 1918 general election.
According to Eric J. Evans, a renowned parliamentary historian, "Britain was jerked into democracy by the horrendous discontinuity of the First World War."
However there were serious limitations to this act that was meant to change the face of British democracy. The act still did not create a system of one person, one vote. 7% of the population enjoyed a plural vote in the 1918 election: mostly middle-class men who had an extra vote due to a university constituency (this act increased the university vote by creating the Combined English Universities seats) or a spreading of business into other constituencies. There was also a significant inequality between the voting rights of men and women. Women could only vote if they were over 30 and
a ) a local government elector through property qualification or
b ) married to a husband who was so enfranchised, or
c ) entitled to vote for a university constituency.

2008-04-17T09:44:00.001-07:00

Alphonso Gene Ford (October 31, 1971 in Greenwood, Mississippi – September 4, 2004 in Memphis, Tennessee) was an American basketball player in the Euroleague.
Ford was a high school star player for Amanda Elzy High School in Greenwood, Mississippi. Upon entering college, Ford led the entire NCAA in freshman scoring in 1989-1990 with a 29.9 point per game average. His sophomore year, he averaged 32.9 points per game, second only to Bo Kimble of Loyola Marymount University. His 3,165 career points are 4th all time behind Pete Maravich, Freeman Williams, and Lionel Simmons.
Ford played just 11 games for the Philadelphia 76ers, who drafted him in 1993 out of Mississippi Valley State University (where he became the first player in NCAA history to average 25 points in four seasons), and the Seattle SuperSonics. He played briefly in the CBA before going to Europe.
Despite being diagnosed with leukemia in 1997, Ford was the Euroleague's top scorer over the previous two seasons with Olympiacos. He died less than two weeks after announcing his retirement due to his condition. He is survived by his wife, Paula, and sons Karlderek and Alphonso, Jr.
In 2004 Euroleague named after him the Alphonso Ford Top Scorer Trophy. In 2005 the trophy was won [1] for the first time ever by Charles Smith, the player who replaced Ford in his previous team, Scavolini Pesaro.

2008-04-16T10:36:00.001-07:00

Movable Type is a weblog publishing system developed by California-based Six Apart. It was publicly announced on 3 September 2001,
Movable Type Enterprise version has become a standard corporate and enterprise blogging software because of advanced features such as LDAP management, enterprise database integration such as Oracle, MySQL, user roles, blog cloning and automated blog provisioning. It is also available as part of Intel's SuiteTwo professional software offering of Web 2.0 tools.
Six Apart also maintains three other weblog publishing systems, TypePad, LiveJournal and Vox. While Movable Type is a system which needs to be installed on a user's own web server, TypePad is a hosted weblog service. LiveJournal is an entirely separate blogging system, acquired after Six Apart's buyout of Danga Interactive in January 2005.
Movable Type was originally named Serge after musician Serge Gainsbourg.

2008-04-15T08:58:00.001-07:00

Power quality is a term used to describe electric power that motivates an electrical load and the load's ability to function properly with that electric power. Without the proper power, an electrical device (or load) may malfunction, fail prematurely or not operate at all. There are many ways in which electric power can be of poor quality and many more causes of such poor quality power.
The electric power industry is in the business of electricity generation (AC power), electric power transmission and ultimately electricity distribution to a point often located near the electricity meter of the end user of the electric power. The electricity then moves through the distribution and wiring system of the end user until it reaches the load. The complexity of the system to move electric energy from the point of production to the point of consumption combined with variatons in weather, electricity demand and other factors provide many opportunities for the quality of power delivered to be compromised.
While "power quality" is a convenient term for many, it is actually the quality of the voltage, rather than power or electric current, that is actual topic described by the term. Power is simply the flow of energy and the current demanded by a load is largely uncontrollable. Nevertheless the relationship between the concepts of "voltage quality" and energy quality is unknown.

Introduction
It is often useful to think of power quality as a compatibility problem: is the equipment connected to the grid compatible with the events on the grid, and is the power delivered by the grid, including the events, compatible with the equipment that is connected? Compatibility problems always have at least two solutions: in this case, either clean up the power, or make the equipment tougher.
Ideally electric power would be supplied as a sine wave with the amplitude and frequency given by national standards (in the case of mains) or system specifications (in the case of a power feed not directly attached to the mains) with an impedance of zero ohms at all frequencies.
No real life power feed will ever meet this ideal. It can deviate from it in the following ways (among others):

Variations in the peak or RMS voltage are both important to different types of equipment.
When the RMS voltage exceeds the nominal voltage by 10 to 80% for 0.5 cycle to 1 minute, the event is called a "swell".
A "dip" (in British English) or a "sag" (in American English - the two terms are equivalent) is the opposite situation: the RMS volage is below the nominal voltage by by 10 to 90% for 0.5 cycle to 1 minute.
Random or repetitive variations in the RMS voltage between 90 and 110% of nominal can produce a phenomina known as "flicker" in lighting equipment. Flicker is the impression of unsteadiness of visual sensation induced by a light stimulus on the human eye. A precise definition of such voltage fluctuations that produce flickers have been subject to ongoing debate in more than one scientific community for many years.
Abrupt, very brief increases in voltage, called "spikes", "impulses", or "surges", generally caused by large inductive loads being turned off, or more severely by lightning.
"Undervoltage" occurs when the nominal voltage drops below 90% for more than 1 minute. The term "brownout" in common usage has no formal definition but is commonly used to describe a reduction in system voltage by the utility or system operator to decrease demand or to increase system operating margins.
"Overvoltage" occurs when the nominal voltage rises above 110% for more than 1 minute.
Variations in the frequency
Variations in the wave shape - usually described as harmonics
Nonzero low-frequency impedance (when a load draws more power, the voltage drops)
Nonzero high-frequency impedance (when a load demands a large amount of current, then stops demanding it suddenly, there will be a dip or spike in the voltage due to the inductances in the power supply line)

2008-04-14T10:19:00.001-07:00

Syd Cain is a British production designer who has worked on more than 30 films, including four in the James Bond series in the 1960s and 1970s. For From Russia with Love, he designed a $150,000 set for a chess match which repeated the "chess pawn" motive throughout the room.
He survived a plane crash in Rhodesia during World War II, which broke his back, and also later survived being struck by lightning.

2008-04-13T08:51:00.001-07:00

Judaism, Christianity, Islam and the Bahá'í Faith see God as a being who created the world and who rules over the universe. God is usually held to have the properties of holiness (separate from sin and incorruptible), justice (fair, right, and true in all His judgments), sovereignty (unthwartable in His will), omnipotence (all-powerful), omniscience (all-knowing), omni-benevolence (all-loving), omnipresence (present everywhere at the same time), and immortality (eternal and everlasting). He is also believed to be transcendent, meaning that He is outside space and outside time, and therefore eternal and unable to be changed by earthly forces or anything else within His creation.
Jews, Christians, Muslims and Bahá'ís often conceive of God as a personal God, with a will and personality. However, many rationalist philosophers felt that one should not view God as personal, and that such personal descriptions of God are only meant as metaphors, as it was widely viewed that God's transcendence meant that He could not act in the lives of ordinary people.
In Christianity, it remains essential that God be personal; hence it speaks of the three persons of the Trinity. It also emphasizes that God has a will, and that God the Son has two wills, divine and human, though these are never in conflict. However, this point is disputed by Oriental Orthodox Christians, who hold that God the Son has only one will of unified divinity and humanity (see Miaphysitism). The personhood of God and of all human people is essential to the concept of theosis or deification.
In Mormonism, God the Father and God the Son are considered personal beings who have separate tangible exalted bodies and one purpose given that they are each omniscient, omnipotent, and omni-benevolent. LDS teachings include that God the Father is the literal father of the spirits of all of mankind, that He loves each of His children unconditionally, and that He desires that they progress in their own ability to love, to experience joy and faith, and to learn the truths that govern the universe. He is the center of LDS worship as the governing Supreme Being in the universe. The mainstream LDS teaching is that God the Father does much of His "work" through God the Son, who is Jesus Christ, and that this delegation and divine investiture of authority occurred during what is described as the pre-existence (pre-mortal life) when all the spirit children of God lived in His presence. It includes the belief that both God the Father and Jesus Christ were involved in the creation (from existing matter or energy) of this earth and other similar earths and many of the stars and planets in the known universe. It also includes the belief that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was the Jehovah of the Old Testament. This teaching is prevalent in the Book of Mormon. The LDS belief is that Abraham received revelation from Jehovah, including the Abrahamic covenant and the Abrahamic test to see if he was willing to sacrifice his son Isaac in similitude of the sacrifice God the Father would offer to mankind through the willing offering of His Beloved Son, Jesus Christ to carry out the infinite atonement. The belief includes Abraham's faith in the promise of resurrection for Isaac, as stated by the Apostle Paul in KJV Hebrews 11:17-19.

2008-04-12T10:31:00.000-07:00

For other uses, see Apayao (disambiguation).
Apayao is a landlocked province of the Philippines in the Cordillera Administrative Region in Luzon. Its capital is Kabugao and borders Cagayan to the north and east, Abra and Ilocos Norte to the west, and Kalinga to the south. Prior to 1995, Kalinga and Apayao used to be a single province named Kalinga-Apayao, until they were split into two to better service the needs of individual native tribes in the provinces.

People and culture

Economy

Geography
Apayao is subdivided into 7 municipalities.

Physical
Apayao was among the earliest areas penetrated by the Spaniards in the Cordilleras, but the region, inhabited by the Isneg tribe, remained largely outside Spanish control until late in the 1800s. As early as 1610, the Dominican friars established a mission in what is now the town of Pudtol. In 1684, the friars again made vain attempts to convert the people and established a church in what is now Cabugao. The ruins of the early churches in Pudtol and Cabugao still stand as mute testimony to the failed attempts to occupy Apayao.
The Spanish authorities were then able to establish the comandancias of Apayao and Cabugaoan in 1891, which covered the western and eastern portions of what is now Apayao. The comandancias, however, failed to bring total control and the Spanish government only maintained a loose hold over the area.
The Americans established the Mountain Province on August 13, 1908, with the enactment of Act No. 1876. Apayao, along with Amburayan, Benguet, Bontoc, Ifugao, Kalinga, and Lepanto, became sub-provinces of this new province. Before this, Apayao had been a part of Cagayan province.
After being a sub-province for almost 60 years, on June 18, 1966, the huge Mountain Province was split into four provinces with the enactment of Republic Act No. 4695. The four provinces were Benguet, Mountain Province, Kalinga-Apayao and Ifugao. Kalinga-Apayao became one of the provinces of the Cagayan Valley region.
On July 15, 1987, the Cordillera Administrative Region was established and Kalinga-Apayao was made one of its provinces. Finally, on February 14, 1995, Kalinga-Apayao was split into two distinct provinces with the passage of Republic Act No. 7878.
It may be no coincidence that the outline of Apayao (and the former Kalinga-Apayao) resembles a bust of a man akin to former dictator Ferdinand Marcos (looking toward his home province, Ilocos Norte) whom they called as the "Great Profile" during the Marcos Era.

2008-04-11T08:31:00.001-07:00

Boynton Beach is a city in Palm Beach County, Florida, United States. The population was 60,389 at the 2000 census. As of 2006, the city had a population of 67,071 according to the University of Florida, Bureau of Economic and Business Research.

History
Boynton Beach is located at 26°31′41″N, 80°4′35″W (26.528099, -80.076363).
According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 42.1 km² (16.2 mi²). 41.1 km² (15.9 mi²) of it is land and 1.0 km² (0.4 mi²) of it (2.28%) is water.

Demographics
As of 2000, speakers of English accounted for 80.09% of all residents, while French Creole comprised of 7.51%, Spanish was at 7.30%, French consisted of 1.02%, Italian at 0.97%, and German made up 0.87% of the population.

Languages
Boynton Beach, like all of Palm Beach County, is served by the School District of Palm Beach County. As of 2006, it was the 5th largest school district in Florida and the 14th largest school district in the United States.
Elementary Schools:
Middle Schools:
High Schools:

Citrus Cove Elementary School
Crosspointe Elementary School
Crystal Lakes Elemetary School
Forest Park Elementary @ Seacrest Holding School
Freedom Shores Elementary School
Galaxy Elementary School
Hagen Road Elementary School
Poinciana Elementary School
Rolling Green Elementary School
Christa McAuliffe Middle School
Congress Middle School - magnet school for math, science and technology
Odyssey Middle School
Boynton Beach Community High School Famous Residents, Past and Present
Boynton Beach is home to the corporate headquarters of VitaCost, an online dietary supplement company: *VitaCost.

2008-04-10T09:53:00.001-07:00
Commonwealth Realms
Her Majesty's Most Gracious Speech, However, the Queen often undertakes visits and speaks to the devolved bodies in a less official capacity. So far, she has been present and has given an address at all openings of the Scottish Parliament, usually speaking reflectively upon its accomplishments and wishing the institution well for its coming term rather than considering the plans of the Executive.

United Kingdom
In the other Commonwealth Realms, a similar speech to the British version is held in their respective legislatures. Generally, the Speech from the Throne will be read on Her Majesty's behalf by the relevant Governor-General, however if the Queen is present in the country she will often give the address in person. Queen Elizabeth II opened the Canadian Parliament with the Speech from the Throne in 1957, and again during her Silver Jubilee in 1977.
Australia and Canada, federated countries, also hold a Throne Speech in the state or provincial jurisdictions, used to outline local legislative plans. Typically these are performed by the respective state Governors or provincial Lieutenant Governor, who represent the sovereign in that area. The Constitution Act, 1867 is written in such a way that the Queen does not form a part of the provincial parliaments, only the pertinent Lieutenant Governor does; thus, the Queen of Canada does not read the Throne Speech in any of her provincial legislatures. Elizabeth II did, however, address the Legislative Assembly of Alberta from the chamber's throne during her tour of the province in 2005.

Other countries

Royal Christmas Message

2008-04-09T09:27:00.001-07:00
Line No 1
An extension was built, the Dudley Canal Line No 2, to link the Dudley Canal, at Park Head Junction (near Netherton)), via Halesowen and a tunnel at Lapal, to the Worcester and Birmingham Canal at Selly Oak, Birmingham, thereby bypassing the congested canals of central Birmingham.
A loop around Bumble Hole was bypassed after the Netherton Tunnel Branch Canal made a connection through the Netherton Tunnel at Windmill End Junction in 1858. The cut-off loop became the Bumble Hole Branch Canal and Bushboil Arm after a collapse of the canal filled in part of the loop.
Lapal Tunnel collapsed in 1917 and the section from Lapal to Selly Oak is filled in. Part of the Lapal Tunnel was unearthed during the construction of the M5 motorway during the 1960s and it was filled with concrete. The Lapal Canal Trust is working on the restoration of the lost canal.

Two Locks Line

Canals of Great Britain
History of the British canal system

2008-04-08T09:59:00.001-07:00

An anthem is a composition to an English religious text sung in the context of an Anglican service. The term has evolved to mean a song of celebration, usually acting as a symbol for a certain group of people, as in the term "national anthem". See below for other uses.
"anthem" is derived from the Greek αντιφωνα through the Saxon antefn, a word which originally had the same meaning as antiphony.
It is now, however, generally restricted to a form of church music, particularly in the service of the Church of England, in which it is appointed by the rubrics to follow the third collect at both morning and evening prayer. It is just as usuan ordinary hymn as an anthem, which may be a more elaborate composition than the congregational hymns. Several anthems are included in the English coronation service. The words are selected from Holy Scripture or in some cases from the Liturgy, and the music is generally more elaborate and varied than that of psalm or hymn tunes. Though the anthem of the Church of England is analogous to the motet of the Roman Catholic and Lutheran Churches, both being written for a trained choir and not for the congregation, it is as a musical form essentially English in its origin and development.
The anthem developed as a replacement for the Catholic "votive antiphon" commonly sung as an appendix to the main office to the Blessed Virgin Mary or other saints. Though anthems were written in the Elizabethan period by Byrd, Tallis and others they are not mentioned in the Book of Common Prayer until 1662, when the famous rubric "In quires and places where they sing here followeth the Anthem" first appears.
Early anthems tended to be simple and homophonic in texture, in order that the words could be clearly heard. Late in the sixteenth century the "verse anthem", in which passages for solo voices alternated with passages for full choir, began to evolve. This became the dominant form in the Restoration period, when composers such as Henry Purcell and John Blow wrote elaborate examples for the Chapel Royal with orchestral accompaniment. In the nineteenth century Samuel Sebastian Wesley wrote anthems influenced by contemporary oratorio which could stretch to several movements and last twenty minutes or longer. Later in the same century Charles Villiers Stanford composed examples which used symphonic techniques to produce a more concise and unified structure. Many anthems have been produced on this model since his time, generally by organists rather than professional composers and often in a conservative style. Major composers have tended to compose anthems only in response to commissions and for special occasions; examples include Edward Elgar's Great is the Lord and Give unto the Lord (both with orchestral accompaniment), Benjamin Britten's Rejoice in the Lamb (a modern example of a multi-movement anthem and today heard mainly as a concert piece), and (on a much smaller scale) Ralph Vaughan Williams' O taste and see, written for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. With the relaxation of the rule, in England at least, that anthems should be only in English, the repertoire has been greatly enhanced by the addition of many works from the Latin repertory.
In common usage among Protestant churches in the U.S.A. the term "anthem" often refers to any short sacred choral work presented during the course of a worship service.
Sometimes the word is used to describe legendary songs in different musical genres. For instance, the song Free Bird by Lynyrd Skynyrd is considered the quintesential rock and roll anthem.

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

Entombed is a Swedish metal band which formed in 1987 (see 1987 in music) under the name of Nihilist. Though Entombed began their career as an early pioneer of Scandinavian death metal, by the early 1990s their sound had broadened to include hardcore punk and other influences.

Members

Lars Göran Petrov - Vocals
Nico Elgstrand - Bass
Alex Hellid - Guitars
Olle Dahlstedt - Drums Current

Jörgen Sandström - Bass
Zoran - Bass
Lars Rosenberg - Bass
Nicke Andersson - Drums, Vocals, Bass
Peter Stjärnvind - Drums
Johnny Dordevic - Vocals
David Blomqvist - Guitars
Uffe Cederlund - Guitars, Bass Former

Fred Estby - Vocals
Matti Kärki - Vocals
Orvar Säfström - Vocals
Peder Carlsson - Harmonica
Anders Lindström - Air Guitar, lead guitar
Daniel Rey - Vocals
Östen Warnebring - Vocals Session and guest members

Discography

But Life Goes On (Demo, 1989)
Crawl (EP, 1990)
Stranger Aeons (EP, 1991)
Hollowman (EP, 1993)
Out of Hand (EP, 1993)
Full of Hell (Promo, 1993)
Contempt (Promo, 1993)
Night of the Vampire (split 7" w/ The New Bomb Turks, 1995)
Wreckage (EP, 1997)
Black Juju (EP, 1998)
When in Sodom (EP, 2006) Full-length albums

Nihilist : Complete Demos 1987-1989 (2005) Collection of all the Nihilist recordings, including Entombed's first demo But Life Goes On.

2008-04-06T08:03:00.001-07:00

In geology, an aulacogen is a failed arm of a triple junction of a plate tectonics rift system. A triple junction beneath a continental plate initiates a three way breakup of the continental plate. As the continental break-up develops one of the three spreading ridges typically fails or stops spreading. The resulting failed rift is called an aulacogen and becomes a filled graben within the continent and is a zone of structural weakness.
The Mississippi embayment with the associated New Madrid Seismic Zone is an example of an ancient aulacogen that dates back to the breakup of the ancient continent Rodinia, as is the Rio Grande Rift. On the Southwestern European margin (offshore Portugal) is located another abandoned rift basin (Lusitanian Basin) that evolved at the same time of the Canadian Grand Banks region, where the Hibernia oil field is located. Abandoned rift basins that have been uplifted and exposed onshore, like the Lusitanian Basin, are important analogues of deep-sea basins located on conjugated margins of ancient rift axes.

2008-04-05T09:12:00.001-07:00

A personal computer (PC) is a computer whose price, size, and capabilities make it useful for individuals.
We may never know who coined the phrase with the intent of a small affordable computing device but John W. Mauchly described such a device in a November 3, 1962 New York Times article entitled "Pocket Computer may replace Shopping List". Six years later a manufacturer took a risk at referring to their product this way when Hewlett Packard advertised their "Powerful Computing Genie" as "The New Hewlett Packard 9100A personal computer"
Personal computers can be categorized by size and portability:
In their early years personal computer was interchangeable with Microcomputers and home computers. Often, the term "personal computer" is used exclusively for computers running a Microsoft Windows operating system, but this is erroneous. For example, a Macintosh running Mac OS and an IBM PC compatible running Linux are both personal computers. This confusion stems from the fact that the term "PC" is often used as a shorthand form for "IBM PC compatible" and historically Mac OS has run on non-IBM compatible hardware like the PowerPC architecture. Newer personal computing devices have had their OS wars with WindowsCE struggling with PalmOS in the PDA markets and now the cell phone devices have gotten powerful enough to start a whole new struggle to define the personal computer, it's operating system and how we use it in our daily lives.
Desktop computers
Laptop or notebooks
Personal digital assistants (PDAs)
Portable computers
Tablet computers
Wearable computers
Cell Phones Mainframes and large minicomputers
One early use of the term "personal computer" appeared in a November 3, 1962, New York Times article reporting John W. Mauchly's vision of future computing as detailed at a recent meeting of the American Institute of Industrial Engineers. Mauchly stated, "There is no reason to suppose the average boy or girl cannot be master of a personal computer.

Computers at home
It was the launch of the VisiCalc spreadsheet, initially for the Apple II (and later for the Atari 8-bit family, Commodore PET, and IBM PC) that turned the microcomputer into a business tool. In fact, An Apple employee discovered in 1980 that IBM's San Jose research lab had purchased several Apple IIs, solely to run VisiCalc.
This was followed by the August 12, 1981 release of the IBM PC, which would revolutionize the computer market. The Lotus 1-2-3, a combined spreadsheet (inspired by VisiCalc), presentation graphics, and simple database application, would become the PC's own killer application. Good word processor programs would also appear for many home computers, in particular the introduction of Microsoft Word for the Apple Macintosh in 1985 (while earlier versions of Word had been created for the PC, it became popular initially through the Macintosh).
In the January 3, 1983 issue of Time magazine, the personal computer was named the "Person of the Year" for 1982.

Back to business
During the 1990s, the power of personal computers increased radically, blurring the formerly sharp distinction between personal computers and multi-user computers, such as mainframes. Today higher-end computers often distinguish themselves from personal computers by greater reliability or greater ability to multitask, rather than by brute CPU ability alone.
In today's common usage, personal computer and PC usually indicate an IBM PC compatible. Due to this association, some manufacturers of personal computers that are not IBM PCs avoid explicitly using the terms to describe their products.
Due to networks, the Internet and such factors as digital rights management, modern personal computers are no longer the exclusive tools of their users. Support of desktop computers in business now requires as much bureaucracy and professional training as did operating a time-sharing system, with the drawback of much lower security and many users skilled enough to get into trouble but not skilled enough to get out.
Modern computers are thousands of times more powerful than those of only twenty years ago. Multi-core processors, a gigabyte of RAM and hard drives of several hundred gigabytes have become the norm. These numbers eclipse even supercomputers from past decades.

Today
Personal computers are normally operated by one user at a time to perform such general purpose tasks as word processing, Internet browsing, Internet faxing, e-mail and other digital messaging, multimedia playback, computer game play, computer programming, etc. The user of a modern personal computer may have significant knowledge of the operating environment and application programs, but is not necessarily interested in programming nor even able to write programs for the computer. Therefore, most software written primarily for personal computers tends to be designed with simplicity of use, or "user-friendliness" in mind. However, the software industry continuously provide a wide range of new products for use in personal computers, targeted at both the expert and the non-expert user.

Uses
This section describes the typical personal computer called a desktop computer because one can easily look inside the case. The other types of personal coputers have the same basic setup, but usually lack the peripherals.

Monitor
Motherboard
CPU (Microprocessor)
Primary storage (RAM)
Expansion cards
Power supply
Optical disc drive
Secondary storage (Hard disk)
Keyboard
Mouse Configuration

Main article: Computer hardware Computer components

Main article: Motherboard Motherboard

Main article: Central processing unit Central processing unit

Main article: Primary storage Main memory

Main article: Hard disk Mass storage

Main article: Video card Video card

Main article: Laptop Laptop computers

List of other non-IBM-PC-compatible business PCs
This is a list of non IBM PC compatible business personal computers (PC), and Personal Workstation (PW) computers, that came on the market before the IBM-PC (August 1981).

Apple III designed as a business system by Apple Inc.
Astrocom 760 by Astrocom Corporation
C4P and C8P systems made by Ohio Scientific
Commodore Business Machines (CBM) a series of mostly compatible machines by Commodore International
CompuColor 8001 by Intecolor
Cromemco (S-100 compatible computers)
DEC Professional (computer) from Digital Equipment Corporation - three models
The Digital Group (multiple platform microcomputers)
DPS-1 by Intersystems
Gimix (SS-50 SWTPC compatible computers)
Helix (SS-50 (and later SS-64) SWTPC compatible computers)
Midwest Scientific (SS-50 SWTPC compatible computers)
Morrow Designs (S-100 compatible computers)
NorthStar Horizon by North Star Computers
HP-85A From Hewlett-Packard
MSI computer systems from Midwest Scientific Instruments
M20 from Olivetti
Noval 760 by Noval/Gremlin
Ohio Scientific (multiple platfomrs micro computers)
QDP-100 and QDP-8100 systems from Quasar Computer Systems
RCC REX by Realistic Controls Corporation
S-100 bus systems, built from components made by various companies, mostly running CP/M
SBC/9 by Percom
SBS-8000 by Small Business systems
Sol-20 by Processor Technology
Sphere computer by Sphere inc.
Smoke Signal Broadcasting (SS-50 SWTPC compatible computers)
Superbrain by intertec Data Systems
Telmac 1800 by the Finnish company Telercas
SWTPC (South West Technical Products Corporation) systems
Tano Systems (SS-50 SWTPC compatible computers)
TRS-80 model I and Model II by Tandy Corporation
H-8 CP/M microcomputer by Heathkit
Z-89 by Zenith/Heathkit Pre-IBM-PC personal business computer systems
This is a list of non IBM PC compatible business personal computers (PC), and Personal Workstation (PW) computers, that came on the market after the IBM-PC (August 1981).

Acorn Archimedes & RiscPC
ACT Apricot by ACT (runs MS-DOS but is not IBM PC compatible.) Post-IBM-PC personal business computer systems

Linux
Microsoft Windows
Computer
CP/M
Desktop replacement computer
Gaming PC
History of computing hardware (1960s-present)
Home computer
HTPC
Laptop
Mainframe computer
Microcomputer
Minicomputer
Altair 8800
Osborne 1
Apple Inc., Apple II, Apple Lisa, and Macintosh
TRS-80, Commodore PET
Personal Computer Museum
Silent PC
Supercomputer
Workstation
Xerox Star
Public computer
List of computer system manufacturers Notes

John Markoff: What the Dormouse Said (ISBN 978-0143036760), Viking 2005. How the sixties counterculture shaped the personal computer industry.

2008-04-04T08:41:00.001-07:00

See also: List of Serbian flags
The flag of Serbia is a tricolour with Pan-Slavic colours, with three equal horizontal fields, red on the top, blue in the middle and white on the bottom, and the Coat of Arms of Serbia centered vertically and located left of center by one-seventh of the flag's length (the version without coat of arms was used as national flag in the meantime).
On June 5, 2006 Serbia proclaimed independence after Montenegro voted for independence from the state union. On June 8, 2006 the new flag was raised for the first time in front of the United Nations headquarters in New York City.

Design

Other official flags

History

Medieval flags
The oldest known description of a flag of Serbia is from 1281 description of treasury of king Stefan Vladislav, which was kept in Dubrovnik Republic. The description lists vexillum unum de zendato rubeo et blavo - a flag of fabric red and blue.. As Vladislav ruled from 1234 to 1243 and died after 1264, the flag was used earlier than it was described, around the middle XIII century.

Flag of Stefan Vladislav
The oldest known drawing of a flag of Serbia is from the 1339 map of Angelino Dulcert. The map depicts a number of flags, and Serbia is represented by a flag placed above Skoplje (Skopi) with the name Serbia (Seruja) near the hoist, which was characteristic for capital cities at the time of the drawing of the map. The flag is red two-headed eagle on yellow field.

Flag of Tsar Dusan
During the First Serbian Uprising, a large variety of flags was used. Among the early flags, the one described by Mateja Nenadović could be connected with today's flag: it was white-red-blue with three crosses
An early flag from 1804

A flag from before 1807

Regular army flag from 1809

Voivode flag from 1811

Flags of the First Serbian Uprising

Modern flags
1835 Sretenje Constitution prescribed the flag of Serbia as horizontal tricolour of red, white and steel blue (čelikasto-ugasita) stripes. The constitution was criticized, especially by Russia, and the flag was specifically singled out as being similar to the revolutionary flag of France

First introduction
Kingdom of Serbia used the same tricolour with the big coat of arms. The merchant ensign contained only the shield and the crown of the big coat of arms, therefore closely resembling the today's flag.
During the World War I, use of the flag was forbidden in occupied Serbia. After the war, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (Yugoslavia) was created (see Flag of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia). Serbia did not exist as a territorial division in Yugoslavia and didn't have any flag.

1882-1918 flag
After World War II, the League of Communists of Yugoslavia came to power in Yugoslavia, and split it into six republics, one of which was Serbia. The red star was used on the middle of the new flag of Serbia, as was the case with other flags of the Yugoslav Socialist Republics and very flag of Yugoslavia. Exactly the same flag was used as flag of Montenegro.

1945-1991 flag
After the breakup of Yugoslavia, the red star was removed from the flag..

1991-2004 flag
Montenegro has in its history had identical flags to that of Serbia. This was very common as Montenegrins are both regarded by Serbs and them selves as Serbs. It is still very common today to see political parties on Montenegro who support reunification with Serbia to carry these flags to rallies and other events.
(1910-1918) The Flag of the Kingdom of Montenegro was very similar if not identical to the Serbian flag apart from the Montenegrin coat of arms which features the same white double headed eagle Serbia has used since the 7th century.

An earlier version of the flag of Montenegro looked similar to the Serbian flag, but with a different hue of blue (azzure colour) and different internal dimensions (ratio 1:3).
Republika Srpska (a part of Bosnia and Herzegovina) uses the same flag but without the coat of arms.
The Serbian Orthodox Church uses the Serbian flag in a 1:4 or higher ratio embossed with the Serbian cross. Adaptations

Proper flag protocol
The state flag of Serbia is constantly flown on the entrance of a building of a state organ of Serbia, and displayed in their rooms. The National Assembly is flying it only during a session and during state holidays. Organs of provinces, Vojvodina and (in theory) Kosovo and Metohija, are flying it only on a state holiday..

State flag
The people's flag of Serbia is constantly flown on the entrance of the Assembly and organs of provinces and public services. It has to be displayed in an election room during an election for provincial or local organs..

People's flag
The President of Serbia and the President of the National Assembly of Serbia are using their Standards instead of the state flag.

Other flags
Neither state nor people's flag can be hoisted so that they touch the ground, nor be used as rests, tablecloths, carpets or curtains, nor to cover vehicles or other objects, nor to attire speaker platforms or tables, except as table flags. They must not be used if damaged or otherwise look unsuitable for use.

Correct display

Flag of Serbia and Montenegro
Flag of Republika Srpska
Flag of Montenegro

2008-04-03T08:17:00.001-07:00

Faber and Faber, often abbreviated to Faber, is an independent publishing house in the UK, notable in particular for publishing a great deal of poetry and for its former editor T. S. Eliot. Faber has a rich tradition of publishing a wide range of fiction, non fiction, drama, film and music books, as well as books for children. In 2006 the company was named Publisher of the Year.

Origins
Poetry was always to be a prime element in the Faber list and under T.S. Eliot's aegis W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Louis MacNeice soon joined Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Wyndham Lewis, John Gould Fletcher, Roy Campbell, James Joyce and Walter de la Mare.
Under Geoffrey Faber's chairmanship the board in 1929 included T.S. Eliot, Richard de la Mare, Charles Stewart and Frank Morley. This young and highly intelligent team built up a comprehensive and profitable catalogue which always had a distinctive physical identity and much of which is still in print. Biographies, memoirs, fiction, poetry, political and religious essays, art and architecture monographs, children's books, and a pioneering ecology list years ahead of its time, gave an unmistakable character to the productions of 24 Russell Square, the firm's Georgian offices in Bloomsbury. It also published T.S. Eliot's literary review, The Criterion.
In the Second World War, paper shortages meant profits were large, but almost all went in taxes and subsequent years were difficult. However, with recovery a new generation joined Faber, bringing in writers such as William Golding, Lawrence Durrell, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, W. S. Graham, Philip Larkin, P. D. James, Tom Stoppard and John Osborne. These last two, first published in the 1960s, represented the firm's growing commitment to modern drama, reflected in a pre-eminence that remains to the present day.

Role in publishing
Faber and Faber has continued to prosper in recent years and is now the last of the great independent publishing houses in London. Its commitment to continuity is reflected in the depth of its backlist, whilst the frontlist goes from strength to strength. Established names have been joined by new voices including Kazuo Ishiguro, Peter Carey, Orhan Pamuk and Barbara Kingsolver, and its arts lists continue to break new talent in poetry, drama, film and music.
Faber's American arm was sold in 1998 to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, where it remains an active imprint focusing on the arts and entertainment. Having published the theatrical works of Samuel Beckett for many years, the company acquired the rights to the remainder of his oeuvre from the publishing house of John Calder in 2007.

2008-04-02T10:15:00.001-07:00

This article is about the town of Zalaegerszeg, for the football club, see Zalaegerszegi TE
Zalaegerszeg listen (help·info) (Croatian: Jagarsek) is the administrative center of Zala county, Western Hungary.

History

Roman Catholic church (Baroque)
Old county hall (18th century)
Hevesi Sándor Theatre
Göcsej Museum and open air museum
Museum of Oil Industry
Kisfaludi Strobl collection Tourist sights

Zalaegerszegi TE, local football team Famous people
Zalaegerszeg is twinned with:

Klagenfurt, Austria
Zenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Dobric, Bulgaria
Varaždin, Croatia
Varkaus, Finland
Kusel, Germany
Marl, Germany
Gorizia, Italy
Krosno, Poland
Târgu Mureş, Romania
Surgut, Russia
Lendava, Slovenia
Kherson, Ukraine

2008-04-01T09:41:00.001-07:00

Music Technology is a term that refers to all forms of technology involved with the musical arts, in particular the use of electronic devices and computer software to facilitate playback, recording, composition, storage, and performance. Taught in many colleges and universities today, the subject involves the study of creative aspects of music production and music performance. Furthermore, the technical, scientific aspects of the medium such as acoustic science, programming, music psychology & sociology, and music industry business practices are studied.

2008-03-29T08:03:00.001-07:00

The Coriolis effect is the apparent deflection of moving objects from a straight path when they are viewed from a rotating frame of reference. The effect is named after Gaspard-Gustave Coriolis, a French scientist who described it in 1835, though the mathematics appeared in the tidal equations of Pierre-Simon Laplace in 1778. One of the most notable examples is the deflection of winds moving along the surface of the Earth to the right of the direction of travel in the Northern hemisphere and to the left of the direction of travel in the Southern hemisphere. This effect is caused by the rotation of the Earth and is responsible for the direction of the rotation of large cyclones: winds around the center of a cyclone rotate counterclockwise on the northern hemisphere and clockwise on the southern hemisphere.
The Coriolis effect is caused by the Coriolis force, which appears in the equation of motion in a rotating frame of reference. Sometimes this force is called a fictitious force (or pseudo force), because it does not appear when the motion is expressed in an inertial frame of reference. In such a frame, the motion is explained by the real impressed forces, together with inertia. In a rotating frame, the Coriolis and centrifugal forces are needed in the equation to correctly describe the motion.
Contrary to popular belief, the Coriolis effect is not the determining factor in the rotation of water in toilets or bathtubs (see the Draining bathtubs and toilets section below).

Formula
The Coriolis effect exists only when using a rotating reference frame. It is mathematically deduced from the law of inertia. Hence it does not correspond to any actual acceleration or force, but only the appearance thereof from the point of view of a rotating system.
The Coriolis effect exhibited by a moving object can be interpreted as being the sum of the effects of two different causes of equal magnitude.
The first cause is the change of the velocity of an object in time. The same velocity (in an inertial frame of reference where the normal laws of physics apply) will be seen as different velocities at different times in a rotating frame of reference. The apparent acceleration is proportional to the angular velocity of the reference frame (the rate at which the coordinate axes changes direction), and to the velocity of the object. This gives a term . The minus sign arises from the traditional definition of the cross product (right hand rule), and from the sign convention for angular velocity vectors.
The second cause is change of velocity in space. Different points in a rotating frame of reference have different velocities (as seen from an inertial frame of reference). In order for an object to move in a straight line it must therefore be accelerated so that its velocity changes from point to point by the same amount as the velocities of the frame of reference. The effect is proportional to the angular velocity (which determines the relative speed of two different points in the rotating frame of reference), and the velocity of the object perpendicular to the axis of rotation (which determines how quickly it moves between those points). This also gives a term .

Causes

The Coriolis effect is not a result of the curvature of the Earth, only of its rotation. (However, the value of the Coriolis parameter, , does vary with latitude, and that dependence is due to the Earth's shape.)
The fact that ballistic missiles and satellites appear to follow curved paths when plotted on common world maps is mainly due to the fact that the earth is spherical and the shortest distance between two points on the earth's surface (called a great circle) is usually not a straight line on those maps. Every two-dimensional (flat) map necessarily distorts the earth's curved (three-dimensional) surface in some way. Typically (as in the commonly used Mercator projection, for example), this distortion increases with proximity to the poles. In the northern hemisphere for example, a ballistic missile fired toward a distant target using the shortest possible route (a great circle) will appear on such maps to follow a path north of the straight line from target to destination, and then curve back toward the equator. This occurs because the latitudes, which are projected as straight horizontal lines on most world maps, are in fact circles on the surface of a sphere, which get smaller as they get closer to the pole. Being simply a consequence of the sphericity of the Earth, this would be true even if the Earth didn't rotate. The Coriolis effect is of course also present, but its effect on the plotted path is much smaller.
The Coriolis force should not be confused with the centrifugal force given by . A rotating frame of reference will always cause a centrifugal force no matter what the object is doing (unless that body is particle-like and lies on the axis of rotation), whereas the Coriolis force requires the object to be in motion relative to the rotating frame with a velocity that is not parallel to the rotation axis. Because the centrifugal force always exists, it can be easy to confuse the two, making simple explanations of the effect of Coriolis in isolation difficult. In particular, when is tangential to a circle centered on and perpendicular to the axis of rotation, the Coriolis force is parallel to the centrifugal force. It is then possible to construct a rotating reference frame of a different rotational speed, where is zero and there is no Coriolis force What the Coriolis effect is not
To demonstrate the Coriolis effect, a parabolic turntable can be used. On a flat turntable the centrifugal force, which always acts outwards from the rotation axis, would force co-rotating objects off the edge. But if the surface of the turntable has the correct parabolic bowl shape and is rotated at the correct rate, then the component of gravity tangential to the bowl surface will exactly equal the centripetal force necessary to keep the water rotating at its velocity and radius of curvature. This allows the Coriolis force to be displayed in isolation. When a container of fluid is rotating on a turntable, the surface of the fluid naturally assumes the correct parabolic shape. This fact may be exploited to make a parabolic turntable by using a fluid that sets after several hours, such as a synthetic resin.
Discs cut from cylinders of dry ice can be used as pucks, moving around almost frictionlessly over the surface of the parabolic turntable, allowing effects of Coriolis on dynamic phenomena to show themselves. To get a view of the motions as seen from the reference frame rotating with the turntable, a video camera is attached to the turntable so as to co-rotate with the turntable. Because this reference frame rotates several times a minute, rather than only once a day like the Earth, the Coriolis acceleration produced is many times larger, and so easier to observe on small time and spatial scales, than is the Coriolis acceleration caused by the rotation of the Earth.
In a manner of speaking, the Earth is analogous such a turntable. The rotation has caused the planet to settle on a spheroid shape such that the normal force, the gravitational force, and the centrifugal force exactly balance each other on a "horizontal" surface. (See equatorial bulge.)
The Coriolis effect caused by the rotation of the Earth can be seen indirectly through the motion of a Foucault pendulum.

Visualization of the Coriolis effect
A misconception in popular culture is that the Coriolis effect determines the direction in which bathtubs or toilets drain, such that water always drains in one direction in the Northern Hemisphere, and in the other direction in the Southern Hemisphere. This urban legend has been perpetuated by several television programs, including an episode of The Simpsons and The X-Files.
When the water is being drawn towards the drain, the radius with which it is spinning around it decreases, so its rate of rotation increases from the low background level to a noticeable spin in order to conserve its angular momentum (the same effect as ice skaters bringing their arms in to cause them to spin faster). As shown by Ascher Shapiro in a 1961 educational video (Vorticity, Part 1), this effect can indeed reveal the influence of the Coriolis force on drain direction, but only under carefully controlled laboratory conditions. In a large, circular, symmetrical container (ideally over 1m in diameter and conical), still water (whose motion is so little that over the course of a day, displacements are small compared to the size of the container) escaping through a very small hole, will drain in a cyclonic fashion: counterclockwise in the Northern hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern hemisphere—the same direction as the Earth rotates with respect to the corresponding pole.

Draining bathtubs and toilets
Perhaps the most important instance of the Coriolis effect is in the large-scale dynamics of the oceans and the atmosphere. In meteorology, it is convenient to use a rotating frame of reference where the Earth is stationary. The fictitious centrifugal and Coriolis forces must then be introduced. The former, however, is cancelled by the non-spherical shape of the earth (see the turntable analogy above). Hence the Coriolis force is the only fictitious force to have a significant impact on calculations.

Coriolis in meteorology
If a low-pressure area forms in the atmosphere, air will tend to flow in towards it, but will be deflected perpendicular to its velocity by the Coriolis acceleration. A system of equilibrium can then establish itself creating circular movement, or a cyclonic flow.
The force balance is largely between the pressure gradient force acting towards the low-pressure area and the Coriolis force acting away from the center of the low pressure. To get some grip on the size of the effect, consider a high-pressure area at 1020 millibars at a distance of 1000 km from a low at 980 millibars. The pressure gradient is then 0.004 N/m Cyclones cannot form on the equator, because in the equatorial region the coriolis parameter is small, and exactly zero on the equator.

Flow around a low-pressure area
An air or water mass moving with speed subject only to the Coriolis force travels in a circular trajectory called an 'inertial circle'. Since the force is directed at right angles to the motion of the particle, it will move with a constant speed, and perform a complete circle with frequency $f$ . The magnitude of the Coriolis force also determines the radius of this circle:
.
On the Earth, a typical mid-latitude value for $f$ is 10; hence for a typical atmospheric speed of 10 m/s the radius is 100 km, with a period of about 14 hours. In the ocean, where a typical speed is closer to 10 cm/s, the radius of an inertial circle is 1 km. These inertial circles are clockwise in the northern hemisphere (where trajectories are bent to the right) and anti-clockwise in the southern hemisphere.
If the rotating system is a parabolic turntable, then $f$ is constant and the trajectories are exact circles. On a rotating planet, $f$ varies with latitude and the paths of particles do not form exact circles. Since the parameter $f$ varies as the sine of the latitude, the radius of the oscillations associated with a given speed are smallest at the poles (latitude = ±90°), and increase toward the equator.

Inertial circles
Further information: Rossby number
The time, space and velocity scales are important in determining the importance of the Coriolis effect. Whether rotation is important in a system can be determined by its Rossby number, which is the ratio of the velocity, $U$ , of a system to the product of the Coriolis parameter, $f$ , and the length scale, $L$ , of the motion:
.
A small Rossby number signifies a system which is strongly affected by rotation, and a large Rossby number signifies a system in which rotation is unimportant.
An atmospheric system moving at U = 10 m/s occupying a spatial distance of L = 1000 km, has a Rossby number of approximately 0.1. A man playing catch may throw the ball at U = 30 m/s in a garden of length L = 50 m. The Rossby number in this case would be about = 6000. Needless to say, one does not worry about which hemisphere one is in when playing catch in the garden. However, an unguided missile obeys exactly the same physics as a baseball, but may travel far enough and be in the air long enough to notice the effect of Coriolis. Long-range shells in the Northern Hemisphere landed close to, but to the right of, where they were aimed until this was noted. (Those fired in the southern hemisphere landed to the left.)
The Rossby number can also tell us about the bathtub. If the length scale of the tub is about L=1m, and the water moves towards the drain at about 60cm/s, then the Rossby number is about 6 000. Thus, the bathtub is, in terms of scales, much like a game of catch, and rotation is likely to be unimportant.

Other terrestrial effects
The practical impact of the Coriolis effect is mostly caused by the horizontal acceleration component produced by horizontal motion.
There are other components of the Coriolis effect. Eastward-traveling objects will be deflected upwards (feel lighter), while westward-traveling objects will be deflected downwards (feel heavier). This is known as the Eötvös effect. This aspect of the Coriolis effect is greatest near the equator. The force produced by this effect is similar to the horizontal component, but the much larger vertical forces due to gravity and pressure mean that it is generally unimportant dynamically.
In addition, objects traveling upwards or downwards will be deflected to the west or east respectively. This effect is also the greatest near the equator. Since vertical movement is usually of limited extent and duration, the size of the effect is smaller and requires precise instruments to detect.

Other aspects of the Coriolis effect

Coriolis elsewhere
A practical application of the Coriolis effect is the mass flow meter, an instrument that measures the mass flow rate and density of a fluid flowing through a tube. The operating principle, introduced in 1977 by Micro Motion Inc., involves inducing a vibration of the tube through which the fluid passes. The vibration, though it is not completely circular, provides the rotating reference frame which gives rise to the Coriolis effect. While specific methods vary according to the design of the flow meter, sensors monitor and analyze changes in frequency, phase shift, and amplitude of the vibrating flow tubes. The changes observed represent the mass flow rate and density of the fluid.

Coriolis flow meter
In polyatomic molecules, the molecule motion can be described by a rigid body rotation and internal vibration of atoms about their equilibrium position. As a result of the vibrations of the atoms, the atoms are in motion relative to the rotating coordinate system of the molecule. Coriolis effects will therefore be present and will cause the atoms to move in a direction perpendicular to the original oscillations. This leads to a mixing in molecular spectra between the rotational and vibrational levels.

Molecular physics
The Coriolis effects became important in external ballistics for calculating the trajectories of very long-range artillery shells. The most famous historical example was the Paris gun, used by the Germans during World War I to bombard Paris from a range of about 120 km. The Coriolis effect plays a role in almost all modern artillery trajectory calculations.

Insect flight

2008-03-28T08:19:00.001-07:00

This article is part of the series: Politics and government of the Republic of Macedonia
Politics of the Republic of Macedonia occurs within the framework of a parliamentary representative democratic republic, whereby the Prime Minister is the head of government, and of a pluriform multi-party system. Executive power is exercised by the government. Legislative power is vested in both the government and parliament. The Judiciary is independent of the executive and the legislature.

President

Branko Crvenkovski Prime Minister

Nikola Gruevski Assembly
Political parties Elections:

President 2004 Parliament 2006
Municipalities
Albanians Human rights Language and politics
Foreign relations

EU accession Naming issue Executive branch
The Assembly (Sobranie) has 120 members, elected for a four year term, by proportional representation.

Legislative branch
For other political parties see List of political parties in the Republic of Macedonia. An overview on elections and election results is included in Elections in the Republic of Macedonia.

Main article: Macedonian presidential election, 2004 Political parties and elections
Judiciary power is exercised by courts, with the court system being headed by the Judicial Supreme Court, Constitutional Court and the Republican Judicial Council. The assembly appoints the judges.

2008-03-27T10:12:00.001-07:00

Edgar Purnell Hooley (1860 - 1942) is the inventor of Tarmac.
He was the County Surveyor of Nottinghamshire. He was passing a tarworks in 1901. He saw that a barrel of tar had spilled on the roadway, and in an attempt to reduce the mess, gravel had been dumped on top of it. The area was remarkably dust-free compared to the surrounding road, and it inspired Hooley to develop and patent Tarmac in Britain.
He called his company Tar Macadam (Purnell Hooley's Patent) Syndicate Limited, but unfortunately he had trouble selling his product as he was not an experienced businessman. His company was soon bought out by the Wolverhampton MP, Sir Alfred Hickman, the owner of a steelworks which produced large quantities of waste slag. The Tarmac company was relaunched in 1905, and became an immediate success: it remains a major player in the UK market for heavy building materials.

Patents

Hooley, E. Purnell, U.S. Patent 765,975 , "Apparatus for the preparation of tar macadam", July 26, 1904.

2008-03-26T09:34:00.001-07:00
Law and Politics
Arbitrary actions are closely related to teleology, the study of purpose. Actions lacking a telos, a goal, are necessarily arbitrary. With no end to measure against, there can be no standard applied to choices, so all decisions are alike. Note that arbitrary or random methods in the standard sense of arbitrary may not qualify as arbitrary choices philosophically, if they were done in furtherance of a larger purpose; in the examples above, discipline in school and avoiding overcrowding at gas stations.
Nihilism is the philosophy that believes that there is no purpose in the universe, and that every choice is arbitrary. According to nihilism, the universe contains no value and is essentially meaningless. Because the universe and all of its constituents contain no higher goal for us to make subgoals from, all aspects of human life and experiences are completely arbitrary. There is no right or wrong decision, thought or practice, and whatever choice a human being makes is just as meaningless and empty as any other choice he or she could've made.
Many brands of theism, the belief in a deity or deities, believe that everything has a purpose and that nothing is arbitrary. In these philosophies, God created the universe for a reason, and every event flows from that. Even seemingly random events cannot escape God's hand and purpose. This is somewhat related to the argument from design, the argument for God's existence because a purpose can be found in the universe.
Arbitrariness is also related to ethics, the philosophy of decision-making. Even if a person has a goal, they may choose to attempt to achieve it in ways that may be considered arbitrary. Rationalism holds that knowledge comes about through intellectual calculation and deduction; many rationalists (though not all) apply this to ethics as well. All decisions should be made through reason and logic, not via whim or how one "feels" what is right. Randomness may occasionally be acceptable as part of a subtask in furtherance of a larger goal, but not in general.

Mathematics

Arbitration

2008-03-25T08:57:00.001-07:00

Five for Fighting is the stage name of American singer-songwriter John Ondrasik. His 2000 album America Town went platinum in the U.S. largely due to the success of the song "Superman (It's Not Easy)" following the September 11 attacks in 2001. The 2004 album The Battle for Everything has also enjoyed chart success in the United States. Ondrasik has also released a DualDisc of his 2004 album which has one side containing The Battle for Everything in its entirety and the other side being a DVD containing bonus footage and the "100 Years" music video. Five for Fighting's fourth album, Two Lights, was released on August 1, 2006.

It may violate Wikipedia's policy on biographies of living persons. Tagged since September 2007. It needs additional references or sources for verification. Tagged since September 2007. It contains a trivia section. Tagged since September 2007.
America Town

Main article: The Battle for Everything The Battle for Everything

Main article: Two Lights (album) Two Lights
In the spring of 2007, Ondrasik created the first video charity website. The website allows fans to upload videos answering the central question, "What Kind of World do You Want?" from his hit song,"World". Each time a fan-made video is viewed, up to .49 cents goes to a selected charity. The charities are: Augie's Quest (www.augiesquest.org) Autism Speaks (www.autismspeaks.org) Fisher House Foundation (www.fisherhouse.org) Save the Children (www.savethechildren.org)

Philanthropy
Backcountry is a live CD/DVD to be released on November 6th, 2007.

Back Country

Discography

1997: Message for Albert
2000: America Town #54 U.S., #30 Australia
2004: Acoustic Live (EP)
2004: The Battle for Everything #20 U.S.
2004: 2+2 Makes 5 (EP)
2006: The Battle for Everything (DualDisc)
2006: The Riddle (EP)
2006: Two Lights #8 U.S.
2007: Backcountry Singles

On the weekend of January 27/28, 2007, John Ondrasik filled in for legendary radio host Casey Kasem on the American Top 20 and American Top 10 radio programs. On AT20, he counted down his own hit "World," and on AT10 he counted down his own hit "The Riddle."
In 2005 he recorded the song "Penguin Lament" for Sandra Boynton's "Dog Train" book and CD.
In March 2007, Ondrasik began appearing in a series of short videos profiling Republican presidential contenders in an interview format at gather.com. So far he has interviewed Mike Huckabee[2] and Newt Gingrich[3].
John Ondrasik co-wrote the Josh Groban song "February Song" for Groban's third album, Awake.

2008-03-24T10:35:00.001-07:00

Deontic logic is the field of logic that is concerned with obligation, permission, and related concepts. Alternatively, a deontic logic is a formal system that attempts to capture the essential logical features of these concepts. Typically, a deontic logic uses OA to mean it is obligatory that A, (or it ought to be (the case) that A), and PA to mean it is permitted (or permissible) that A. The term deontic is derived from the ancient Greek déon, meaning, roughly, that which is binding or proper.

History
Philosophers from the Indian Mimamsa school to those of Ancient Greece have remarked on the formal logical relations of deontic concepts In his Elementa juris naturalis, Leibniz notes the logical relations between the licitum, illicitum, debitum, and indifferens are equivalent to those between the possible, impossible, necessarium, and contingens respectively.
Pre-History of Deontic Logic
Ernst Mally, a pupil of Alexius Meinong, was the first to propose a formal system of deontic logic in his Grundgesetze des Sollens and he founded it on the syntax of Whitehead's and Russell's propositional calculus. Mally's deontic vocabulary consisted of the logical constants U and ∩, unary connective !, and binary connectives f and ∞. * Mally read !A as "A ought to be the case". * He read A f B as "A requires B" . * He read A ∞ B as "A and B require each other." * He read U as "the unconditionally obligatory" . * He read ∩ as "the unconditionally forbidden". Mally defined f, ∞, and ∩ as follows:
Def. f. A f B = A → !B Def. ∞. A ∞ B = (A f B) & (B f A) Def. ∩. ∩ = ¬U Mally proposed five informal principles:
(i) If A requires B and if B then C, then A requires C. (ii) If A requires B and if A requires C, then A requires B and C. (iii) A requires B if and only if it is obligatory that if A then B. (iv) The unconditionally obligatory is obligatory. (v) The unconditionally obligatory does not require its own negation. He formalized these principles and took them as his axioms:
I. ((A f B) & (B → C)) → (A f C) II. ((A f B) & (A f C)) → (A f (B & C)) III. (A f B) ↔ !(A → B) IV. ∃U !U V. ¬(U f ∩) From these axioms Mally deduced 35 theorems, many of which he rightly considered strange. Karl Menger showed that !A ↔ A is a theorem and thus that the introduction of the ! sign is irrelevant and that A ought to be the case iff A is the case. After Menger, philosophers no longer considered Mally's system viable. Gert Lokhorst lists Mally's 35 theorems and gives a proof for Menger's theorem at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy under Mally's Deontic Logic. The first plausible system of deontic logic was proposed by G. H. von Wright in his paper Deontic Logic in the philosophical journal Mind in 1951. (Von Wright was also the first to use the term "deontic" in English to refer to this kind of logic although Mally published the German paper Deontik in 1926.) Since the publication of von Wright's seminal paper, many philosophers and computer scientists have investigated and developed systems of deontic logic. Nevertheless, to this day deontic logic remains one of the most controversial and least agreed-upon areas of logic. G. H. von Wright did not base his 1951 deontic logic on the syntax of the propositional calculus as Mally had done, but was instead influenced by alethic modal logics, which Mally had not benefited from. In 1964, von Wright published A New System of Deontic Logic, which was a return to the syntax of the propositional calculus and thus a significantly return to Mally's system. (For more on von Wright's departure from and return to the syntax of the propositional calculus, see Deontic Logic: A Personal View and A New System of Deontic Logic, both by Georg Henrik von Wright.) G. H. von Wright's adoption of the modal logic of possibility and necessity for the purposes of normative reasoning was a return to Leibniz.

Mally's First Deontic Logic and von Wright's First Plausible Deontic Logic
In von Wright's first system, obligatoriness and permissibility were treated as features of acts. It was found not much later that a deontic logic of propositions could be given a simple and elegant Kripke-style semantics, and von Wright himself joined this movement. The deontic logic so specified came to be known as "standard deontic logic," often referred to as SDL, KD, or simply D. It can be axiomatized by adding the following axioms to a standard axiomatization of classical propositional logic:

In English, these axioms say, respectively:
FA, meaning it is forbidden that A, can be defined (equivalently) as or .
The propositional system D can be extended to include quantifiers in a relatively straightforward way.

If it ought to be that A implies B, then if it ought to be that A, it ought to be that B;
If it ought to be that A, then it is permissible that A. Standard deontic logic
An important problem of deontic logic is that of how to properly represent conditional obligations, e.g. If you smoke (s), then you ought to use an ashtray (a). It is not clear that either of the following representations is adequate:

Under the first representation it is vacuously true that if you commit a forbidden act, then you ought to commit any other act, regardless of whether that second act was obligatory, permitted or forbidden (Von Wright 1956, cited in Aqvist 1994). Under the second representation, we are vulnerable to the gentle murder paradox, where the plausible statements if you murder, you ought to murder gently, you do commit murder and to murder gently you must murder imply the less plausible statement: you ought to murder.
Some deontic logicians have responded to this problem by developing dyadic deontic logics, which contain a binary deontic operators:
means it is obligatory that A, given B
means it is permissible that A, given B.
(The notation is modeled on that used to represent conditional probability.) Dyadic deontic logic escapes some of the problems of standard (unary) deontic logic, but it is subject to some problems of its own.

Dyadic deontic logic
Many other varieties of deontic logic have been developed, including non-monotonic deontic logics, paraconsistent deontic logics, and dynamic deontic logics.

Other variations
Deontic logic faces Jørgensen's Dilemma. Norms cannot be true or false, but truth and truth values seem essential to logic. There are two possible answers:

Deontic logic handles norm propositions, not norms;
There might be alternative concepts to truth, e.g. validity or success, as it is defined in speech act theory. Jørgensen's Dilemma

Modal logic
Imperative logic
Norm (philosophy)

2008-03-23T08:40:00.001-07:00

Hess' Law is a law of physical chemistry named for Germain Hess's expansion of the Hess Cycle and used to predict the enthalpy change and conservation of energy (denoted as state function ΔH) regardless of the path through which it is to be determined.

Use
Typical table for making a Hess cycle:
Using this ΔH_f

2008-03-22T08:38:00.001-07:00

Hannah Gordon (born 9 April 1941) is a Scottish actress who is well known in the United Kingdom for her television work, including Upstairs, Downstairs, Telford's Change, My Wife Next Door and an appearance in the final episode of One Foot in the Grave.

Early life
Having married cameraman Norman Warwick, they had a son Ben, and Gordon returned to work after a year out in 1974.

2008-03-21T08:02:00.001-07:00

Descriptive statistics are used to describe the basic features of the data in a study. They provide simple summaries about the sample and the measures. Together with simple graphics analysis, they form the basis of virtually every quantitative analysis of data. Various techniques that are commonly used are classified as:
In general, statistical data can be described as a list of subjects or units and the data associated with each of them. Although most research uses many data types for each unit, we will limit ourselves to just one data item each for this simple introduction.
We have two objectives for our summary:
When we are summarizing a quantity like length or weight or age, it is common to answer the first question with the arithmetic mean, the median, or the mode. Sometimes, we choose specific values from the cumulative distribution function called quantiles.
The most common measures of variability for quantitative data are the variance; its square root, the standard deviation; the range; interquartile range; and the average absolute deviation (average deviation).

Graphical description in which we use graphs to summarize data.
Tabular description in which we use tables to summarize data.
Summary statistics in which we calculate certain values to summarize data.
We want to choose a statistic that shows how different units seem similar. Statistical textbooks call the solution to this objective, a measure of central tendency.
We want to choose another statistic that shows how they differ. This kind of statistic is often called a measure of statistical variability. Steps in descriptive statistics

Collect data
Classify data
Summarize data
Present data
Proceed to inferential statistics if there are enough data to draw a conclusion.

2008-03-20T09:17:00.001-07:00

This article is about the Canadian province. For the similar historical entity, see Province of Quebec (1763-1791). For the city, see Quebec City. For other uses, see Quebec (disambiguation) and Québécois (disambiguation).
Coordinates: 53°45′N, 71°59′W
Quebec (pronounced [kʰwəˈbɛk] or [kʰəˈbɛk]) or, in French, Québec (pronounced [kebɛk]), is a province in Canada.
Affectionately known as la belle province ("the beautiful province"), Quebec is bordered to the west by the province of Ontario, James Bay and Hudson Bay. To the north are the Hudson Strait and Ungava Bay, to the east the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, the provinces of New Brunswick and Newfoundland and Labrador, and to the south the United States (the states of New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine). It also shares maritime borders with the Territory of Nunavut and the provinces of Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia.
Quebec is Canada's largest province by area and its second-largest administrative division; only the territory of Nunavut is larger. It is the second most populated province, and most of its inhabitants live along or close to the banks of the Saint Lawrence River. The central and north portion of the province is sparsely populated and inhabited by the aboriginal peoples of Canada. Quebec operates North America's largest and most extensive civil service.
The official language of Quebec is French; it is the sole Canadian province whose population is mainly French Canadian, and where English is not an official language at the provincial level.
Quebec, then called Canada, formed part of the colonial empire of New France until the Seven Years' War, when it was conquered by Great Britain; the 1763 Treaty of Paris formally transferred the colony to British possession. After the Constitutional Act of 1791, it became known as Lower Canada (with Ontario being Upper Canada, the names derived from elevation, not latitude). In 1840, Quebec became Eastern Canada after the British Parliament unified Upper and Lower Canada on the recommendation of Lord Durham. Quebec was one of the first 4 provinces to join the Canadian Confederation in 1867.
While the province's substantial natural resources have long been the mainstay of its economy, Quebec has renewed itself to function effectively in the knowledge economy: information and communication technologies, aerospace, biotechnology, and health industries.

Geography
In 1870, Canada purchased Rupert's Land from the Hudson's Bay Company and over the next few decades the Parliament of Canada transferred portions of this territory to Quebec that would more than triple the size of the province. In 1898, the Canadian Parliament passed the first Quebec Boundary Extension Act that expanded the provincial boundaries northward to include the lands of the aboriginal Cree. This was followed by the addition of the District of Ungava through the Quebec Boundaries Extension Act of 1912 that added the northernmost lands of the aboriginal Inuit to create the modern Province of Quebec.

Provincial boundary expansions
As a result of the boundary expansions, the province currently occupies a vast territory (nearly three times the size of France), most of which is very sparsely populated. More than 90 percent of Quebec's area lies within the Canadian Shield and includes the greater part of the Labrador Peninsula. The most populated region is the St. Lawrence River valley in the south, where the capital, Quebec City, and the largest city, Montreal, are situated. North of Montreal are the Laurentians, a mountain range, and to the east are the Appalachian Mountains which extend into the Eastern Townships and Gaspésie regions. Quebec's highest mountain is Mont D'Iberville, which is located on the border with Newfoundland and Labrador in the northeastern part of the province. The Gaspé Peninsula juts into the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the east.
The northern region of Nunavik is subarctic or arctic and is mostly inhabited by Inuit. A major hydro-electric project is found on the La Grande and Eastmain rivers in the James Bay region (the La Grande Complex) and on the Manicouagan River, north of the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

Current territory
Quebec has three main climate regions. Southern and western Quebec, including most of the major population centres, have a humid continental climate (Koppen climate classification Dfb) with warm, humid summers and long, cold winters. The main climatic influences are from western and northern Canada which move eastward and from the southern and central United States that move northward. Due to the influence of both storm systems from the core of North America and the Atlantic Ocean, precipitation is abundant throughout the year, with most areas receiving more than 1,000 mm (40 inches) of precipitation, including over 300 cm (120 inches) of snow in many areas. Severe summer weather (such as tornadoes and severe thunderstorms) are far less common than in southern Ontario, although they occasionally occur.
Most of central Quebec has a subarctic climate (Koppen Dfc). Winters here are long and among the coldest in eastern Canada, while summers are warm but very short due to the higher latitude and the greater influence of Arctic air masses. Precipitation is also somewhat less than farther south, except at some of the higher elevations.
The northern regions of Quebec have an arctic climate (Koppen ET), with very cold winters and short, much cooler summers. The primary influences here are the Arctic Ocean currents (such as the Labrador Current) and continental air masses from the High Arctic.

Climate

Main article: History of Quebec History
At the time of first European contact and later colonization, Algonquian, Iroquoian and Inuit groups were the peoples of what is now Québec. Their lifestyles and cultures reflected the land on which they lived. Seven Algonquian groups lived nomadic lives based on hunting, gathering, and fishing in the rugged terrain of the Canadian Shield: (James Bay Cree, Innu, Algonquins) and Appalachian Mountains (Mi'kmaq, Abenaki). St. Lawrence Iroquoians lived more settled lives, planting squash and maize in the fertile soils of St. Lawrence Valley. The Inuit continue to fish, whale, and seal in the harsh Arctic climate along the coasts of Hudson and Ungava Bay. These peoples traded fur and food, and sometimes warred with each other.
The name "Quebec", which comes from a Míkmaq word meaning "strait, narrows", originally meant the narrowing of the St. Lawrence River off what is currently Quebec City. There have been variations in spelling of the name:

Québecq — Levasseur, 1601
Kébec — Lescarbot, 1609
Québec — Champlain, 1613 First Nations: before 1500
Basque whalers and fishermen traded furs with Saguenay natives throughout the 1500s. [2]
The first French explorer to reach Quebec was Jacques Cartier, who planted a cross either in Gaspé in 1534 or at Old Fort Bay on the Lower North Shore. He sailed into the St. Lawrence River in 1535 and established an ill-fated colony near present-day Quebec City at the site of Stadacona, an Iroquoian village.

Early European exploration: 1500

Main article: New France New France
In 1753 France began building a series of forts in the British Ohio Country. They refused to leave after being notified by the British Governor and, in 1754, George Washington launched an attack on the French Fort Duquesne (now Pittsburgh) in the Ohio Valley in an attempt to enforce the British claim to take territory. This frontier battle set the stage for the French and Indian War in North America. By 1756, France and Britain were battling the Seven Years' War worldwide. In 1758, the British mounted an attack on New France by sea and took the French fort at Louisbourg.
On 13 September 1759, General James Wolfe defeated General Louis-Joseph de Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham outside Quebec City. France ceded its North American possessions to Great Britain through the Treaty of Paris (1763). By the British Royal Proclamation of 1763, Canada (part of New France) was renamed the Province of Quebec.
In 1774, fearful that the French-speaking population of Quebec (as the colony was now called) would side with the rebels of the Thirteen Colonies to the south, the British Parliament passed the Quebec Act giving recognition to French law, Catholic religion and French language in the colony; before that Catholics had been excluded from public office and recruitment of priests and brothers forbidden, effectively shutting down Quebec's schools and colleges. The first British policy of assimilation (1763-1774) was deemed a failure. Both the petitions and demands of the Canadiens' élites, and Governor Guy Carleton, played an important part in convincing London of dropping the assimilation scheme, but the looming American revolt was certainly a factor. By the Quebec Act, the Quebec people obtained their first Charter of rights. That paved the way to later official recognition of the French language and French culture. The Act allowed Canadiens to maintain French civil law and sanctioned the freedom of religious choice, allowing the Roman Catholic Church to remain. It also restored the Ohio Valley to Quebec, reserving the territory for the fur trade.
The act, designed to placate one North American colony, had the opposite effect among its neighbors to the south. The Quebec Act was among the Intolerable Acts that infuriated American colonists, who launched the American Revolution. A 1775 invasion by the American Continental Army met with early success, but was later repelled at Quebec City.

Conquest of New France
When the American army came to Quebec they found many sympathetic supporters. According to Baby, Tachereau and Williams, as many as 747 peoples in Quebec took up active service with the Americans. Most notably Clément Gosselin of the 2nd Canadian Regiment. At sea, Louis-Philippe de Vaudreuil beat the British Navy at the Battle of Yorktown in 1781. John Graves Simcoe, the founder of Ontario, was soundly defeated by the French Cavalry of the Duke of Lauzun, who was brought to America by Louis-Philippe.
William Howe who led the attack on the Plains of Abraham before Wolfe, was met by the 2nd Canadian Regiment at the Battle of Brandywine in 1777. This was a diversion battle while other Quebecers in the 1st Canadian Regiment of James Livingston defeated John Burgoyne at the Battle of Saratoga in 1777.
At the end of the war, 50,000 Loyalists came to Canada and settled amongst a population of 90,000 French people. English Canada was built by the British who were defeated by the Americans, French and Quebecers at the Battle of Yorktown.
The American Revolutionary War was ultimately successful in winning the independence of the Thirteen Colonies. With the Treaty of Paris (1783), the British would cede its territory south of the Great Lakes to the new United States of America.

The English defeat at Yorktown 1781

Main article: Lower Canada Rebellion The Patriotes' Rebellion in Lower and Upper Canada
After the rebellions, Lord Durham was asked to undertake a study and prepare a report on the matter and to offer a solution for the British Parliament to assess.
The final report recommended that the population of Lower Canada be assimilated. Following Durham's Report, the British government merged the two colonial provinces into one Province of Canada in 1840 with the Act of Union.
However, the political union proved contentious. Reformers in both Canada West (formerly Upper Canada) and Canada East (formerly Lower Canada) worked to repeal limitations on the use of the French language in the Legislature. The two colonies remained distinct in administration, election, and law.
In 1848, Baldwin and LaFontaine, allies and leaders of the Reformist party, obtained the grant (from Lord Elgin) for responsible government and returned the French language to legal status in the Legislature.

Act of Union
In the 1860s, the delegates from the colonies of British North America (Canada, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland) met in a series of conferences to discuss self-governing status for a new confederation.
The first Charlottetown Conference took place in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island followed by the Quebec Conference in Quebec City which led to a delegation going to London, England to put forth the proposal for the national union.
As a result of those deliberations, in 1867 the Parliament of the United Kingdom passed the British North America Act, providing for the Confederation of most of these provinces.
The former Province of Canada was divided into its two previous parts as the provinces of Ontario (Upper Canada) and Quebec (Lower Canada).

New Brunswick and Nova Scotia joined Ontario and Quebec in the new Dominion of Canada.
Prince Edward Island joined in 1873 and the Dominion of Newfoundland entered Confederation in 1949. Canadian Confederation

Main article: Quiet Revolution The "Quiet Revolution"
Lévesque and his party had run in the 1970 and 1973 Quebec elections under a platform of separating Quebec from the rest of Canada. The party failed to win control of Quebec's National Assembly both times — though its share of the vote increased from 23% to 30% — and Lévesque himself was defeated both times in the riding he contested. In the 1976 election, he softened his message by promising a referendum (plebiscite) on sovereignty-association rather than outright separation, by which Quebec would have independence in most government functions but share some other ones, such as a common currency, with Canada. On November 15, 1976, Lévesque and the Parti Québécois won control of the provincial government for the first time. The question of sovereignty-association was placed before the voters in the 1980 Quebec referendum. During the campaign, Pierre Trudeau promised that a vote for the NO side was a vote for reforming Canada. Trudeau advocated the patriation of Canada's Constitution from the United Kingdom. The existing constitutional document, the British North America Act, could only be amended by the United Kingdom Parliament upon a request by the Canadian parliament.
Sixty percent of the Quebec electorate voted against the proposition. Polls showed that the overwhelming majority of English and immigrant Quebecers voted against, and that French Quebecers were almost equally divided, with older voters less in favour, and younger voters more in favour. After his loss in the referendum, Lévesque went back to Ottawa to start negotiating a new constitution with Trudeau, his minister of Justice Jean Chrétien and the nine other provincial premiers. Lévesque insisted Quebec be able to veto any future constitutional amendments. The negotiations quickly reached a stand-still.
Then on the night of November 4, 1981 (widely known in Quebec as La nuit des longs couteaux or the "Night of the Long Knives"'), Federal Justice Minister Jean Chretien met all the provincial premiers except René Lévesque to sign the document that would eventually become the new Canadian constitution. The next morning, they put Lévesque in front of the "fait accompli." Lévesque refused to sign the document, and returned to Quebec. In 1982, Trudeau had the new constitution approved by the British Parliament, with Quebec's signature still missing (a situation that persists to this day). The Supreme Court of Canada confirmed Trudeau's assertion that every province's approval is not required to amend the constitution.
In subsequent years, two attempts were made to gain Quebec's approval of the constitution. The first was the Meech Lake Accord of 1987, which was finally abandoned in 1990 when the provinces of Manitoba and Newfoundland refused to support it. This led to the formation of the sovereignist Bloc Québécois party in Ottawa under the leadership of Lucien Bouchard, who had resigned from the federal cabinet. The second attempt, the Charlottetown Accord of 1992, was rejected by 56.7% of all Canadians and 57% of Quebecers. This result caused a split in the Quebec Liberal Party that led to the formation of the new Action Démocratique (Democratic Action) party led by Mario Dumont and Jean Allaire.
On October 30, 1995, with the Parti Québécois back in power since 1994, a second referendum on sovereignty took place. This time, it was rejected by a slim majority (50.6% NO to 49.4% YES); a clear majority of French-speaking Quebecers voted in favour of sovereignty.
The referendum was enshrouded in controversy. Federalists complained that an unusually high number of ballots had been rejected in pro-federalist areas, notably in the largely Jewish and Greek riding of Chomedey (11.7 % or 5,500 of its ballots were spoiled, compared to 750 or 1.7% in the general election of 1994) although Quebec's chief electoral officer found no evidence of outright fraud. The Government of Canada was accused of not respecting provincial laws with regard to spending during referendums (leading to a corruption scandal that would become public a decade later, greatly damaging the Liberal Party's standing), and to having accelerated the naturalization of immigrant people living in the province of Quebec (43,850 immigrants were naturalized in 1995, whereas the average number between 1988 and 1998 was 21,733).
The same night of the referendum, an angry Jacques Parizeau, then premier and leader of the "Yes" side, declared that the loss was due to "money and the ethnic vote". Parizeau resigned over public outrage and as per his commitment to do so in case of a loss. Lucien Bouchard became Quebec's new premier in his place.
Federalists accused the sovereignist side of asking a vague, overly complicated question on the ballot. Its English text read as follows:
Do you agree that Québec should become sovereign after having made a formal offer to Canada for a new economic and political partnership within the scope of the bill respecting the future of Québec and of the agreement signed on June 12, 1995?
After winning the next election, Bouchard retired from politics in 2001. Bernard Landry was then appointed leader of the Parti Québécois and premier of Quebec. In 2003, Landry lost the election to the Quebec Liberal Party and Jean Charest. Landry stepped down as PQ leader in 2005, and in a crowded race for the party leadership, André Boisclair was elected to succeed him. The PQ has promised to hold another referendum should it return to government.
Given the province's heritage and the preponderance of French (unique among the Canadian provinces), there is an ongoing debate in Canada regarding the status of Quebec and/or its people (wholly or partially). Prior attempts to amend the Canadian constitution to acknowledge Quebec as a 'distinct society' – referring to the province's uniqueness within Canada regarding law, language, and culture – have been unsuccessful; however, the federal government under prime minister Jean Chrétien would later endorse recognition of Quebec as a distinct society. On October 30, 2003, the National Assembly voted unanimously to affirm "that the Quebecers form a nation". As only a motion of the House, it is not legally binding.

The Parti Québécois and constitutional crisis

Main articles: Politics of Quebec and Monarchy in Quebec Administrative subdivisions
The data are from the 2006 census of Canada. [5]

Population centres
¹These figures are adjusted to reflect boundary changes for the 2006 census.
²Where a metropolitan area straddles more than one administrative region, the region of the central municipality is given.
³These figures pertain to the part of the Ottawa-Gatineau census metropolitan area that is in Quebec. The total figures for the CMA, including the part in Ontario, are 1,130,761 (2006), 1,067,800 (2001).

Census metropolitan areas by population
The municipalities of the Montreal, Quebec, and Ottawa-Gatineau metropolitan areas exceeding 50,000 in population in 2006 are given below with their administrative regions in parentheses.
Montreal CMA:
The population of the Island of Montreal was 1,854,442.
Quebec CMA:
Ottawa-Gatineau CMA:
The population of Ottawa, Ontario is 812,129.

Montreal (Montréal), 1,620,693;
Laval (Laval), 368,709;
Longueuil (Montérégie), 229,330;
Terrebonne (Lanaudière), 94,703;
Repentigny (Lanaudière) 76,237;
Brossard (Montérégie), 71,154;
Saint-Jérôme (Laurentides), 63,729.
Quebec City (Capitale-Nationale), 491,142;
Lévis (Chaudière-Appalaches), 130,006.
Gatineau (Outaouais), 242,124. Major municipalities
¹These figures are adjusted to reflect boundary changes for the 2006 census.
²Where a census agglomeration straddles more than one administrative region, the region of the central municipality is given.
The municipalities of Quebec which are not part of a CMA or CA but which had populations exceeding 10,000 in 2006, with administrative regions in parentheses, are: Gaspé (Gaspésie-Îles-de-la-Madeleine), 14,819; Saint-Lin-Laurentides (Lanaudière), 14,159; Mont-Laurier (Laurentides), 13,405; Les Îles-de-la-Madeleine (Gaspésie-Îles-de-la-Madeleine), 12,560; Sainte-Marie (Chaudière-Appalaches), 11,584; Montmagny (Chaudière-Appalaches), 11,353; Sainte-Adèle (Laurentides), 10,634; Roberval (Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean), 10,544; Saint-Félicien (Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean), 10,477; Sainte-Sophie (Laurentides), 10,355; Prévost (Laurentides), 10,132; Rawdon (Lanaudière), 10,058.

Other census agglomerations

Main article: Economy of Quebec Economy

Main article: Culture of Quebec Culture

Main article: Demographics of Quebec Demographics
Source: Statistics Canada [9][10]

Population of Quebec since 1851
The information regarding ethnicities at the right is from the 2001 Canadian Census. The percentages add to more than 100% because of dual responses (e.g., "French-Canadian" generates an entry in both the category "French" and the category "Canadian".) Groups with greater than 70,000 responses are included.

Ethnic origins
Quebec is unique among the provinces in its overwhelmingly Roman Catholic population. This is a legacy of colonial times; only Catholics were permitted to settle in the New France colony.

90.2% Christian

83.3% Roman Catholic
4.7% Protestant
1.4% Eastern Orthodox
0.8% other Christian
7.1% non-religious
1.5% Muslim
1.2% Jewish Religious groups

Main article: Demolinguistics of Quebec Language
The motto of Quebec is Je me souviens ("I remember"), which is carved into the Parliament Building façade in Quebec City and is seen on the coat of arms and licence plates.
The graphic emblem of Quebec is the fleur-de-lis, usually white on a blue background, as on the flag of Quebec, the Fleurdelisé. As indicated on the government of Quebec's Web site, the flag recalls the French Royal banner said to have accompanied the army of General Montcalm, Marquis de Saint-Véran during the victorious battle of Carillon in 1758. While the fleur-de-lis, a symbol of France's Ancien Régime, may be thought of as "counter-revolutionary" in France today, it is a modern symbol in Quebec (which was never ruled by the French Republic) and is prominent in its coat of arms.
The floral emblem of Quebec is the Iris versicolor. It was formerly the Madonna lily, to recall the fleur-de-lis, but has been changed to the iris, which is native to Quebec.
The avian emblem of Quebec is the snowy owl.
In addition to the other emblems, an insect emblem has been chosen by popular vote in October 1998 during a poll sponsored by the Montreal Insectarium: The White Admiral (Limenitis arthemis) [12] won with 32 % of the 230 660 votes. The butterfly was in competition with four other candidates: the Spotted lady beetle (Coleomegilla maculata lengi), the Ebony Jewelwing damselfly (Calopteryx maculata), a species of bumble bee (Bombus impatiens) and the six-spotted tiger beetle (Cicindela sexguttata sexguttata). The Ministère du Développement durable, de l'Environnement et des Parcs supports and finances actions to officially recognize the White Admiral as the insect emblem.
The patron saints of French Canada are Saint Anne and John the Baptist. La Saint-Jean, June 24, is Quebec's national day and has been officially called the Fête nationale du Québec since 1977. The song "Gens du pays" by Gilles Vigneault is sometimes regarded as Quebec's unofficial anthem.

Symbols and emblems

National Hockey League

Montreal Canadiens
Canadian Football League

Montreal Alouettes
Can-Am League

Quebec Capitales
National Women's Hockey League

Montreal Axion
Quebec Avalanche
United Soccer Leagues

Montreal Impact Former sports teams
Cathedrals · Communities · County seats · Lieutenant Governors · Actors · Authors · Counties (historic) · County regional municipalities (current) · Premiers · Provincial highways · Regions · Universities · Quebecers · Airports · Quebec-related topics

Alliance Quebec
Anglo-Quebecer
Autoroute (Quebec) (Quebec's Autoroute system)
Canada
Charter of the French Language
Cinema of Quebec
Civil Code of Quebec
Civil unions in Quebec
Distinct society
Education in Quebec
État québécois
French in Canada
A few acres of snow
Irish Quebecer
Jews in Canada
List of Canadian provincial and territorial symbols
List of cities in Canada
Quebec lists:

Cathedrals · Communities · County seats · Lieutenant Governors · Actors · Authors · Counties (historic) · County regional municipalities (current) · Premiers · Provincial highways · Regions · Universities · Quebecers · Airports · Quebec-related topics

Musicians of Quebec
National Assembly of Quebec
National Order of Quebec
New France
Office québécois de la langue française
Politics of Canada
Quebec French
Quebec general elections
Quebec sovereignty movement
Québécois
Same-sex marriage in Quebec
Scots-Quebecer
Scouting in Québec
Timeline of Quebec history

2008-03-19T10:14:00.001-07:00

National team caps and goals correct as of 4 February 2007. * Appearances (Goals)
Miguel Ángel Nieto de la Calle (born 12 January 1986) is a Spanish football (soccer) attacking midfielder. Currently plays for Real Madrid Castilla in Segunda División, and was granted no.36 shirt in first team.
He sometimes trained with and was called-up to first team, as against Racing Santander, 18 November 2006, Valencia CF, 27 November 2006, all as an unused substitute.
He made his first team debut in a match with Dynamo Kyiv in UEFA Champions League 2006-07 last group match that ended up with a draw.
His La Liga 2007 debut was against Real Zaragoza and played the next matches against Mallorca, Villareal and Levante.
On February 4, 2007, Nieto, who had substituted an injured Robinho, tried his luck with an awesome shot which sliced the woodwork of Molina's goal. Ramón Calderón also stated "Miguel Torres has proven that he deserves a spot on the team, as have De la Red and Nieto." Nieto has proved an ideal alternative, contributing fresh legs and speed in the midfield for the last few minutes of almost every match over the prior weeks of January and February.

2008-03-18T09:11:00.001-07:00

For the Jurassic 5 album, see Quality Control (album)
In engineering and manufacturing, quality control and quality engineering are involved in developing systems to ensure products or services are designed and produced to meet or exceed customer requirements. These systems are often developed in conjunction with other business and engineering disciplines using a cross-functional approach.

History
During the Middle Ages, guilds took the responsibility of quality control upon themselves.
Royal governments purchasing material were interested in quality control as customers. For instance, King John of England appointed a certain William Wrotham to supervise the construction and repair of ships. Some centuries later, but also in England, Samuel Pepys, Secretary to the Admiralty, appointed multiple such overseers.
Prior to the extensive division of labor and mechanization resulting from the Industrial Revolution, it was possible for workers to control the quality of their own products. Working conditions then were more conducive to professional pride.
The Industrial Revolution led to a system in which large groups of people performing a similar type of work were grouped together under the supervision of a foreman who also took on the responsibility to control the quality of work manufactured.
Quality Assurance has developed a good deal during the last 80-90 years (in about 20 year intervals) from its inception to the current state of the art.

Craft and tradespersons
During World War I, the manufacturing process became more complex, and the introduction of large numbers of workers being supervised by a foreman designated to ensure the quality of the work, which was being produced. This period also introduced mass production and piecework, which created quality problems as workmen could now earn more money by the production of extra products, which in turn led to bad workmanship being passed on to the assembly lines.
Due to the large amount of bad workmanship being produced, the first full time inspectors were introduced into the large-scale modern factory. These full time inspectors were the real beginning of inspection quality control, and this was the beginning the large inspection organizations of the 1920s and 1930s, which were separately organised from production and big enough to be headed by superintendents.
The systematic approach to quality started in industrial manufacture during the 1930s, mostly in the USA, when some attention was given to the cost of scrap and rework. With the impact of mass production, which was required during the Second World War, it became necessary to introduce a more stringent form of quality control which can be identified as Statistical Quality Control, or SQC. Some of the initial work for SQC is credited to Walter A. Shewhart of Bell Labs.
This system came about with the realisation that quality cannot be inspected into an item. By extending the inspection phase and making inspection organizations more efficient, it provides inspectors with control tools such as sampling and control charts.
SQC had a significant contribution in that it provided a sampling inspection system rather than a 100 per cent inspection. This type of inspection however did lead to a lack of realisation to the importance of the engineering of product quality.
For example, if you have a basic sampling scheme with an acceptance level of 4%, what happens is you have a ratio of 96% products released onto the market with 4% defective items – this obviously is a fair risk for any company/customer – unless you happen to be one of the unfortunate buyers of a defective item.

Wartime production
After World War II, the United States continued to apply the concepts of inspection and sampling to remove defective product from production lines. However, there were many individuals trying to lead U.S. industries towards a more collaborative approach to quality. Excluding the U.S., many countries' manufacturing capabilities were destroyed during the war. This placed American business in a position where advances in the collaborative approaches to quality were essentially ignored.
After World War II, the U.S. sent General Douglas MacArthur to oversee the re-building of Japan. During this time, General MacArthur invited two key individuals in the development of modern quality concepts: W. Edwards Deming and Joseph Juran. Both individuals promoted the collaborative concepts of quality to Japanese business and technical groups, and these groups utilized these concepts in the redevelopment of the Japanese economy.

Postwar
Quality Assurance covers all activities from design, development, production, installation, servicing and documentation. This introduced the rules: "fit for purpose" and "do it right the first time". It includes the regulation of the quality of raw materials, assemblies, products and components; services related to production; and management, production, and inspection processes.
One of the most widely used paradigms for QA management is the PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) approach, also known as the Shewhart cycle.

Quality assurance
A valuable process to perform on a whole consumer product is failure testing, the operation of a product until it fails, often under stresses such as increasing vibration, temperature and humidity. This exposes many unanticipated weaknesses in a product, and the data is used to drive engineering and manufacturing process improvements. Often quite simple changes can dramatically improve product service, such as changing to mould-resistant paint or adding lock-washer placement to the training for new assembly personnel.

Statistical control
During the 1980s, the concept of "company quality" with the focus on management and people came to the fore. It was realised that, if all departments approached quality with an open mind, success was possible if the management led the quality improvement process.
The company-wide quality approach places an emphasis on three aspects :-
The quality of the outputs is at risk if any of these three aspects are deficient in any way.
The approach to quality management given here is therefore not limited to the manufacturing theatre only but can be applied to any business activity:
It comprises a quality improvement process, which is generic in the sense it can be applied to any of these activities and it establishes a behaviour pattern, which supports the achievement of quality.
This in turn is supported by quality management practices which can include a number of business systems and which are usually specific to the activities of the business unit concerned.
In manufacturing and construction activities, these business practices can be equated to the models for quality assurance defined by the International Standards contained in the ISO 9000 series and the specified Specifications for quality systems.
Still, in the system of Company Quality, the work being carried out was shop floor inspection which did not control the major quality problems. This led to quality assurance or total quality control, which has come into being recently.

Elements such as controls, job management, adequate processes, performance and integrity criteria and identification of records
Competence such as knowledge, skills, experience, qualifications
Soft elements, such as personnel integrity, confidence, organisational culture, motivation, team spirit and quality relationships.
Design work
Administrative services
Consulting
Banking
Insurance
Computer software
Retailing
Transportation Total quality control

CQE - Certified Quality Engineer
American Society for Quality
Computerized system validation
Health Care Quality Improvement Organizations, or QIOs.
Industrial engineering
Kaizen
List of production topics
List of software engineering topics
Manufacturing
Playtest
Quality circle
Six Sigma
Hoshin Kanri
Software quality & Software testing
Test method
Total Quality Management (TQM)
Validation
Pharmaceutical Inspection Convention and Pharmaceutical Inspection Co-operation Scheme
Validation (drug manufacture)
EudraLex
Seven Tools of Quality

2008-03-17T09:26:00.001-07:00

The Book of Knowledge about the Companions (Arabic: كتاب المعرفة الصحابة) is a book by 9th century Islamic scholar Ali ibn al-Madini about Ilm ar-Rijal, The first book of this genre. .

2008-03-16T08:45:00.001-07:00

The flag of the state of Illinois was designed in 1912 by Lucy Derwent and chosen by the Rockford Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution in response to a contest held by that organization. The contest was led by Mrs. Ella Park Lawrence, state regent of the Daughters of the American Revolution. The flag became the official state banner on July 6, 1915 following its passage in the Illinois State House and Senate. Governor Edward F. Dunne did not sign the bill, but neither did he veto it.

2008-03-15T10:17:00.001-07:00

Urdu Wikipedia (Urdu: اردو وکیپیڈیا or اردو ویکیپیڈیا), started in January 2004, is the Urdu language edition of Wikipedia, a free, open-content encyclopedia. As of June 2007, it had more than 5,762 articles.

History