text:
Computer, device for processing, storing, and displaying information.
Computer once meant a person who did computations, but now the term almost universally refers to automated electronic machinery. The first section of this article focuses on modern digital electronic computers and their design, constituent parts, and applications. The second section covers the history of computing. For details on computer architecture, software, and theory, see computer science.
Computing basics
The first computers were used primarily for numerical calculations. However, as any information can be numerically encoded, people soon realized that computers are capable of general-purpose information processing. Their capacity to handle large amounts of data has extended the range and accuracy of weather forecasting. Their speed has allowed them to make decisions about routing telephone connections through a network and to control mechanical systems such as automobiles, nuclear reactors, and robotic surgical tools. They are also cheap enough to be embedded in everyday appliances and to make clothes dryers and rice cookers "smart." Computers have allowed us to pose and answer questions that could not be pursued before. These questions might be about DNA sequences in genes, patterns of activity in a consumer market, or all the uses of a word in texts that have been stored in a database. Increasingly, computers can also learn and adapt as they operate.
Computers also have limitations, some of which are theoretical. For example, there are undecidable propositions whose truth cannot be determined within a given set of rules, such as the logical structure of a computer. Because no universal algorithmic method can exist to identify such propositions, a computer asked to obtain the truth of such a proposition will (unless forcibly interrupted) continue indefinitely—a condition known as the "halting problem." (See Turing machine.) Other limitations reflect current technology. Human minds are skilled at recognizing spatial patterns—easily distinguishing among human faces, for instance—but this is a difficult task for computers, which must process information sequentially, rather than grasping details overall at a glance. Another problematic area for computers involves natural language interactions. Because so much common knowledge and contextual information is assumed in ordinary human communication, researchers have yet to solve the problem of providing relevant information to general-purpose natural language programs.
Analog computers
Analog computers use continuous physical magnitudes to represent quantitative information. At first they represented quantities with mechanical components (see differential analyzer and integrator), but after World War II voltages were used; by the 1960s digital computers had largely replaced them. Nonetheless, analog computers, and some hybrid digital-analog systems, continued in use through the 1960s in tasks such as aircraft and spaceflight simulation.
One advantage of analog computation is that it may be relatively simple to design and build an analog computer to solve a single problem. Another advantage is that analog computers can frequently represent and solve a problem in "real time"; that is, the computation proceeds at the same rate as the system being modeled by it. Their main disadvantages are that analog representations are limited in precision—typically a few decimal places but fewer in complex mechanisms—and general-purpose devices are expensive and not easily programmed.
Digital computers
In contrast to analog computers, digital computers represent information in discrete form, generally as sequences of 0s and 1s (binary digits, or bits). The modern era of digital computers began in the late 1930s and early 1940s in the United States, Britain, and Germany. The first devices used switches operated by electromagnets (relays). Their programs were stored on punched paper tape or cards, and they had limited internal data storage. For historical developments, see the section Invention of the modern computer.
Mainframe computer
During the 1950s and '60s, Unisys (maker of the UNIVAC computer), International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), and other companies made large, expensive computers of increasing power. They were used by major corporations and government research laboratories, typically as the sole computer in the organization. In 1959 the IBM 1401 computer rented for $8,000 per month (early IBM machines were almost always leased rather than sold), and in 1964 the largest IBM S/360 computer cost several million dollars.
These computers came to be called mainframes, though the term did not become common until smaller computers were built. Mainframe computers were characterized by having (for their time) large storage capabilities, fast components, and powerful computational abilities. They were highly reliable, and, because they frequently served vital needs in an organization, they were sometimes designed with redundant components that let them survive partial failures. Because they were complex systems, they were operated by a staff of systems programmers, who alone had access to the computer. Other users submitted "batch jobs" to be run one at a time on the mainframe.
Such systems remain important today, though they are no longer the sole, or even primary, central computing resource of an organization, which will typically have hundreds or thousands of personal computers (PCs). Mainframes now provide high-capacity data storage for Internet servers, or, through time-sharing techniques, they allow hundreds or thousands of users to run programs simultaneously. Because of their current roles, these computers are now called servers rather than mainframes.
The most powerful computers of the day have typically been called supercomputers. They have historically been very expensive and their use limited to high-priority computations for government-sponsored research, such as nuclear simulations and weather modeling. Today many of the computational techniques of early supercomputers are in common use in PCs. On the other hand, the design of costly, special-purpose processors for supercomputers has been supplanted by the use of large arrays of commodity processors (from several dozen to over 8,000) operating in parallel over a high-speed communications network.
Although minicomputers date to the early 1950s, the term was introduced in the mid-1960s. Relatively small and inexpensive, minicomputers were typically used in a single department of an organization and often dedicated to one task or shared by a small group. Minicomputers generally had limited computational power, but they had excellent compatibility with various laboratory and industrial devices for collecting and inputting data.
One of the most important manufacturers of minicomputers was Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) with its Programmed Data Processor (PDP). In 1960 DEC's PDP-1 sold for $120,000. Five years later its PDP-8 cost $18,000 and became the first widely used minicomputer, with more than 50,000 sold. The DEC PDP-11, introduced in 1970, came in a variety of models, small and cheap enough to control a single manufacturing process and large enough for shared use in university computer centres; more than 650,000 were sold. However, the microcomputer overtook this market in the 1980s.
A microcomputer is a small computer built around a microprocessor integrated circuit, or chip. Whereas the early minicomputers replaced vacuum tubes with discrete transistors, microcomputers (and later minicomputers as well) used microprocessors that integrated thousands or millions of transistors on a single chip. In 1971 the Intel Corporation produced the first microprocessor, the Intel 4004, which was powerful enough to function as a computer although it was produced for use in a Japanese-made calculator. In 1975 the first personal computer, the Altair, used a successor chip, the Intel 8080 microprocessor. Like minicomputers, early microcomputers had relatively limited storage and data-handling capabilities, but these have grown as storage technology has improved alongside processing power.
In the 1980s it was common to distinguish between microprocessor-based scientific workstations and personal computers. The former used the most powerful microprocessors available and had high-performance colour graphics capabilities costing thousands of dollars. They were used by scientists for computation and data visualization and by engineers for computer-aided engineering. Today the distinction between workstation and PC has virtually vanished, with PCs having the power and display capability of workstations.
Embedded processors
Another class of computer is the embedded processor. These are small computers that use simple microprocessors to control electrical and mechanical functions. They generally do not have to do elaborate computations or be extremely fast, nor do they have to have great "input-output" capability, and so they can be inexpensive. Embedded processors help to control aircraft and industrial automation, and they are common in automobiles and in both large and small household appliances. One particular type, the digital signal processor (DSP), has become as prevalent as the microprocessor. DSPs are used in wireless telephones, digital telephone and cable modems, and some stereo equipment.
Computer hardware
The physical elements of a computer, its hardware, are generally divided into the central processing unit (CPU), main memory (or random-access memory, RAM), and peripherals. The last class encompasses all sorts of input and output (I/O) devices: keyboard, display monitor, printer, disk drives, network connections, scanners, and more.
The CPU and RAM are integrated circuits (ICs)—small silicon wafers, or chips, that contain thousands or millions of transistors that function as electrical switches. In 1965 Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel, stated what has become known as Moore's law: the number of transistors on a chip doubles about every 18 months. Moore suggested that financial constraints would soon cause his law to break down, but it has been remarkably accurate for far longer than he first envisioned. It now appears that technical constraints may finally invalidate Moore's law, since sometime between 2010 and 2020 transistors would have to consist of only a few atoms each, at which point the laws of quantum physics imply that they would cease to function reliably.
Central processing unit
The CPU provides the circuits that implement the computer's instruction set—its machine language. It is composed of an arithmetic-logic unit (ALU) and control circuits. The ALU carries out basic arithmetic and logic operations, and the control section determines the sequence of operations, including branch instructions that transfer control from one part of a program to another. Although the main memory was once considered part of the CPU, today it is regarded as separate. The boundaries shift, however, and CPU chips now also contain some high-speed cache memory where data and instructions are temporarily stored for fast access.
The ALU has circuits that add, subtract, multiply, and divide two arithmetic values, as well as circuits for logic operations such as AND and OR (where a 1 is interpreted as true and a 0 as false, so that, for instance, 1 AND 0 = 0; see Boolean algebra). The ALU has several to more than a hundred registers that temporarily hold results of its computations for further arithmetic operations or for transfer to main memory.
The circuits in the CPU control section provide branch instructions, which make elementary decisions about what instruction to execute next. For example, a branch instruction might be "If the result of the last ALU operation is negative, jump to location A in the program; otherwise, continue with the following instruction." Such instructions allow "if-then-else" decisions in a program and execution of a sequence of instructions, such as a "while-loop" that repeatedly does some set of instructions while some condition is met. A related instruction is the subroutine call, which transfers execution to a subprogram and then, after the subprogram finishes, returns to the main program where it left off.
In a stored-program computer, programs and data in memory are indistinguishable. Both are bit patterns—strings of 0s and 1s—that may be interpreted either as data or as program instructions, and both are fetched from memory by the CPU. The CPU has a program counter that holds the memory address (location) of the next instruction to be executed. The basic operation of the CPU is the "fetch-decode-execute" cycle:
- Fetch the instruction from the address held in the program counter, and store it in a register.
- Decode the instruction. Parts of it specify the operation to be done, and parts specify the data on which it is to operate. These may be in CPU registers or in memory locations. If it is a branch instruction, part of it will contain the memory address of the next instruction to execute once the branch condition is satisfied.
- Fetch the operands, if any.
- Execute the operation if it is an ALU operation.
- Store the result (in a register or in memory), if there is one.
- Update the program counter to hold the next instruction location, which is either the next memory location or the address specified by a branch instruction.
At the end of these steps the cycle is ready to repeat, and it continues until a special halt instruction stops execution.
Steps of this cycle and all internal CPU operations are regulated by a clock that oscillates at a high frequency (now typically measured in gigahertz, or billions of cycles per second). Another factor that affects performance is the "word" size—the number of bits that are fetched at once from memory and on which CPU instructions operate. Digital words now consist of 32 or 64 bits, though sizes from 8 to 128 bits are seen.
Processing instructions one at a time, or serially, often creates a bottleneck because many program instructions may be ready and waiting for execution. Since the early 1980s, CPU design has followed a style originally called reduced-instruction-set computing (RISC). This design minimizes the transfer of data between memory and CPU (all ALU operations are done only on data in CPU registers) and calls for simple instructions that can execute very quickly. As the number of transistors on a chip has grown, the RISC design requires a relatively small portion of the CPU chip to be devoted to the basic instruction set. The remainder of the chip can then be used to speed CPU operations by providing circuits that let several instructions execute simultaneously, or in parallel.
There are two major kinds of instruction-level parallelism (ILP) in the CPU, both first used in early supercomputers. One is the pipeline, which allows the fetch-decode-execute cycle to have several instructions under way at once. While one instruction is being executed, another can obtain its operands, a third can be decoded, and a fourth can be fetched from memory. If each of these operations requires the same time, a new instruction can enter the pipeline at each phase and (for example) five instructions can be completed in the time that it would take to complete one without a pipeline. The other sort of ILP is to have multiple execution units in the CPU—duplicate arithmetic circuits, in particular, as well as specialized circuits for graphics instructions or for floating-point calculations (arithmetic operations involving noninteger numbers, such as 3.27). With this "superscalar" design, several instructions can execute at once.
Both forms of ILP face complications. A branch instruction might render preloaded instructions in the pipeline useless if they entered it before the branch jumped to a new part of the program. Also, superscalar execution must determine whether an arithmetic operation depends on the result of another operation, since they cannot be executed simultaneously. CPUs now have additional circuits to predict whether a branch will be taken and to analyze instructional dependencies. These have become highly sophisticated and can frequently rearrange instructions to execute more of them in parallel.
Main memory
The earliest forms of computer main memory were mercury delay lines, which were tubes of mercury that stored data as ultrasonic waves, and cathode-ray tubes, which stored data as charges on the tubes' screens. The magnetic drum, invented about 1948, used an iron oxide coating on a rotating drum to store data and programs as magnetic patterns.
In a binary computer any bistable device (something that can be placed in either of two states) can represent the two possible bit values of 0 and 1 and can thus serve as computer memory. Magnetic-core memory, the first relatively cheap RAM device, appeared in 1952. It was composed of tiny, doughnut-shaped ferrite magnets threaded on the intersection points of a two-dimensional wire grid. These wires carried currents to change the direction of each core's magnetization, while a third wire threaded through the doughnut detected its magnetic orientation.
The first integrated circuit (IC) memory chip appeared in 1971. IC memory stores a bit in a transistor-capacitor combination. The capacitor holds a charge to represent a 1 and no charge for a 0; the transistor switches it between these two states. Because a capacitor charge gradually decays, IC memory is dynamic RAM (DRAM), which must have its stored values refreshed periodically (every 20 milliseconds or so). There is also static RAM (SRAM), which does not have to be refreshed. Although faster than DRAM, SRAM uses more transistors and is thus more costly; it is used primarily for CPU internal registers and cache memory.
In addition to main memory, computers generally have special video memory (VRAM) to hold graphical images, called bitmaps, for the computer display. This memory is often dual-ported—a new image can be stored in it at the same time that its current data is being read and displayed.
It takes time to specify an address in a memory chip, and, since memory is slower than a CPU, there is an advantage to memory that can transfer a series of words rapidly once the first address is specified. One such design is known as synchronous DRAM (SDRAM), which became widely used by 2001.
Nonetheless, data transfer through the "bus"—the set of wires that connect the CPU to memory and peripheral devices—is a bottleneck. For that reason, CPU chips now contain cache memory—a small amount of fast SRAM. The cache holds copies of data from blocks of main memory. A well-designed cache allows up to 85–90 percent of memory references to be done from it in typical programs, giving a several-fold speedup in data access.
The time between two memory reads or writes (cycle time) was about 17 microseconds (millionths of a second) for early core memory and about 1 microsecond for core in the early 1970s. The first DRAM had a cycle time of about half a microsecond, or 500 nanoseconds (billionths of a second), and today it is 20 nanoseconds or less. An equally important measure is the cost per bit of memory. The first DRAM stored 128 bytes (1 byte = 8 bits) and cost about $10, or $80,000 per megabyte (millions of bytes). In 2001 DRAM could be purchased for less than $0.25 per megabyte. This vast decline in cost made possible graphical user interfaces (GUIs), the display fonts that word processors use, and the manipulation and visualization of large masses of data by scientific computers.
Secondary memory
Secondary memory on a computer is storage for data and programs not in use at the moment. In addition to punched cards and paper tape, early computers also used magnetic tape for secondary storage. Tape is cheap, either on large reels or in small cassettes, but has the disadvantage that it must be read or written sequentially from one end to the other.
IBM introduced the first magnetic disk, the RAMAC, in 1955; it held 5 megabytes and rented for $3,200 per month. Magnetic disks are platters coated with iron oxide, like tape and drums. An arm with a tiny wire coil, the read/write (R/W) head, moves radially over the disk, which is divided into concentric tracks composed of small arcs, or sectors, of data. Magnetized regions of the disk generate small currents in the coil as it passes, thereby allowing it to "read" a sector; similarly, a small current in the coil will induce a local magnetic change in the disk, thereby "writing" to a sector. The disk rotates rapidly (up to 15,000 rotations per minute), and so the R/W head can rapidly reach any sector on the disk.
Early disks had large removable platters. In the 1970s IBM introduced sealed disks with fixed platters known as Winchester disks—perhaps because the first ones had two 30-megabyte platters, suggesting the Winchester 30-30 rifle. Not only was the sealed disk protected against dirt, the R/W head could also "fly" on a thin air film, very close to the platter. By putting the head closer to the platter, the region of oxide film that represented a single bit could be much smaller, thus increasing storage capacity. This basic technology is still used.
Refinements have included putting multiple platters—10 or more—in a single disk drive, with a pair of R/W heads for the two surfaces of each platter in order to increase storage and data transfer rates. Even greater gains have resulted from improving control of the radial motion of the disk arm from track to track, resulting in denser distribution of data on the disk. By 2002 such densities had reached over 8,000 tracks per centimetre (20,000 tracks per inch), and a platter the diameter of a coin could hold over a gigabyte of data. In 2002 an 80-gigabyte disk cost about $200—only one ten-millionth of the 1955 cost and representing an annual decline of nearly 30 percent, similar to the decline in the price of main memory.
Optical storage devices—CD-ROM (compact disc, read-only memory) and DVD-ROM (digital videodisc, or versatile disc)—appeared in the mid-1980s and '90s. They both represent bits as tiny pits in plastic, organized in a long spiral like a phonograph record, written and read with lasers. A CD-ROM can hold 2 gigabytes of data, but the inclusion of error-correcting codes (to correct for dust, small defects, and scratches) reduces the usable data to 650 megabytes. DVDs are denser, have smaller pits, and can hold 17 gigabytes with error correction.
Optical storage devices are slower than magnetic disks, but they are well suited for making master copies of software or for multimedia (audio and video) files that are read sequentially. There are also writable and rewritable CD-ROMs (CD-R and CD-RW) and DVD-ROMs (DVD-R and DVD-RW) that can be used like magnetic tapes for inexpensive archiving and sharing of data.
The decreasing cost of memory continues to make new uses possible. A single CD-ROM can store 100 million words, more than twice as many words as are contained in the printed Encyclopædia Britannica. A DVD can hold a feature-length motion picture. Nevertheless, even larger and faster storage systems, such as three-dimensional optical media, are being developed for handling data for computer simulations of nuclear reactions, astronomical data, and medical data, including X-ray images. Such applications typically require many terabytes (1 terabyte = 1,000 gigabytes) of storage, which can lead to further complications in indexing and retrieval.
Computer peripherals are devices used to input information and instructions into a computer for storage or processing and to output the processed data. In addition, devices that enable the transmission and reception of data between computers are often classified as peripherals.
Input devices
A plethora of devices falls into the category of input peripheral. Typical examples include keyboards, mice, trackballs, pointing sticks, joysticks, digital tablets, touch pads, and scanners.
Keyboards contain mechanical or electromechanical switches that change the flow of current through the keyboard when depressed. A microprocessor embedded in the keyboard interprets these changes and sends a signal to the computer. In addition to letter and number keys, most keyboards also include "function" and "control" keys that modify input or send special commands to the computer.
Mechanical mice and trackballs operate alike, using a rubber or rubber-coated ball that turns two shafts connected to a pair of encoders that measure the horizontal and vertical components of a user's movement, which are then translated into cursor movement on a computer monitor. Optical mice employ a light beam and camera lens to translate motion of the mouse into cursor movement.
Pointing sticks, which are popular on many laptop systems, employ a technique that uses a pressure-sensitive resistor. As a user applies pressure to the stick, the resistor increases the flow of electricity, thereby signaling that movement has taken place. Most joysticks operate in a similar manner.
Digital tablets and touch pads are similar in purpose and functionality. In both cases, input is taken from a flat pad that contains electrical sensors that detect the presence of either a special tablet pen or a user's finger, respectively.
A scanner is somewhat akin to a photocopier. A light source illuminates the object to be scanned, and the varying amounts of reflected light are captured and measured by an analog-to-digital converter attached to light-sensitive diodes. The diodes generate a pattern of binary digits that are stored in the computer as a graphical image.
Output devices
Printers are a common example of output devices. New multifunction peripherals that integrate printing, scanning, and copying into a single device are also popular. Computer monitors are sometimes treated as peripherals. High-fidelity sound systems are another example of output devices often classified as computer peripherals. Manufacturers have announced devices that provide tactile feedback to the user—"force feedback" joysticks, for example. This highlights the complexity of classifying peripherals—a joystick with force feedback is truly both an input and an output peripheral.
Early printers often used a process known as impact printing, in which a small number of pins were driven into a desired pattern by an electromagnetic printhead. As each pin was driven forward, it struck an inked ribbon and transferred a single dot the size of the pinhead to the paper. Multiple dots combined into a matrix to form characters and graphics, hence the name dot matrix. Another early print technology, daisy-wheel printers, made impressions of whole characters with a single blow of an electromagnetic printhead, similar to an electric typewriter. Laser printers have replaced such printers in most commercial settings. Laser printers employ a focused beam of light to etch patterns of positively charged particles on the surface of a cylindrical drum made of negatively charged organic, photosensitive material. As the drum rotates, negatively charged toner particles adhere to the patterns etched by the laser and are transferred to the paper. Another, less expensive printing technology developed for the home and small businesses is inkjet printing. The majority of inkjet printers operate by ejecting extremely tiny droplets of ink to form characters in a matrix of dots—much like dot matrix printers.
Computer display devices have been in use almost as long as computers themselves. Early computer displays employed the same cathode-ray tubes (CRTs) used in television and radar systems. The fundamental principle behind CRT displays is the emission of a controlled stream of electrons that strike light-emitting phosphors coating the inside of the screen. The screen itself is divided into multiple scan lines, each of which contains a number of pixels—the rough equivalent of dots in a dot matrix printer. The resolution of a monitor is determined by its pixel size. More recent liquid crystal displays (LCDs) rely on liquid crystal cells that realign incoming polarized light. The realigned beams pass through a filter that permits only those beams with a particular alignment to pass. By controlling the liquid crystal cells with electrical charges, various colours or shades are made to appear on the screen.
Communication devices
The most familiar example of a communication device is the common telephone modem (from modulator/demodulator). Modems modulate, or transform, a computer's digital message into an analog signal for transmission over standard telephone networks, and they demodulate the analog signal back into a digital message on reception. In practice, telephone network components limit analog data transmission to about 48 kilobits per second. Standard cable modems operate in a similar manner over cable television networks, which have a total transmission capacity of 30 to 40 megabits per second over each local neighbourhood "loop." (Like Ethernet cards, cable modems are actually local area network devices, rather than true modems, and transmission performance deteriorates as more users share the loop.) Asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL) modems can be used for transmitting digital signals over a local dedicated telephone line, provided there is a telephone office nearby—in theory, within 5,500 metres (18,000 feet) but in practice about a third of that distance. ADSL is asymmetric because transmission rates differ to and from the subscriber: 8 megabits per second "downstream" to the subscriber and 1.5 megabits per second "upstream" from the subscriber to the service provider. In addition to devices for transmitting over telephone and cable wires, wireless communication devices exist for transmitting infrared, radiowave, and microwave signals.
Peripheral interfaces
A variety of techniques have been employed in the design of interfaces to link computers and peripherals. An interface of this nature is often termed a bus. This nomenclature derives from the presence of many paths of electrical communication (e.g., wires) bundled or joined together in a single device. Multiple peripherals can be attached to a single bus—the peripherals need not be homogeneous. An example is the small computer systems interface (SCSI; pronounced "scuzzy"). This popular standard allows heterogeneous devices to communicate with a computer by sharing a single bus. Under the auspices of various national and international organizations, many such standards have been established by manufacturers and users of computers and peripherals.
Buses can be loosely classified as serial or parallel. Parallel buses have a relatively large number of wires bundled together that enable data to be transferred in parallel. This increases the throughput, or rate of data transfer, between the peripheral and computer. SCSI buses are parallel buses. Examples of serial buses include the universal serial bus (USB). USB has an interesting feature in that the bus carries not only data to and from the peripheral but also electrical power. Examples of other peripheral integration schemes include integrated drive electronics (IDE) and enhanced integrated drive electronics (EIDE). Predating USB, these two schemes were designed initially to support greater flexibility in adapting hard disk drives to a variety of different computer makers.
Microprocessor integrated circuits
Before integrated circuits (ICs) were invented, computers used circuits of individual transistors and other electrical components—resistors, capacitors, and diodes—soldered to a circuit board. In 1959 Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments Incorporated, and Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation filed patents for integrated circuits. Kilby found how to make all the circuit components out of germanium, the semiconductor material then commonly used for transistors. Noyce used silicon, which is now almost universal, and found a way to build the interconnecting wires as well as the components on a single silicon chip, thus eliminating all soldered connections except for those joining the IC to other components. Brief discussions of IC circuit design, fabrication, and some design issues follow. For a more extensive discussion, see semiconductor and integrated circuit.
Today IC design starts with a circuit description written in a hardware-specification language (like a programming language) or specified graphically with a digital design program. Computer simulation programs then test the design before it is approved. Another program translates the basic circuit layout into a multilayer network of electronic elements and wires.
The IC itself is formed on a silicon wafer cut from a cylinder of pure silicon—now commonly 200–300 mm (8–12 inches) in diameter. Since more chips can be cut from a larger wafer, the material unit cost of a chip goes down with increasing wafer size. A photographic image of each layer of the circuit design is made, and photolithography is used to expose a corresponding circuit of "resist" that has been put on the wafer. The unwanted resist is washed off and the exposed material then etched. This process is repeated to form various layers, with silicon dioxide (glass) used as electrical insulation between layers.
Between these production stages, the silicon is doped with carefully controlled amounts of impurities such as arsenic and boron. These create an excess and a deficiency, respectively, of electrons, thus creating regions with extra available negative charges (n-type) and positive "holes" (p-type). These adjacent doped regions form p-n junction transistors, with electrons (in the n-type regions) and holes (in the p-type regions) migrating through the silicon conducting electricity.
Layers of metal or conducting polycrystalline silicon are also placed on the chip to provide interconnections between its transistors. When the fabrication is complete, a final layer of insulating glass is added, and the wafer is sawed into individual chips. Each chip is tested, and those that pass are mounted in a protective package with external contacts.
Transistor size
The size of transistor elements continually decreases in order to pack more on a chip. In 2001 a transistor commonly had dimensions of 0.25 micron (or micrometre; 1 micron = 10−6 metre), and 0.1 micron was projected for 2006. This latter size would allow 200 million transistors to be placed on a chip (rather than about 40 million in 2001). Because the wavelength of visible light is too great for adequate resolution at such a small scale, ultraviolet photolithography techniques are being developed. As sizes decrease further, electron beam or X-ray techniques will become necessary. Each such advance requires new fabrication plants, costing several billion dollars apiece.
Power consumption
The increasing speed and density of elements on chips have led to problems of power consumption and dissipation. Central processing units now typically dissipate about 50 watts of power—as much heat per square inch as an electric stove element generates—and require "heat sinks" and cooling fans or even water cooling systems. As CPU speeds increase, cryogenic cooling systems may become necessary. Because storage battery technologies have not kept pace with power consumption in portable devices, there has been renewed interest in gallium arsenide (GaAs) chips. GaAs chips can run at higher speeds and consume less power than silicon chips. (GaAs chips are also more resistant to radiation, a factor in military and space applications.) Although GaAs chips have been used in supercomputers for their speed, the brittleness of GaAs has made it too costly for most ordinary applications. One promising idea is to bond a GaAs layer to a silicon substrate for easier handling. Nevertheless, GaAs is not yet in common use except in some high-frequency communication systems.
Future CPU designs
Since the early 1990s, researchers have discussed two speculative but intriguing new approaches to computation—quantum computing and molecular (DNA) computing. Each offers the prospect of highly parallel computation and a way around the approaching physical constraints to Moore's law.
Quantum computing
According to quantum mechanics, an electron has a binary (two-valued) property known as "spin." This suggests another way of representing a bit of information. While single-particle information storage is attractive, it would be difficult to manipulate. The fundamental idea of quantum computing, however, depends on another feature of quantum mechanics: that atomic-scale particles are in a "superposition" of all their possible states until an observation, or measurement, "collapses" their various possible states into one actual state. This means that if a system of particles—known as quantum bits, or qubits—can be "entangled" together, all the possible combinations of their states can be simultaneously used to perform a computation, at least in theory.
Indeed, while a few algorithms have been devised for quantum computing, building useful quantum computers has been more difficult. This is because the qubits must maintain their coherence (quantum entanglement) with one another while preventing decoherence (interaction with the external environment). As of 2000, the largest entangled system built contained only seven qubits.
Molecular computing
In 1994 Leonard Adleman, a mathematician at the University of Southern California, demonstrated the first DNA computer by solving a simple example of what is known as the traveling salesman problem. A traveling salesman problem—or, more generally, certain types of network problems in graph theory—asks for a route (or the shortest route) that begins at a certain city, or "node," and travels to each of the other nodes exactly once. Digital computers, and sufficiently persistent humans, can solve for small networks by simply listing all the possible routes and comparing them, but as the number of nodes increases, the number of possible routes grows exponentially and soon (beyond about 50 nodes) overwhelms the fastest supercomputer. While digital computers are generally constrained to performing calculations serially, Adleman realized that he could take advantage of DNA molecules to perform a "massively parallel" calculation. He began by selecting different nucleotide sequences to represent each city and every direct route between two cities. He then made trillions of copies of each of these nucleotide strands and mixed them in a test tube. In less than a second he had the answer, albeit along with some hundred trillion spurious answers. Using basic recombinant DNA laboratory techniques, Adleman then took one week to isolate the answer—culling first molecules that did not start and end with the proper cities (nucleotide sequences), then those that did not contain the proper number of cities, and finally those that did not contain each city exactly once.
Although Adleman's network contained only seven nodes—an extremely trivial problem for digital computers—it was the first demonstration of the feasibility of DNA computing. Since then Erik Winfree, a computer scientist at the California Institute of Technology, has demonstrated that nonbiologic DNA variants (such as branched DNA) can be adapted to store and process information. DNA and quantum computing remain intriguing possibilities that, even if they prove impractical, may lead to further advances in the hardware of future computers.
Operating systems
Role of operating systems
Operating systems manage a computer's resources—memory, peripheral devices, and even CPU access—and provide a battery of services to the user's programs. UNIX, first developed for minicomputers and now widely used on both PCs and mainframes, is one example; Linux (a version of UNIX), Microsoft Corporation's Windows XP, and Apple Computer's OS X are others.
One may think of an operating system as a set of concentric shells. At the centre is the bare processor, surrounded by layers of operating system routines to manage input/output (I/O), memory access, multiple processes, and communication among processes. User programs are located in the outermost layers. Each layer insulates its inner layer from direct access, while providing services to its outer layer. This architecture frees outer layers from having to know all the details of lower-level operations, while protecting inner layers and their essential services from interference.
Early computers had no operating system. A user loaded a program from paper tape by employing switches to specify its memory address, to start loading, and to run the program. When the program finished, the computer halted. The programmer had to have knowledge of every computer detail, such as how much memory it had and the characteristics of I/O devices used by the program.
It was quickly realized that this was an inefficient use of resources, particularly as the CPU was largely idle while waiting for relatively slow I/O devices to finish tasks such as reading and writing data. If instead several programs could be loaded at once and coordinated to interleave their steps of computation and I/O, more work could be done. The earliest operating systems were small supervisor programs that did just that: they coordinated several programs, accepting commands from the operator, and provided them all with basic I/O operations. These were known as multiprogrammed systems.
A multiprogrammed system must schedule its programs according to some priority rule, such as "shortest jobs first." It must protect them from mutual interference to prevent an addressing error in a program from corrupting the data or code of another. It must ensure noninterference during I/O so that output from several programs does not get commingled or input misdirected. It might also have to record the CPU time of each job for billing purposes.
Modern types of operating systems
Multiuser systems
An extension of multiprogramming systems was developed in the 1960s, known variously as multiuser or time-sharing systems. (For a history of this development, see the section Time-sharing from Project MAC to UNIX.) Time-sharing allows many people to interact with a computer at once, each getting a small portion of the CPU's time. If the CPU is fast enough, it will appear to be dedicated to each user, particularly as a computer can perform many functions while waiting for each user to finish typing the latest commands.
Multiuser operating systems employ a technique known as multiprocessing, or multitasking (as do most single-user systems today), in which even a single program may consist of many separate computational activities, called processes. The system must keep track of active and queued processes, when each process must access secondary memory to retrieve and store its code and data, and the allocation of other resources, such as peripheral devices.
Since main memory was very limited, early operating systems had to be as small as possible to leave room for other programs. To overcome some of this limitation, operating systems use virtual memory, one of many computing techniques developed during the late 1950s under the direction of Tom Kilburn at the University of Manchester, England. Virtual memory gives each process a large address space (memory that it may use), often much larger than the actual main memory. This address space resides in secondary memory (such as tape or disks), from which portions are copied into main memory as needed, updated as necessary, and returned when a process is no longer active. Even with virtual memory, however, some "kernel" of the operating system has to remain in main memory. Early UNIX kernels occupied tens of kilobytes; today they occupy more than a megabyte, and PC operating systems are comparable, largely because of the declining cost of main memory.
Operating systems have to maintain virtual memory tables to keep track of where each process's address space resides, and modern CPUs provide special registers to make this more efficient. Indeed, much of an operating system consists of tables: tables of processes, of files and their locations (directories), of resources used by each process, and so on. There are also tables of user accounts and passwords that help control access to the user's files and protect them against accidental or malicious interference.
Thin systems
While minimizing the memory requirements of operating systems for standard computers has been important, it has been absolutely essential for small, inexpensive, specialized devices such as personal digital assistants (PDAs), "smart" cellular telephones, portable devices for listening to compressed music files, and Internet kiosks. Such devices must be highly reliable, fast, and secure against break-ins or corruption—a cellular telephone that "freezes" in the middle of calls would not be tolerated. One might argue that these traits should characterize any operating system, but PC users seem to have become quite tolerant of frequent operating system failures that require restarts.
Reactive systems
Still more limited are embedded, or real-time, systems. These are small systems that run the control processors embedded in machinery from factory production lines to home appliances. They interact with their environment, taking in data from sensors and making appropriate responses. Embedded systems are known as "hard" real-time systems if they must guarantee schedules that handle all events even in a worst case and "soft" if missed deadlines are not fatal. An aircraft control system is a hard real-time system, as a single flight error might be fatal. An airline reservation system, on the other hand, is a soft real-time system, since a missed booking is rarely catastrophic.
Many of the features of modern CPUs and operating systems are inappropriate for hard real-time systems. For example, pipelines and superscalar multiple execution units give high performance at the expense of occasional delays when a branch prediction fails and a pipeline is filled with unneeded instructions. Likewise, virtual memory and caches give good memory-access times on the average, but sometimes they are slow. Such variability is inimical to meeting demanding real-time schedules, and so embedded processors and their operating systems must generally be relatively simple.
Operating system design approaches
Operating systems may be proprietary or open. Mainframe systems have largely been proprietary, supplied by the computer manufacturer. In the PC domain, Microsoft offers its proprietary Windows systems, Apple has supplied Mac OS for its line of Macintosh computers, and there are few other choices. The best-known open system has been UNIX, originally developed by Bell Laboratories and supplied freely to universities. In its Linux variant it is available for a wide range of PCs, workstations, and, most recently, IBM mainframes.
Open-source software is copyrighted, but its author grants free use, often including the right to modify it provided that use of the new version is not restricted. Linux is protected by the Free Software Foundation's "GNU General Public License," like all the other software in the extensive GNU project, and this protection permits users to modify Linux and even to sell copies, provided that this right of free use is preserved in the copies.
One consequence of the right of free use is that numerous authors have contributed to the GNU-Linux work, adding many valuable components to the basic system. Although quality control is managed voluntarily and some have predicted that Linux would not survive heavy commercial use, it has been remarkably successful and seems well on its way to becoming the version of UNIX on mainframes and on PCs used as Internet servers.
There are other variants of the UNIX system; some are proprietary, though most are now freely used, at least noncommercially. They all provide some type of graphical user interface. Although Mac OS has been proprietary, its current version, Mac OS X, is built on UNIX.
Proprietary systems such as Microsoft's Windows 98, 2000, and XP provide highly integrated systems. All operating systems provide file directory services, for example, but a Microsoft system might use the same window display for a directory as for a World Wide Web browser. Such an integrated approach makes it more difficult for nonproprietary software to use Windows capabilities, a feature that has been an issue in antitrust lawsuits against Microsoft.
Computer communication may occur through wires, optical fibres, or radio transmissions. Wired networks may use shielded coaxial cable, similar to the wire connecting a television to a videocassette recorder or an antenna. They can also use simpler unshielded wiring with modular connectors similar to telephone wires. Optical fibres can carry more signals than wires; they are often used for linking buildings on a college campus or corporate site and increasingly for longer distances as telephone companies update their networks. Microwave radio also carries computer network signals, generally as part of long-distance telephone systems. Low-power microwave radio is becoming common for wireless networks within a building.
Local area networks
Local area networks (LANs) connect computers within a building or small group of buildings. A LAN may be configured as (1) a bus, a main channel to which nodes or secondary channels are connected in a branching structure, (2) a ring, in which each computer is connected to two neighbouring computers to form a closed circuit, or (3) a star, in which each computer is linked directly to a central computer and only indirectly to one another. Each of these has advantages, though the bus configuration has become the most common.
Even if only two computers are connected, they must follow rules, or protocols, to communicate. For example, one might signal "ready to send" and wait for the other to signal "ready to receive." When many computers share a network, the protocol might include a rule "talk only when it is your turn" or "do not talk when anyone else is talking." Protocols must also be designed to handle network errors.
The most common LAN design since the mid-1970s has been the bus-connected Ethernet, originally developed at Xerox PARC. Every computer or other device on an Ethernet has a unique 48-bit address. Any computer that wants to transmit listens for a carrier signal that indicates that a transmission is under way. If it detects none, it starts transmitting, sending the address of the recipient at the start of its transmission. Every system on the network receives each message but ignores those not addressed to it. While a system is transmitting, it also listens, and if it detects a simultaneous transmission, it stops, waits for a random time, and retries. The random time delay before retrying reduces the probability that they will collide again. This scheme is known as carrier sense multiple access with collision detection (CSMA/CD). It works very well until a network is moderately heavily loaded, and then it degrades as collisions become more frequent.
The first Ethernet had a capacity of about 2 megabits per second, and today 10- and 100-megabit-per-second Ethernet is common, with gigabit-per-second Ethernet also in use. Ethernet transceivers (transmitter-receivers) for PCs are inexpensive and easily installed.
A recent standard for wireless Ethernet, known as Wi-Fi, is becoming common for small office and home networks. Using frequencies from 2.4 to 5 gigahertz (GHz), such networks can transfer data at rates up to 600 megabits per second. Early in 2002 another Ethernet-like standard was released. Known as HomePlug, the first version could transmit data at about 8 megabits per second through a building's existing electrical power infrastructure. A later version could achieve rates of 1 gigabit per second.
Wide area networks
Wide area networks (WANs) span cities, countries, and the globe, generally using telephone lines and satellite links. The Internet connects multiple WANs; as its name suggests, it is a network of networks. Its success stems from early support by the U.S. Department of Defense, which developed its precursor, ARPANET, to let researchers communicate readily and share computer resources. Its success is also due to its flexible communication technique. The emergence of the Internet in the 1990s as not only a communication medium but also one of the principal focuses of computer use may be the most significant development in computing in the past several decades. For more on the history and technical details of Internet communication protocols, see Internet.
Computer software
Software denotes programs that run on computers. John Tukey, a statistician at Princeton University and Bell Laboratories, is generally credited with introducing the term in 1958 (as well as coining the word bit for binary digit). Initially software referred primarily to what is now called system software—an operating system and the utility programs that come with it, such as those to compile (translate) programs into machine code and load them for execution. This software came with a computer when it was bought or leased. In 1969 IBM decided to "unbundle" its software and sell it separately, and software soon became a major income source for manufacturers as well as for dedicated software firms.
Business and personal software
Business software generally must handle large amounts of data but relatively little computation, although that has changed somewhat in recent years. Office software typically includes word processors, spreadsheets, database programs, and tools for designing public presentations.
A spreadsheet is a type of accounting program. Unlike specialized accounting programs (e.g., payroll and office records), an important function of spreadsheets is their ability to explore "What if?" scenarios. A spreadsheet not only holds tables of data but also defines relationships among their rows and columns. For example, if the profit on a product is defined in terms of various costs—materials, manufacturing, and shipping—it is easy to ask "What if we use cheaper materials that require more manufacturing expense?"
A database is an organized collection of data, or records. Databases organize information to answer questions such as "What companies in the Southwest bought more than 100 of our products last year?" or "Which products made by Acme Manufacturing are in low supply?" Such software is often integrated so that a database report or spreadsheet table can be added to a document composed with a word processor, frequently with illustrative graphs. Today even the most trivial data can effortlessly be glorified by presenting it in a polychromatic bar chart with three-dimensional shading.
Scientific and engineering software
Scientific software is typically used to solve differential equations. (Differential equations are used to describe continuous actions or processes that depend on some other factors.) Although some differential equations have relatively simple mathematical solutions, exact solutions of many differential equations are very difficult to obtain. Computers, however, can be used to obtain useful approximate solutions, particularly when a problem is split into simpler spatial or temporal parts. Nevertheless, large-scale problems often require parallel computation on supercomputers or clusters of small computers that share the work.
There are numerous standard libraries of equation-solving software—some commercial, some distributed by national organizations in several countries. Another kind of software package does symbolic mathematics, obtaining exact solutions by algebraic manipulations. Two of the most widely used symbolic packages are Mathematica and Maple.
Scientific visualization software couples high-performance graphics with the output of equation solvers to yield vivid displays of models of physical systems. As with spreadsheets, visualization software lets an experimenter vary initial conditions or parameters. Observing the effect of such changes can help in improving models, as well as in understanding the original system.
Visualization is an essential feature of computer-aided engineering (CAE) and computer-aided design (CAD). An engineer can design a bridge, use modeling software to display it, and study it under different loads. CAE software can translate drawings into the precise specification of the parts of a mechanical system. Computer chips themselves are designed with CAD programs that let an engineer write a specification for part of a chip, simulate its behaviour in detail, test it thoroughly, and then generate the layouts for the photolithographic process that puts the circuit on the silicon.
Astronomical sky surveys, weather forecasting, and medical imaging—such as magnetic resonance imaging, CAT scans, and DNA analyses—create very large collections of data. Scientific computation today uses the same kinds of powerful statistical and pattern-analysis techniques as many business applications.
Internet and collaborative software
Among the most commonly used personal Internet software are "browsers" for displaying information located on the World Wide Web, newsreaders for reading "newsgroups" located on USENET, file-sharing programs for downloading files, and communication software for e-mail, as well as "instant messaging" and "chat room" programs that allow people to carry on conversations in real time. All of these applications are used for both personal and business activities.
Other common Internet software includes Web search engines and "Web-crawling" programs that traverse the Web to gather and classify information. Web-crawling programs are a kind of agent software, a term for programs that carry out routine tasks for a user. They stem from artificial intelligence research and carry out some of the tasks of librarians, but they are at a severe disadvantage. Although Web pages may have "content-tag" index terms, not all do, nor are there yet accepted standards for their use. Web search engines must use heuristic methods to determine the quality of Web page information as well as its content. Many details are proprietary, but they may use techniques such as finding "hubs" and "authorities" (pages with many links to and from other Web sites). Such strategies can be very effective, though the need for a Web version of card catalogs has not vanished.
A different kind of Internet use depends on the vast number of computers connected to the Internet that are idle much of the time. Rather than run a "screen-saver" program, these computers can run software that lets them collaborate in the analysis of some difficult problem. Two examples are the SETI@home project, which distributes portions of radio telescope data for analysis that might help in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), and the "Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search" (GIMPS), which parcels out tasks to test for large prime numbers.
The Internet has also become a business tool, and the ability to collect and store immense amounts of information has given rise to data warehousing and data mining. The former is a term for unstructured collections of data and the latter a term for its analysis. Data mining uses statistics and other mathematical tools to find patterns of information. For more information concerning business on the Internet, see e-commerce.
Games and entertainment
Computer games are nearly as old as digital computers and have steadily developed in sophistication. Chinook, a recent checkers (draughts) program, is widely believed to be better than any human player, and the IBM Deep Blue chess program beat world champion Garry Kasparov in 1996. These programs have demonstrated the power of modern computers, as well as the strength of good heuristics for strategy. On the other hand, such brute-force search heuristics have failed to produce a go-playing program that can defeat even moderately skilled players because there are too many possible moves in this Japanese game for simple quantification.
After board games, the earliest computer games were text-based adventures—in which players explored virtual worlds, sought treasure, and fought enemies by reading and typing simple commands. Such games resembled military simulation programs first used in the early 1950s. Contemporary games, however, depend on high-performance computer graphics. Played on arcade machines, special game computers for home use, or PCs, they use the same capabilities as simulation and visualization programs. A related area is computer-generated (CG) animation for films and video.


text:
TORONTO (Reuters) - Tim Hortons Inc THI.TO, the Canadian coffee and doughnut chain, said on Tuesday it will open at least 800 restaurants over the next five years under a new strategic plan to extend its dominance in Canada and boost returns in the United States.
Pressured by activist investors last year to deliver better returns, the company said its new strategy is expected to reduce capital intensity while improving returns to shareholders and on assets.
Tim Hortons, which boasts that it sells nearly eight of every 10 cups of coffee sold in Canada, said the move reflected changing consumer preferences for healthier food, a shift in demographics and new technology for marketing.
Facing mounting competition from rivals such as Starbucks Corp (SBUX.O) and McDonald's Corp (MCD.N), Tim Hortons said it will open 500 new restaurants in Canada by 2018, including new formats in office, sporting venue and healthcare settings.
It also aims to improve service, attract customers beyond breakfast and snack times, and boost the average bill at its restaurants.
Tim Hortons, which last week issued its 2014 forecast, said that from 2015 to 2018 it is targeting earnings per share at a compounded annual growth rate of 11 percent to 13 percent. It will also target cumulative free cash of about C$2 billion ($1.81 billion).
The company, which has found it difficult to translate its Canadian success in the United States, said it will open about 300 restaurants in priority U.S. markets by the end of 2018.
That expansion will use a "capital light" model, in which franchisees deploy capital and local market knowledge, Tim Hortons said. The company has signed its first such development agreements, for close to 100 restaurants over the next five years in Missouri, Ohio, Indiana and North Dakota.
Tim Hortons said it would further expand in the Middle East, but did not say how many restaurants it would open there. It will also develop plans that will allow it to enter new international markets in 2015.
As of December 29, 2013, the company had 4,485 locations, with 3,588 in Canada, 859 in the United States and 38 in the Middle East.
Reporting by Susan Taylor; Editing by Jeffrey Benkoe and Paul Simao

subset: commoncrawl


text:
|Mukilteo, Wash.
|High School:
2010-11: 2011 Ivy League Player of the Year...2011 Ivy League Rookie of the Year...Appeared in all ten tournaments during the school year, taking first overall in 6 of them and finishing in the top three in all but one...fired an opening-round 66 at the C&F Bank Invitational en route to an under-par weekend and a first-place overall finish (-2)...won the Princeton Invitational (74, 68, 71), Yale Women's Intercollegiate (73, 70, 67), Harvard Invitational (72,74,74), Sacred Heart Invitational (75,73), match against Longwood (70)...third at Ivy League Championships (76, 78, 72)...was the Bulldogs' top finisher at the NCAA East Regional, tying for 20th with rounds of 74, 74 and 72.
Before Yale: Captain of the Kamiak High School golf team her junior and senior yeras, Moon led the team to the state championship in her freshman season. Individually, she finished in the top five in the state all four years, including a first-place finish as a freshman. Outside of high school golf, Moon competed in nationwide junior tournaments with Yale golf classmate Sun Park, and reached a highest rank of 38th nationally in her senior year. Played in the U.S. Women's Amateur Publinx tournament as well as the U.S. Junior Girls' Championship last year where she met Donald Trump and Annika Sorenstam.
Nickname: Bean
Residential College: Davenport
Major: American Studies
Future Plans: Futures Tour or Grad School
Lowest Score: 6-under 66
Why She Chose Yale: "Because it's better than Harvard."
Favorite Place at Yale: Branford Courtyard
Favorite Class (so far): Intro Psych
Favorite Band: Maroon 5
Favorite Song: "Maps" by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Favorite Food: "BBQ!"
Favorite Course: Pebble Beach
Places You'd Like to Visit: Europe, Australia, Hawaii


text:
Guinea Pigs
You see them frequently in the pet store: interesting, oblong-shaped creatures, generally larger than the other rodents they are grouped with. Housed in the same location as smaller rodents, many people think that their care is similar to that of a hamster or rat. However, guinea pigs have their own special requirements that differ vastly from those of the other small animals around them.
Guinea pigs, or cavies, are not actually related to pigs, nor are they from Guinea. According to Dr. J. Jill Heatley, associate professor at the Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences, they are actually native to South America.
"Guinea pigs were domesticated by the ancient South American people as a source of food," states Heatley. "The 'pig' part in their name likely refers to their appearance, as they have shorter legs and large heads."
Generally docile and inquisitive, guinea pigs can make great pets. Most seem to enjoy human interaction. They are usually fairly quiet, but if they hear the sound of their food being prepared, they can respond with shrill squeaks and boisterous leaps around their cage.
"There is quite a range of sounds in a guinea pig's vocabulary," says Heatley. "'Wheeking' is a vocalization that is generally heard when a guinea pig thinks it is about to receive food. It may have heard the refrigerator door open and close, and this is its way of begging you to bring its food quickly. A 'rumble' is a purring sound that usually happens when a male is courting a female. Purring can also happen if your guinea pig is enjoying being stroked. A quick, short purr, followed by the guinea pig going still, means that it just heard a noise that it is afraid of. A 'shriek' is a very high-pitched wheek that usually is a call of alarm or a cry of pain or fear. If a guinea pig chatters its teeth, it is very angry. This is a warning to other guinea pigs or humans that the guinea pig wants to be left alone."
Guinea pigs can weigh up to two and a half pounds and can reach a length of under a foot. Their size makes them easier to handle than other smaller rodents. Their average life span is four to eight years, so acquiring a new pig should not be done on impulse.
"As they are social animals, guinea pigs enjoy having at least one companion," says Heatley. "A guinea pig living by itself will be lonely and can become depressed. Therefore, it is a good idea to have a large cage that can house two compatible guinea pigs together."
Female pairs and male/female pairs work well, although males need to be neutered before being housed with females to prevent babies. Two males can also be cage mates, but extra caution needs to be taken when introducing them. Guinea pigs occasionally like to have some alone time, so they will appreciate the largest size cage you can manage. A minimum size of seven and a half square feet is recommended for up to two guinea pigs.
"A healthy diet is instrumental in maintaining your guinea pig's health," asserts Heatley. "They require a mixture of fruits and vegetables, along with a high quality pellet. They should also have continual access to hay. Additionally, guinea pigs cannot manufacture vitamin C, and store-bought pellets will not supply an adequate amount to meet their needs. This is because vitamin C is very heat sensitive and will rapidly degrade in less than a month of shelf storage at a controlled room temperature. Therefore, sufficient supplementation is required."
This can be achieved by feeding your pigs fruits and vegetables that are high in vitamin C, such as parsley, bell peppers (remove seeds first), kale, kiwi, and strawberries. Feed fruit sparingly, as it is high in sugar and can cause obesity if fed too frequently. Offering a mixture of three to five different vegetables per day gives your guinea pigs a good variety. Always introduce new foods gradually, as sudden changes in diet can lead to gastrointestinal upset.
Another consideration for guinea pigs is the fact that their teeth are continually growing. To help keep their teeth filed down, a wood chew should be provided. These can be purchased at pet stores; anything brought in from outdoors should be disinfected first to avoid introducing parasites to the guinea pig's environment. Additionally, the guinea pig's toenails will need to be clipped monthly. This can be done using small, scissors-style clippers. Be careful to not cut into the quick, or living part of the nail, which will cause bleeding. You can also use this time to check your guinea pig's feet for sores and ingrown toenails, as these are common problems.
"Seldom do guinea pigs need baths," states Heatley. "They do shed, however, so daily brushing with a soft brush can help to remove loose hair and reduce shedding. Brushing is especially important for long-haired guinea pigs to keep the hair from tangling. If your guinea pig does require a bath, make sure to use a shampoo made especially for small animals."
Be sure to use a shallow bowl of warm water when bathing your guinea pig. Rinse the guinea pig thoroughly, but avoid getting water in its ears. Also, make sure to dry its body meticulously before putting it into its cage to avoid chills.
Finally, guinea pigs benefit from some exercise around the house. Only place them on the floor if they will be monitored, and make sure to adequately block any downward stairs. Guinea pigs do not understand heights, so do not set them unsupervised on a table or ledge. Always hold them securely so that they cannot wiggle out of your arms.
Guinea pigs make fun companions. Each has a unique personality, from the loud male that is constantly on the alert for food to the female that runs up to the front of her cage when her owner walks into the room. If you do your research and provide your guinea pigs with the proper care and space, they can make wonderful additions to your family.
Pet Talk is a service of the College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences, Texas A&M University.


text:
Create an Account - Increase your productivity, customize your experience, and engage in information you care about.
View All Calendars is the default. Choose Select a Calendar to view a specific calendar. Subscribe to calendar notifications by clicking on the Notify Me® button, and you will automatically be alerted about the latest events in our community.
May 22, 2018, 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Join Ms. Katie Morris, our professional children's librarian, and help your child develop early literacy skills with read-along storytelling, songs, movement, finger play, crafts and educational free-play time! The target age range is 0-5 but children and their guardians of all ages are welcome!


text:
Australian regulated
forex company!
Live Account Testing
Video Tutorials
MT4 User Guide
Economics of the USD
The US Dollar's Presence Globally
The US Dollar has maintained a vital presence on the world stage for nearly a century. Most major governments maintain some of their currency reserves held in USD, this means the ripple effect of inflation and other valuation issues connected to the US Dollar have far reaching consequences.
There are many economic indicators pertinent to the US economy. Some of the relevant economic indicators to the US Dollar are released directly through the Federal Reserve (Fed), while others may be released from private data analysis firms. Each of the economic indicators listed and described below have the potential to affect the price and stability of the US Dollar upon their release. This is not a complete list of economic indicators that have an impact on the US Dollar.
The economic indicators outlined below can potentially move the price of any currency pair the US Dollar is involved with, regardless of whether the US Dollar is the base or quote currency in the pair. These currency pairs include:
The reports are listed in alphabetical order, for more on the report and its strength ranking take a look at each individual indicator description below. For the date and time of the next release for each report please browse our current economic calendar.
Reports Listed in Alphabetical Order
ADP Nonfarm Employment Change
The ADP (Automatic Data Processing, Inc.) Nonfarm Employment Change is a measurement of the number of new jobs created in the previous month (of course excluding farming related employment). This report is said to be a precursor to the much more widely followed Nonfarm Payroll Report, which of course is released two days later. The ADP Nonfarm Employment Change report began in March of 2006, and though it is said to offer insight into the pending Non Farm Payroll Report, its brief history accounts for its lesser credibility with traders.
Average Hourly Earnings m/m
This indicator gathers numbers relevant to wage inflation, specifically price increases in wages paid to nonfarm employees. When corporations and businesses are forced to pay higher wages this increased will soon be seen on the consumer end, thus wage inflation is viewed as a preemptive look into consumer inflation. Higher trends seen in this indicator tend to have a positive impact on a nation's currency, as wage inflation leads to consumer inflation and consumer inflation is relative to a strong economy.
Beige Book
The Beige Book gathers regional information from Federal Reserve branches on the strength of the economy within their own region. This information is collected two weeks prior to the FOMC's (Federal Open Market Committee) monetary policy meetings. The FOMC will use the Beige Book when considering the future of interest rates.
Chicago PMI
PMI stands for Purchasing Managers Index. Measured in Chicago (essentially accounting for the Midwest region of the United States) the Chicago PMI is conducted by the National Association of Purchasing Managers (NAPM). Before the report is published purchasing managers in the area are surveyed on the present situation of their firm, specifically whether the firm's purchasing activity is lower than, higher than, or equal to the previous month's activity. The word 'activity' is meant in reference to employment, inventories, prices, orders, output, etc. The indicator uses a reading of 50 to measure expansion, or the lack thereof. A reading above 50 would indicate economic expansion in the region.
Consumer Confidence
In a monthly survey respondents are asked to measure and evaluate the future strength of the economy. Consumer optimism will of course have a positive impact on the strength or weakness of an economy, and ultimately the nation's currency; when consumer confidence is high the purchase of goods and services tends to increase as well, thus stimulating economic growth.
Consumer Sentiment
In a monthly survey conducted by the University of Michigan 500 respondents are asked to measure and evaluate both the present and the future strength of the economy. Consumer optimism will of course have a positive impact on the strength or weakness of an economy, and ultimately the nation's currency; when consumer confidence is high the purchase of goods and services tends to increase as well, thus stimulating economic growth.
Core Durable Goods Orders m/m
Core Durable Goods Orders essentially reports the same data as does 'Durable Goods Orders' minus data including Transportation components. This is because purchase orders for aircraft and automobile components often see rapid increases for brief periods – such numbers weaken the clarity of the overall trend. As such, Core Durable Goods Orders is typically more widely watched than is Durable Goods Orders. Core Durable Goods Orders is a measurement of the total value of purchase orders placed through manufacturers for products with a shelf life of more than three years. This indicator is watched closely by traders primarily because of what it has to say about the future of an economy. When the total value of purchase orders is higher than previous months it can be expected that manufacturers will be pressed to fill the pending orders, as such employment will likely see an increase. When productivity and employment are expected to increase as a direct result of increased purchase orders the coming months are more likely to see an increased GDP (Gross Domestic Product).
Core PCE Price Index m/m
PCE stands for Personal Consumption Expenditures; The Core PCE Price Index is a measurement of consumer inflation rates, as seen when purchasing goods and services. Essentially, PCE is very similar to CPI (Consumer Price Index), the subtle difference lies in the fact that PCE gauges the level of price changes seen within consumer goods and services, specifically those targeted towards individual consumers (as opposed to production consumers). As is the case with other economic indicators, Core PCE Price Index implies that certain statistics are left out of what would be included in the normal indicator. In this case, Core PCE excludes Food and Energy because month-to-month purchase volatility of such can skew underlining consumer trends. The Federal Reserve tends to favor this indicator for its clear look at consumer inflation, for this reason traders watch the Core PCE closely.
Currency Manipulation Hearings
The US House Committee on Ways and Means will conduct a hearing to examine possible evidence of potential currency manipulation seen by countries in the Asian region. China and Japan will be closely looked at. The committee will then recommend whether or not the US should take action, and what the most plausible solution would be.
Durable Goods Orders m/m
Durable Goods Orders is a measurement of the total value of purchase orders placed through manufacturers for products with a shelf life of more than three years, i.e. automobiles and parts, appliances, airplanes and parts, computers, etc. This indicator is watched closely by traders primarily because of what it has to say about the future of an economy. When the total value of purchase orders is higher than previous months it can be expected that manufacturers will be pressed to fill the pending orders, as such employment will likely see an increase. When productivity and employment are expected to increase as a direct result of increased purchase orders the coming months are more likely to see an increased GDP (Gross Domestic Product).
ECI q/q
ECI stands for Employment Cost Index, a measurement of inflation rates found within salaries, wages and benefits paid to non-government employees. A rise in wage inflation rates are seen as a positive for a nation's currency. This is because wage inflation is directly linked to consumer inflation; when employers are forced to pay higher wages prices seen by consumers will soon be increased in order to compensate. Traders keep an eye on wage inflation as a means to gauge pending consumer inflation, which will of course ultimately affect GDP (Gross Domestic Product).
Existing Home Sales
Each month the National Association of Realtors releases a report measuring the number of homes sold in the prior month. Existing Home Sales and New Home Sales have collectively gained more respect from traders since the beginning of 2007, when sub-prime lending in the US began to fall under scrutiny. Most traders view Existing Home Sales as the report that carries the most weight between the two.
GDP Annualized q/q
This release is a quarterly look at Gross Domestic Product, revisions will follow in next two months. Gross Domestic Product is considered by most the broadest, most comprehensive barometer of a country's overall economic condition. It measures the sum of all market values on final goods and services produced in a country (domestically) during a specific period of time. A rising trend seen in a country's GDP of course indicates that the economy of said country is improving; as a result foreign investors are more inclined to seek investment opportunities within that nation's bond and stock markets. It is not uncommon to see interest rate hikes as a follow-up to a rising GDP, as central banks will have an increased confidence in their own growing economies. The combination of a rising GDP and potentially higher interest rates can lead to an increase in demand for that nation's currency on a global scale.
GDP is calculated and reported on a quarterly basis as part of the National income and Product Accounts (NIPAs). NIPAs were developed and are maintained today by the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). NIPAs are the most comprehensive set of data available regarding US national output, production, and the distribution of income. Each GDP report contains the following:
Personal income and consumptions expenditures
Corporate profits
National income
GDP Deflator Annualized q/q
Aside from basic GDP (Gross Domestic Product) figures the government also releases GDP deflators. The GDP Deflator report publishes the difference between nominal and actual GDP. The report takes a measurement of annualized quarterly inflation rates as applicable to all economic activity.
Interest Rate Statement
The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), which is the governing body of the US central bank, publishes an Interest Rate Statement eight times each year. Perhaps at the core of all economic indicators are those that relate to interest rate decisions. In fact, most would argue that other economic indicators are used by the average trader as nothing more than a means to anticipate pending interest rate changes. The bulk of the statement includes an explanation of the various economic factors that influenced the change in rates (or lack thereof) for the nation's short term interest rate, also referred to as the "fed funds rate". The report will also include insight as to what the next interest rate decision might be. Short term interest rates are of monumental importance to traders in any of the major financial markets. This is due to the fact that high interest rates attract foreign investors who are seeking the highest possible return in exchange for the lowest possible risk. Central banks are most concerned with price stability. If inflation rates are continually rising interest rates will likely be increased in an effort to bring prices back down. Globally, increased interest rates are said to entice foreign investment flows, which would of course, in turn, increase the demand and the standing of a nation's currency on a global scale. Seasoned economists understand the relationship between inflation and interest rates, namely that inflation tends to precede higher interest rates, which ultimately increases the global demand for a nation's currency.
ISM Manufacturing Index
The ISM Manufacturing Index is a monthly report released by the Institute of Supply Management that tracks the amount of manufacturing activity that occurred the previous month. The values for the index range between 0 and 100. If the index has a value below 50, due to a decrease in activity, it tends to indicate an economic recession, particularly if they trend continues over several months. A value substantially over 50 likely indicates a time of economic growth.
ISM Manufacturing Prices
This manufacturing indicator, conducted by the Institute of Supply Management, surveys 400 firms in an attempt to gauge price inflation seen within the manufacturing sector. Firms are asked whether or not there has been an increase seen in the prices of materials and services.
ISM Non-Manufacturing Index
ISM stands for the Institute of Supply Management. The NON-Manufacturing Index of course focuses on the non-manufacturing portion of the services sector. In the US this Manufacturing Index seems to be closely watched by traders in each of the major financial markets. Before the report is published purchasing managers are surveyed on the present situation of economic factors relevant to their position; factors such as new orders, inventories, production, employment, etc. Traders tend to keep an eye on this indicator because it tends to lead (leading indicator) into data that will later be released. This is because purchasing managers have an early view at the performance of their company. The indicator uses a reading of 50 to measure expansion, or the lack thereof. A reading above 50 would indicate economic expansion.
New Home Sales
New Home Sales reports the number of new privately owned homes sold or for sale in a given period (generally reported once a month). Economists note the correlation between changing mortgage rates and new home sales; namely that new home sales numbers tend to lag slowly behind changes made to mortgage rates. Also measured is the number of homes for sale in relationship to current sales prices; these numbers of course in turn will affect housing starts. Because the new home sales report is often subject to large revisions monthly numbers are often seen as unreliable. As a result this indicator's potential impact on the market is rather inconsistent; instead traders tend to give more credence to the existing home sales report which is released earlier in the month.
Nonfarm Employment Change
This indicator is a measurement of the total number of non farming related new jobs created in America for the previous month. It is perhaps the most important of all economic indicators in terms of its potential for immediate impact upon the currency market. The Nonfarm Employment Change (also referred to as the Nonfarm Payroll Report) is so largely influential because of its implications concerning the strength, or perhaps the weakness of the US economy. The number of new jobs created is closely connected to consumer spending, which in turn plays into GDP (Gross Domestic Product). This indicator is released on the first Friday of every month and contains data for the month prior. The report is the first of its kind (related to labor statistics) every month and is often regarded as an indicator in which surprise figures are generally anticipated. Traders in every major financial market watch this release very closely and are often forced to adjust trading strategies because of its immediate impact on the market.
Nonfarm Productivity q/q
This indicator takes a look at quarterly growth (annualized) in the non farming sector. Essentially labor efficiency for the production of goods and services is analyzed. This report is watched closely by traders because it tends to give a glimpse into the potential for inflation; as manufacturers may be forced to raise prices.
Personal Spending m/m
Personal spending is a simple measurement of the total amount spent by consumers in a given period (month) on goods and services. As consumer spending has far reaching implications into the overall picture of an economy, and considering that it accounts for more than half of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) a rise seen in the trends of this indicator should have a positive effect on a nation's currency.
Unemployment Rate
The Unemployment Rate, as one might presume, measures the total number of Americans that are unemployed and who are presently seeking employment. Because consumer spending is such a large part of economic health, and those who are employed tend to spend more than those who are not, a downtrend seen in this indicator will have a positive effect on a nation's overall economic strength. The Unemployment Report is considered by traders a lagging indicator, meaning that its insight offers little in the way of future projections. As such, this indicator is not as heavily regarded as perhaps its name would suggest.
Unit Labor Costs q/q
This indicator is a measurement that calculates output per hour minus inflation, or in other words the correlation between productivity per hour and compensation per hour. An increase in hourly compensation will of course increase unit labor costs; the only way to offset this cost is to facilitate higher labor productivity per hour. Higher trends seen in this indicator should positively affect a nation's economy and thus their currency as well. This is because when companies are forced to pay more for labor (wage inflation) consumers will soon see an increase in cost as well (consumer inflation). This indicator is important to traders, as wage inflation is often a precursor to consumer inflation, which will in turn affect Gross Domestic Product, interest rates, etc.


text:
Thanksgiving Weekend TV: Your Guide to Marathons, Specials and Football
Nov 21, 2016 5:03 PM EST
Stuffed from turkey? Don't have the energy for Black Friday? Want something else to watch this weekend besides Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life? You can try the original series marathon. Still not your style? Well, don't worry, there's plenty to wat… Read more


text:
In the course of one recent week, Jennifer Lopez was honored with a Billboard Icon Award, her single "First Love" became the most-added song on pop radio, she played to a sold-out crowd in Anaheim and she wrapped another season as an "American Idol" judge.
In other words, it was business-as-usual for the multiplatinum singer known as J.Lo, who has multiple films and a TV series in the works, her own fragrances, countless endorsement deals, a TV and film production company and part ownership in a cable network. It's an insane juggling act that makes multitasker Jay Z look like a slacker.
"I think because I do a lot of different things, I don't get credit for being great at one thing like some people are," Lopez, 44, said of her mixed-medium career. "Somebody once told me, 'One of the best things is when people underestimate you, because then you can always surprise them.'"
And that she's done. After a couple bumpy years in the late aughts that saw her stock in music and films fall, Lopez tried her hand as an "Idol" judge. The payoff was big. Her comeback album, 2011's "Love?," had a top 5 debut (a feat she hadn't done since 2005); its lead single, "On the Floor," was her highest debut, and the video became one of the most-watched of all time.
"A.K.A.," her follow-up album that comes out Tuesday, is what Lopez wants to talk about now. "It's very surreal. You feel like you started yesterday. Believe it or not, [the time] just goes," she said, snapping her fingers for emphasis from inside the dressing room of a West Hollywood sound stage for a photo shoot.
Like previous efforts, the new album shows Lopez's wide-ranging tastes, but "A.K.A." also showcases a singer better adept at balancing her pop and hip-hop roots. She zips from the dancey title track to the breezy electro-pop of the Max Martin-produced "First Love" to sticky hip-hop offerings such as "Acting Like That" and "I Luh Ya Papi" to torch ballads.
She is large, she contains multitudes: "I did a couple of dance records and people want me to do a dance album. Or they think I should go back to being 'Jenny From the Block,'" she laughs. "I am dance, I am pop, I am R&B, I am hip-hop, I am Latin, I am 'Jenny From the Block.' But I am also 'Jenny From Rodeo Drive.' It was about embracing all those things musically, everything about me emotionally, and putting that into lyrics and sound for this album."
Lounging barefoot in a leather armchair, in fitted jeans and a white T-shirt, the singer-actress-dancer and mom looked relaxed despite her whirlwind schedule and a brewing controversy over the FIFA-commissioned World Cup anthem "We Are One (Ole Ola)." It was recorded largely in English and Spanish with Cuban American rapper Pitbull and Brazilian pop star Claudia Leitte (with hardly any Portuguese for a song touting the Brazil-hosted matches, thus part of the outcry from Brazilians who felt the Bronx-born Puerto Rican Lopez and Pitbull were unfit).
If Lopez is stressed out by any of this, she doesn't let it show. She looks as radiant and warm as she does in that judge's chair — and makes eating slices of pizza look almost glamorous. She says, through bites, that she'll be in New York the next day for a promo tour including a homecoming concert (playing to 20,000 fans in the Bronx) and a set for "Good Morning America's" annual concert series.
Fifteen years after launching her music career, Lopez has sold more than 80 million records worldwide and is still the only performer to have a No. 1 album and film in the same week. "A.K.A." is her first offering on Capitol Records after years of label shifts (Lopez departed Island Def Jam after "Love?"; before that, she parted ways with longtime home Sony/Epic). "We were just not in sync," she says of Epic. "And I had been orphaned there for awhile … to be quite honest,"
The new album also comes at a time when Lopez is yet again the subject of tabloid headlines.
Recent criticism about the World Cup anthem was exacerbated by reports that she had abruptly pulled out of performing at the opening ceremony days before Thursday's scheduled kick-off in São Paulo (reps for the singer called the cancellation reports "premature" and said the singer was set to appear).
Two years ago, the singer went through a highly publicized divorce from singer Marc Anthony. And reports of her split with Casper Smart, her choreographer boyfriend of over two years (he was once her backup dancer), are currently dominating tabloid sites. Smart was present during the interview, sweetly kissing Lopez and bringing her food before driving her to the airport.
Love and all its splendor — and peril — is a major lyrical touchstone on Lopez's new album. "I'm so done with pleasing you / I'm so over needing you / All this space just gave me room so I could fly," she sings on "So Good."
In conversation, she's also forthcoming about the subject.
"These last four years, I felt like I really had to look at myself. One of the things I realized was I had to love myself a little bit more," said Lopez, who lives in Los Angeles. "That was a huge lesson for me. My kids [she and Anthony had twins in 2008] taught me that. They teach you a sort of unconditional kind of love and what it should feel like. It's very selfless and pure.
"The breakup [of her marriage] just made me go make some real realizations about myself. When you get to the point of loving yourself … you start going, 'OK, well, who am I?' Myself happens to be many things. Do I love all those parts? The good parts, the messy parts. And when I said that, so many things happened for this album."
Though the album's subject matter is familiar territory for Lopez, the purpose and confidence in which she sings are new. Lopez, who has long been criticized for her voice, finally gained confidence in her vocal ability — something she credits Anthony with.
"He's such a powerful vocalist, and he always believed in me as a vocalist and he knew it was a confidence thing for me," she says. "While we were married, he really helped me with that. And once I toured for the first time, I realized I was a much stronger vocalist than I gave myself credit for. [After the tour] I just couldn't wait to get into the studio. There was nothing to be afraid of. I had to really push myself."
She recruited a host of R&B/hip-hop heavyweights to contribute. T.I., Nas, Rick Ross, French Montana, Iggy Azalea and frequent collaborator Pitbull all appear; Chris Brown penned a handful of songs; producers Detail (Beyoncé, Nicki Minaj), Harmony Samuels (Fantasia, Ariana Grande) and RoccStar (Brown) lent beats. The album also reunited her with longtime producer Cory Rooney, who helmed her earlier releases.
But do audiences still care?
The album's lead single, the sexy "I Luh Ya Papi," logged the singer another dance hit, while its recently released follow-up, "First Love," was the most-added song on radio after she performed it on the "Idol" finale and at the Billboard Music Awards in May.
Lopez is eager to get back on the road too. After 2012's well-received and high-grossing Dance Again World tour (her first), she's hoping to support the new album with another trek. Whether she can depends on her oft-crammed schedule, which includes "Idol."
"They've asked me back, which is right there on the table and is waiting for me to make the decision," she said. "I know people want an answer right now. But when I know, you'll know. Until then, I'm still figuring it out myself."
Also on her plate? Several films slated for next year, including the thriller "The Boy Next Door," the indie drama "Lila & Eve" and the animated family film "Home." There's also "Shades of Blue," an NBC drama she's attached to produce and star in. The series received a 13-episode order for the 2015-16 season. "It's a great role for me, but again, it's logistics," she says. "Can we make it work for all of the things I have going on in my life?"
Lopez also wrote her first book, "True Love," set for release in October. Initially, a photo diary of the year she went on tour, the book morphed "into a real story of that transitional, transformative time" in her personal life. "I'm nervous about it, I'll be honest. It's soul-baring.
"There's a different strength to me than there was from my first album. I'm the same girl, I'm the same person, but I'm stronger now. I've grown up, and I like to think I'm a little bit better now," she says before breaking into laughter. "But you don't have to analyze it. Just enjoy the music."
Twitter: @gerrickkennedy


text:
Sunderland boss Steve Bruce confirmed he has held talks with Sol Campbell but insisted the former England international is just one of his options as he bids to strengthen his defence over the summer.
Campbell is a free agent after leaving Arsenal at the end of last season and has been sounded out by Bruce, who also retains an interest in Schalke's Heiko Westermann and Ghana international John Mensah.
"I have known Sol Campbell for a lot of years and it was nice to see him," said Bruce. "We had a catch up to see what his ideas are and what he is up to. It was pretty positive stuff and we will see what happens there."
Westermann is still a primary target with a bid lodged for a player who would have been in the Germany squad had he not broken a foot in a warm-up game.
"I've a number of irons in the fire," Bruce added in the Sunderland Echo. "The situation with Westermann was complicated because the boy got injured at the end of last season.
"But there is still interest there. We have made a bid but that hasn't come to anything at the moment."
Mensah is another under consideration. The 27-year-old spent last season on loan at the Stadium of Light from Lyon and impressed hugely when fit.
However his long-standing injury problems make a permanent move a non-starter unless Bruce can broker a pay-as-you-play deal.
"As for John Mensah, we all saw what a terrific player he is when he was here last season. When he is fit, he is up there with the best I have worked with," he said.
"He has been back here to see me this week and we will have to see how that situation develops."
Copyright (c) PA Sport 2009, All Rights Reserved.