A war novel is a novel that takes place during some form of fighting. In these books, the primary action happens during armed combat. Other war novels take place on the home front. The characters may be busy getting ready for or recovering from war. It is sometimes called military fiction.

History
There have been war novels and other stories about war for many thousands of years. In Ancient Greece and Rome and the Middle Ages, people wrote epic poems about the glory of war. Some of the most famous epic poems are The Iliad by Homer, The Aeneid by Virgil, the Old English saga Beowulf, and the legends of King Arthur.

Another important influence of war novels are tragedies (plays about human suffering.) Euripides, Seneca the Younger, Christopher Marlowe, and William Shakespeare wrote plays that are important influences on war novels. Shakespeare's play Henry V has many features of a war novel. It has history and military tactics, and it talks about the ethics of war.

The genres of romance and satire are also important. These works, especially in Early Modern Europe, show military heroism and folly (foolishness). Some important examples are The Faerie Queen by Edmund Spenser and Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes.

The themes and symbols found in modern war novels are also influenced by older works. In The Inferno, Dante described Hell in a way that is very close to how war is described in war novels. Other influences are John Milton's Paradise Lost and the Apocalypse in the Book of Revelation in the Bible.

Origins
The first war novels were from the 1600s. At that time fiction novels written in prose (instead of poetry) were becoming popular. These early war novels were usually satires and picaresque novels. The soldier was usually a rogue and not very realistic. One example is Simplicissimus by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen. Simplicissimus is a semi-autobiographical novel (based on the author's life) about the Thirty Years' War.

19th century war novels
Influential war novels from this time include Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, about the Napoleonic Wars in Russia, and Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, about the American Civil War.

World War I and after
War novels from this time included the experiences of trench warfare, but also began to tell the stories of what happened at home during the war. Many novels were written about the war. Writers were from countries on all sides of the conflict.

One of the first and most influential of these was the 1916 novel Le Feu (or Under Fire) by the French novelist and soldier Henri Barbusse.

The 1920s saw the so-called "war book boom," during which many men who had fought during the war were finally ready to write openly and critically about their war experiences. In 1929, Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front was a massive, worldwide bestseller. Also significant were Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (1929), Richard Aldington's Death of a Hero (1929), Arnold Zweig's The Case of Sergeant Grischa (1927), Charles Yale Harrison's Generals Die in Bed (1930) and William March's Company K (1933).

World War II and after
Many novels came out of soldiers' and peoples' experiences during World War II. These books were not only by European authors, but also by people around the world.

Japanese war novels
Just after the war ended, Sakaguchi Ango (坂口安吾) published a book called Idiocy (白痴) about the strange life in Japan after the bombing and losing the war. There were many novels aout the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, including: Summer Flowers (夏の花) by Hara Tamiki  (原 民喜) in 1947 and Black Rain (黒い雨) by Ibuse Masuji (井伏鱒二). There were also novels about being part of the kamikaze. The 1949 book Last Friends (きけ、わだつみの声) was about a group of soldiers leaving for the front. It was a best-seller. Around 1970 another type of novel began to appear. Ordinary people wrote about their experiences of battles and air raids. Novels about the many different ways the war ended also began to appear and tell being left behind in China or becoming prisoners of the Soviet Union in Siberia.

Vietnam and after
Many Americans and Vietnamese authors wrote books during or after this long war.

Related pages
 Epic poetry
 Ernest Hemingway
 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
 Stendhal
 Leo Tolstoy
 Napoleonic Wars
 American Civil War
 World War I
 World War II
 Vietnam War

Fiction genres

War novel


The elephant shrew, also called sengi, are any of 16 species of rat-sized African mammals named for their long, tapered, and flexible snout (proboscis).  All have slim bodies, slender limbs, and very long hind legs and feet. Although they resemble shrews, they are not insectivores but constitute the mammalian order Macroscelidea.  Long thought to be related to shrews, they are actually more closely related to elephants than to shrews although this was not known or even widely believed until the 1990s.

Description
Elephant shrews are terrestrial and are active during the day. Their ears and eyes are large, and, when alarmed, they run on their toes swiftly along paths they construct and maintain, sometimes leaping over obstacles. When foraging, they move along the pathways, using their paws and the constantly moving proboscis to turn over leaf litter and soil in search of prey, which consists of small insects (especially ants and termites), other arthropods, and earthworms. Gestation lasts two months, and litters contain one or two well-developed young.

Mammals of Africa
Mammals

Elephant shrew


Market share, in business and marketing, is the portion ('share') of the targeted consumer base ('market') that a company actually reaches, for a particular service or product.

For example, it can be shown as the amount of money a company brings in (revenue) from its consumers, divided by the total amount of money paid from all consumers for that service or product.

It can also be shown as the amount of products/services sold ('unit sales volume') by a company  divided by the total volume sold to all the consumers in that market.

It is necessary to commission (hire) market research (generally desk/secondary research, although sometimes primary research) to estimate the total market size and a company's market share.

Increasing market share is one of the most important objectives in business. The main advantage of using market share is that it removes the effects of industry-wide macroenvironmental variables such as the state of the economy, or changes in tax policy. For example, if you were one of only two psychiatrists in Chicago, then it would not matter how bad the economy was because you would always have a huge slice of the consumer-base "pie" for your service. If your service was less needed, then advertising more would help increase your market share.

The market shares for different companies tends to change over time, causing change in the market share values; the reason can be political ups and downs, a disaster, etc.

In finance a share is a unit of account for various financial instruments including stocks, mutual funds, limited partnerships, and REIT's. In British English, the usage of the word share alone to refer solely to stocks is so common that it almost replaces the word stock itself.

In simple words, a share or stock is a document issued by a company, which entitles its holder to be one of the owners of the company. A share is issued by a company or can be purchased from the stock market.

By owning a share you can earn a portion and selling shares you get capital gain. So, your return is the dividend plus the capital gain. However, you also run a risk of making a capital loss if you have sold the share at a price below your buying price.

A company's stock price reflects what investors think about the stock, not necessarily what the company is "worth." For example, companies that are growing quickly often trade at a higher price than the company might currently be "worth." Stock prices are also affected by all forms of company and market news. Publicly traded companies are required to report quarterly on their financial status and earnings. Market forces and general investor opinions can also affect share price.

 Owning a stock or a share means you are a partial owner of the company, and you get voting rights in certain company issues
 Over the long run, stocks have historically averaged about 10% annual returns However, stocks offer no guarantee of any returns and can lose value, even in the long run
 Investments in stocks can generate returns through dividends, even if the price

Related pages
 Marketing
Business

Other websites

 A Model of Market Shares I and A Model of Market Shares II by Fiona Maclachlan, The Wolfram Demonstrations Project.

Marketing

Market share


A folk hero is a person, who may or may not have existed, and is famous and well liked by people, or people of a certain country. Usually it is someone who helped the common people or fought against the authorities, such as a bad king. People tells stories about folk heroes, most of their stories have been passed down orally, and changed to fit the situations. They usually have a special skill or trait of some sort (Paul Bunyan is very short).

Some famous folk heroes are:

Robin Hood (England), who stole from the rich and gave it to the poor people
William Tell (Switzerland), who killed a tyrant (a lord terrorizing the people)
Carmine Crocco (Italy), controversial figure of the Italian unification but considered by many a folk hero
Johnny Appleseed
George Washington, First President of the United States
Natty Bumppo
Paul Bunyan
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, First President of Turkey
Gandhi
Nelson Mandela, First President of South Africa and anti-apartheid activist
Simón Bolívar
John Henry
Pecos Bill
Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States during the American Civil War
Davy Crockett, famous American folk hero who died at the Battle of the Alamo.
Jim Bowie, famous for his Bowie knife, died at the Battle of the Alamo.
Paul Revere
Qutb Shah, supposed Arab-Afghan who conquered large parts of Northern India and sired many tribes.
Dulla Bhatti who was a popular resistance hero against the Mughal Empire.
Rai Ahmad Khan Kharal who was a Punjabi freedom-fighter in 1857.

Folklore

Folk hero


Lodhran is the chief city of Lodhran District in the Punjab province of Pakistan. It is at 29°31'60N 71°37'60E. It is on the northern side of River Sutlej.

Administration
As well as being district capital, Lodhran is the administrative centre of Lodhran tehsil, which is subdivided into 28 Union Councils of Pakistan.

Infrastructure
Lodhran Tehsil, has a total of 325 schools, 9 colleges, 30 hospitals, 10 police stations, 11 railway stations, 52 post offices, one radio station and 20 banks.

Tehsils of Punjab (Pakistan)

Lodhran Tehsil


In computing, the JPEG file format is a file format which is used to compress digital images. The amount of compression can be changed depending on the wanted quality. If an image is high quality, it will take up a large amount of storage. If it is low quality, it will take up a small amount of storage. The JPEG file format is commonly found on the World Wide Web. The word JPEG is short for the Joint Photographic Experts Group which created the format. JPEG file extensions include .jpg, .jpeg, .jpe and others.

How it works

YPbPr
The first notable thing about JPEG compression is the way in which the colour of each pixel is stored. Each pixel of the image is assigned 3 bytes to define its colour. All three bytes can have any value from 0 to 255 and every possible combination of the three bytes stands for another colour. In most file formats, the RGB format is used for defining the colour. RGB stands for Red Green Blue. It's named this way because the first of the three bytes tells you how much red there is in the pixel's colour. The second byte tells you how much green there is in the colour and the third byte how much blue. The higher value the first byte has, the more red the pixel looks.

JPEG also uses three bytes for every pixel each, but it's using the YPbPr (also known as YCbCr) format. Here, the first byte tells us how bright the pixel is. The second byte tells us how blue the pixel is. The third byte tells us how red the pixel is. Using this colour format, the brightness is stored apart from the colour. This is useful, because we are going to compress an image. Because the human eye is better at seeing brightness than seeing colour, we can apply a greater compression to the colour bytes (the Pb-byte and the Pr-byte). Since we see brightness better, we use less compression on the Y-byte, to have the image look better after compression.

Because images are most often stored in RGB format, the first step of JPEG compression is usually to correctly change the RGB format into the YPbPr format.

Discrete Cosine Transform
JPEG uses cosine functions to represent an image. Therefore, we are going to talk a little bit about cosine functions. This is what a cosine function could look like:

To have the cosine function represent the colour of a pixel, we say that the higher the value of the cosine function, the brighter the pixel. If we had a set of pixels that went bright-dark-bright, we could use the function above to define them.

The function could also have a higher frequency. Like this:

But here's where it gets interesting. We can also create different functions by taking the average of different cosine functions. Here is what it would look like if we took the average of the above two functions:

In JPEG, DCT is applied to blocks of 8 × 8 pixels.

Quantisation
So far, no information has been lost in the process of compressing the image. In this step, we're filtering out information. For that reason, this is the step that lowers the quality of the image. For every block of 8 × 8 pixels, the cosine functions with high frequencies are set to 0. This means that these can no longer have any impact on how the image looks when you decompress it.

A lot of values will now be 0, which means that this can be very easily compressed. This is done using Huffman coding. Huffman coding is the last step of JPEG compression. It is also the only step in which the data is actually compressed.

Structure
Being a computer file, a JPEG file is made of multiple bytes. One byte in hexadecimal could look like 0x01. The very first bytes of a JPEG are 0xFF, 0xD8 ("FF D8"); these bytes are named Start Of Image (SOI). The first section of bytes in a JPEG is the header; this is from FF D8 to right before the last 0xFF, 0xDA ("FF DA") bytes. The header contains data about the data and other helpful data. The next section of bytes in a JPEG is the image data; this is from FF DA to 0xFF, 0xD9 ("FF D9"). The FF DA bytes are named Start Of Scan (SOS), and the FF D9 bytes are named End Of Image (EOI).

Other websites
 Videoon the "Computerphile" YouTube channel

Computer file formats
Data compression

JPEG


is a vertically scrolling shooter released by Konami as an arcade video game in 1985 in Japan. Along with Sega's Fantasy Zone, released a year later, TwinBee is credited as an early archetype of the "cute 'em up" type in its genre. It was the first game to run on Konami's Bubble System hardware. TwinBee was ported to the Family Computer and MSX in 1986 and has been included in numerous compilations released in later years. The original arcade game was released outside Japan for the first time in the Nintendo DS compilation Konami Classics Series: Arcade Hits. A mobile phone version was released for i-mode Japan phones in 2003 with edited graphics.

Various TwinBee sequels were released for the arcade and home console markets following the original game, some which spawned audio drama and anime adaptations in Japan.

Gameplay
TwinBee can be played by up to 2-players simultaneously. The player takes control of a cartoon-like anthropomorphic spacecraft, with Player 1 taking control of TwinBee, the titular ship, while Player 2 controls WinBee. The game control consists of an eight-way joystick and two buttons: one for shooting enemies in the air and the other for dropping bombs to ground enemies (similarly to Xevious).

The player's primary power-ups are bells that can be uncovered by shooting at the floating clouds where they're hidden. If the player continues shooting the bell after it appears, it will change into one of four other colors: the regular yellow bells only grant bonus points, the white bell will upgrade the player's gun into a twin cannon, the blue bell increases the player's speed (for up to five speed levels), the green bell will allow the player to create image copies of its ship for additional firepower, and the red bell will provide the player's ship a barrier that allows it to sustain more damage. The green and red bells cannot be combined. Other power-ups can also be retrieved from ground enemies such as an alternate bell that gives the player's ship a three-way gun, a star which eliminates all on-screen enemies.

As with other games of the same genre, getting shot by a single enemy bullet will cause the player to lose a life. However, if the bullet only strikes either side of the ship instead, the player's ship will only lose one of its arms. If the player's ship loses both arms, it will lose the ability to throw bombs and the player must wait for an ambulance to arrive. The player must navigate their ship to the ambulance to repair their arms. If the player's ship loses both arms for the second time, no ambulance will arrive.

If two players are playing at the same time, they can align their ships vertically or horizontally together to perform more powerful attacks.

Ports
TwinBee originally appeared as an arcade game. It was later ported to MSX and the Family Computer. The Famicom version was re-released only in Japan under the Famicom Mini label for the Game Boy Advance. This game was officially released for the first time outside Japan as part of the Konami Classics Series: Arcade Hits for the Nintendo DS in March 2007, under the name RainbowBell in North America, although the TwinBee name was restored for the European release. TwinBee was released in Japan on August 10, 2011, and in other regions on September 22 for the Nintendo 3DS as a part of the 3D Classics series. This release was featured amongst other games from the Nintendo Entertainment System and Super NES to be released for the 3DS on a tech demo called Classic Games at E3 2010. The arcade version of TwinBee was made available on Microsoft's Game Room service for its Xbox 360 console and for Windows-based PCs on December 1, 2010. Also, the MSX version was re-released for Windows' EGG Project on August 19, 2014. The arcade original version was available via the Arcade Archives series published by Hamster Corporation on Christmas 2015 for the PlayStation 4 in Japan and in December 2019 for the Nintendo Switch worldwide. The NES port was re-released via the Nintendo Switch Online service in November 2018 worldwide, with an SP version titled TwinBee: A Second Helping of Donburi Island! released on June 12, 2019.

Reception
In Japan, Game Machine listed TwinBee on their April 1, 1985 issue as being the third most-successful table arcade unit of the month.

The version of Twinbee for Nintendo 3DS received a total of 68/100 on Metacritic, which is mixed to positive, with an average user score of 7.3.

References

External links
 Twinbee World
 i-mode Release

1985 video games
Arcade video games
D4 Enterprise games
Famicom Disk System games
Game Boy Advance games
MSX games
Nintendo 3DS eShop games
Nintendo Entertainment System games
X68000 games
Mobile games
TwinBee games
Video games developed in Japan
Virtual Console games
Virtual Console games for Wii U
Windows games
Xbox 360 games
PlayStation 4 games
Nintendo Switch Online games
Hamster Corporation games
Multiplayer and single-player video games

TwinBee


Chalkida (or Chalkis) is a Greek town. Its population is 55,264 inhabitants according to the 2001 census. Chalkida is located to the north of Athens, on Euboea island. It is at the point where the Euboea is nearest to mainland Greece. At this point is the Eyripous narrow, a sea narrow, where there is a tidal phenomenon.

History
During antiquity, Chalkida was an important town. Its people were Ionian, an ancient Greek race. Chalkida had founded many colonies. Most of them were in south Italy. The Latin alphabet is an evolution of the ancient Chalkidian alphabet. During the Middle Ages Chalkida was an unimportant city. During the Lombardian knights' rule, Chalkida was developed again. Today Chalkida is an industrial town.

Cities in Greece

Chalkida


Circuit de Nevers Magny-Cours is a motor racing circuit in France, near the towns of Magny-Cours and Nevers. It is often called just Magny-Cours. It is most well known for hosting the Formula One French Grand Prix, which was held there between 1991 and 2008.

History
The circuit was built in 1960 by Jean Bernigaud. It was the home to the L'école de pilotage Winfield racing school. The school provided such drivers as François Cevert and Jacques Laffite. In the 1980s, the track condition was not very good. It needed a lot of repairs. The circuit was not used for international racing until it was purchased by the Regional Conseil de la Nièvre.

In the 1990s the Ligier (later known as Prost) Formula One team was based at the circuit. They did a lot of their testing at Magny-Cours. It started hosting the F1 French Grand Prix in 1991, and the Bol d'Or motorcycle race in 2000. The circuit was re-designed in 2003 and used for a wide range of events include various sports and commercial use.

The circuit does not provide many overtaking opportunities. The races here are commonly regarded as quite uneventful.

For the 2003 event, the final corner and chicane were changed in an effort to increase overtaking.  It did not help much. The change did make the pitlane much shorter. Because less time was lost making a pit stop, Michael Schumacher was able to win the 2004 French Grand Prix using a four-stop strategy.

In 2006, the circuit was the scene of more Formula One history. Michael Schumacher became the first driver to win a single Grand Prix 8 times at the same circuit.

The 2007 race was to mark the last French Grand Prix at Magny-Cours. The French Grand Prix had been indefinitely suspended from the Formula One calendar. Bernie Ecclestone originally said that F1 would not return to Magny-Cours in 2008. He wanted to move to another location, possibly in Paris.

When the official calendar on July 2007, the 2008 French Grand Prix was still in place at Magny-Cours.

In May 2008, Ecclestone confirmed that Magny-Cours would stop hosting the French Grand Prix after the 2008 race. He suggested he was looking into hosting the French Grand Prix on the streets of Paris.

In June 2008, the provisional calendar for the 2009 season was released. The French Grand Prix at Magny-Cours appeared on it, scheduled for 28 June. However, in October 2008 the 2009 French Grand Prix was canceled after the French Motorsports Federation (FFSA) withdrew financing for the event.

In 2009 the track hosted its first Superleague Formula event. It has also been confirmed it will host a second event in 2010.

The circuit
The current track is a modern, smooth circuit. It has good facilities for the teams and spectators. It is  from Paris in central France. Many corners are modeled on famous turns from other circuits, and are named after those circuits. Examples include the fast Estoril corner and the Adelaide hairpin. It has a mix of slow hairpins and high-speed chicane sections. It includes a long fast straight into the first-gear Adelaide hairpin, the best overtaking opportunity on the circuit. The circuit is very flat with little change in elevation. It does not provide many overtaking opportunities, despite modifications in 2003.

References

Other websites

 Circuit de Nevers Magny-Cours
 Google Maps satellite view of Circuit de Nevers Magny-Cours
 Nevers Magny-Cours History and Statistics
 Track info from official F1 site
 A lap of Magny-Cours with Honda's Alexander Wurz
 Magny-Cours - the technical requirements

Formula One circuits
Nièvre
Sport in France

Circuit de Nevers Magny-Cours


The Swan Islands, or Islas Santanilla, are a chain of three islands. They are in the northwestern Caribbean Sea. They are about ninety miles off the coastline of Honduras. They have a land area of .

Detailed location and features

They are within the EEZ of Honduras and belong to the Islas de la Bahía department of Honduras. They consist of three islands:
 Great Swan Island (3 km long, 5.5 km²)
Little Swan (2.4 km long, 0.5 km wide, 2.5 km²)
Booby Cay (90 metres long, 70 m off the southwest corner of Great Swan, <0.01 km²)

Rosario Bank and Misteriosa Bank are 130 to 150 km north of the Swan Islands. The >5000 metres deep Cayman Trench separates them.

The islands have no people in them, except for a small Honduran navy garrison. Great Swan has a 3800′ (1158 m) grass airstrip (ICAO code MHIC, IATA code SWA).

Historical background

Both the United States and Honduras claimed the Swan Islands until the United States dropped its claim. This was under the Guano Islands Act in 1972. The islands gained attention in the early 1960s. This was because of Radio Swan, which began broadcasting in May 1960 during preparation for, and during, the Bay of Pigs Invasion of Cuba. The station was removed from the islands in the late 1960s. Its main transmitter was transferred for use in the Vietnam War.

In October 1998, Hurricane Mitch moved over Swan Island with winds of 180 mph.

References

Other websites
 History of the Swan Islands

Caribbean islands
Islands of Central America
Geography of Honduras

Swan Islands, Honduras


The Horse-thristle for ordinar growes in Europe, North Africae an Asie, it is a virr, biennial wi coorse, piky leafs an kenspeckle jaggy-weengit stocks.

The flouer o the thristle haes been the naitional emblem o Scotland syne the time o Alexander III (1249 - 1286) an wis uised on siller cunyies issued by Jeames III in 1470.

Gaun by leegend, an invadin Norse airmy wis ettlin, by nicht, tae sneak upo a Scots airmy encampment. Ae barefit Norseman haed the wanluck tae pit his fit on a thristle that gart him skelloch wi pyne, lattin licht tae the Scots that the Norse wis oot an aboot. Some threaps that wis the Battle o Largs that merkit the onset o the awagaun o King Haakon IV (Haakon the Elder) o Norrowey, wha haein owerins o the Northren Isles an Hebrides, haed herriet the coast o the Kinrick o Scotland for mony a year. Piky plants sic as brammles seems tae hae been uised aboot forts lang syne, sae the story, whither adae wi the Haakon episode or no, is likely the affcome o mair nor ae sic ploy.

Flouers

Horse-thristle


The Augsburg Confession, also known as the "Augustana" from its Latin name, Confessio Augustana, is the most important confession of faith of the Lutheran Church. The Augsburg Confession is normative to all Lutheran Churches everywhere and in all times. It is also one of the most important documents of the Lutheran Reformation. The Augsburg Confession was presented by a number of German rulers and free-cities at the Diet of Augsburg on June 25, 1530.

Other websites

 The Augsburg Confession (1530) in Latin with a parallel English translation and with notes on the differences in the 1540 edition; from Philip Schaff's Creeds of the Evangelical Protestant Churches at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library
 The Roman Confutation (1530) , in an English translation, compares each articles of the confession to Catholic beliefs.
 An Orthodox Response - Summary of Orthodox Patriarch Jeremias II's letter of 15 May 1576, in which he compares each article of the confession to Orthodox Christian beliefs.

1530s works
Augsburg
Protestantism in Germany
16th century in Germany
Lutheranism
Protestant theology
Christian creeds

Augsburg Confession


March On, Bahamaland es l'imne nacional de las Bahamas.

Lift up your head to the rising sun, Bahamaland;
March on to glory your bright banners waving high.

See how the world marks the manner of your bearing!
Pledge to excel through love and unity.

Pressing onward, march together
to a common loftier goal;

Steady sunward, tho' the weather
hide the wide and treachrous shoal.

Lift up your head to the rising sun, Bahamaland,
'Til the road you've trod lead unto your God,
March On, Bahamaland.

Imne nacional

March On, Bahamaland


A synchronous orbit is an orbit in which an orbiting body (usually a satellite) has a period equal to the average rotational period of the body being orbited (usually a planet). Or in smaller words, the orbit above and the spinning planet below, go around once in the same amount of time. It orbits in the same direction of rotation as that body. So if you were on the orbiting body, you would always see the same side of the body being orbited. Or if you were on the body being orbited, the orbiting body would stay in the same part of the sky. Geostationary orbit is the most common kind.

Orbits

Synchronous orbit


A ballet blanc (literally, white ballet) is a ballet in the style of the 19th century romantic ballet. The ballerinas and the female members of the corps de ballet wear bell-shaped, calf-length, white ballet tutus. The second acts of La Sylphide and Giselle are representatives of the ballet blanc. Fokine's Les Sylphides is a 20th-century homage to the ballet blanc.

Ballet terminology

Ballet blanc


George Herbert Mead (February 27, 1863 – April 26, 1931) was an American philosopher, sociologist, and psychologist, primarily affiliated with the University of Chicago. He was one of the key figures in the development of pragmatism. He is regarded as one of the founders of symbolic interactionism, and was an important influence on what has come to be referred to as the Chicago School of Sociology.

Biography
George Herbert Mead was born on February 27, 1863, in South Hadley, Massachusetts. He was raised in a Protestant, middle-class family comprising his father, Hiram Mead, his mother, Elizabeth Storrs Mead (née Billings), and his sister Alice. His father was a former Congregationalist pastor from a lineage of farmers and clergymen and who later held the chair in Sacred Rhetoric and Pastoral Theology at Oberlin College's theological seminary. Elizabeth taught for two years at Oberlin College and subsequently, from 1890 to 1900, served as president of Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts.

In 1879, George Mead enrolled at the Oberlin Academy at Oberlin College and then the college itself, graduating in 1883 with a Bachelor of Arts. After graduation, Mead taught grade school for about four months. For the following three years, he worked as a surveyor for the Wisconsin Central Railroad Company.

In autumn 1887, Mead enrolled at Harvard University, where his main interests were philosophy and psychology. At Harvard, Mead studied with Josiah Royce, a major influence upon his thought, and William James, whose children he tutored. In 1888, Mead left Harvard after receiving only a B.A. and moved to Leipzig, Germany to study with psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, from whom he learned the concept of "the gesture", which would become central to his later work.

In 1891, Mead married Helen Kingsbury Castle (1860–1929), the sister of Henry Northrup Castle (1862–1895), a friend he met at Oberlin.
Despite never finishing his dissertation, Mead was able to obtain a post at the University of Michigan in 1891. There, Mead met Charles H. Cooley and John Dewey, both of whom would influence him greatly. In 1894, Mead moved, along with Dewey, to the University of Chicago, where he taught until his death. Dewey's influence led Mead into educational theory, but his thinking soon diverged from that of Dewey, and developed into his famous psychological theories of mind, self and society.

He was active in Chicago's social and political affairs; his many activities include work for the City Club of Chicago. Mead believed that science could be used to deal with social problems and played a key role in conducting research at the settlement house in Chicago. He also worked as treasurer for Chicago's Hull House. He also collaborated closely with Jane Addams on matters of social justice.

Mead died of heart failure on April 26, 1931.

Theory

Pragmatism and symbolic interaction

Much of Mead's work focused on the development of the self and the objectivity of the world within the social realm: he insisted that "the individual mind can exist only in relation to other minds with shared meanings". The two most important roots of Mead's work, and of symbolic interactionism in general, are the philosophy of pragmatism and social behaviorism.

Social behaviorism (as opposed to psychological behaviorism) refers to Mead's concern of the stimuli of gestures and social objects with rich meanings, rather than bare physical objects which psychological behaviourists considered stimuli.

Pragmatism is a wide-ranging philosophical position from which several aspects of Mead's influences can be identified into four main tenets:

 True reality does not exist "out there" in the real world, it "is actively created as we act in and toward the world".
 People remember and base their knowledge of the world on what has been useful to them and are likely to alter what no longer "works".
 People define the social and physical "objects" they encounter in the world according to their use for them.
 If we want to understand actors, we must base that understanding on what people actually do.

Three of these ideas are critical to symbolic interactionism:

the focus on the interaction between the actor and the world;
a view of both the actor and the world as dynamic processes and not static structures; and
the actor's ability to interpret the social world.

Thus, to Mead and symbolic interactionists, consciousness is not separated from action and interaction, but is an integral part of both. Symbolic interactionism as a pragmatic philosophy was an antecedent to the philosophy of transactionalism. Mead's theories in part, based on pragmatism and behaviorism, were transmitted to many graduate students at the University of Chicago who then went on to establish symbolic interactionism.

Social philosophy (social behaviorism)
Mead was a very important figure in 20th-century social philosophy. One of his most influential ideas was the emergence of mind and self from the communication process between organisms, discussed in Mind, Self and Society (1934), also known as social behaviorism. This concept of how the mind and self emerge from the social process of communication by signs founded the symbolic interactionist school of sociology.

Rooted intellectually in Hegelian dialectics and process philosophy, Mead, like John Dewey, developed a more materialist process philosophy that was based upon human action and specifically communicative action. Human activity is, in a pragmatic sense, the criterion of truth, and through human activity meaning is made. Joint activity, including communicative activity, is the means through which our sense of self is constituted. The essence of Mead's social behaviorism is that mind is not a substance located in some transcendent realm, nor is it merely a series of events that takes place within the human physiological structure. This approach opposed the traditional view of the mind as separate from the body. The emergence of mind is contingent upon interaction between the human organism and its social environment; it is through participation in the social act of communication that individuals realize their potential for significantly symbolic behaviorthat is, thought. Mind, in Mead's terms, is the individualized focus of the communication process. It is linguistic behavior on the part of the individual. There is, then, no "mind or thought without language"; and language (the content of mind) "is only a development and product of social interaction". Thus, mind is not reducible to the neurophysiology of the organic individual, but is emergent in "the dynamic, ongoing social process" that constitutes human experience.

For Mead, mind arises out of the social act of communication. Mead's concept of the social act is relevant not only to his theory of mind, but to all facets of his social philosophy. His theory of "mind, self, and society" is, in effect, a philosophy of the act from the standpoint of a social process involving the interaction of many individuals, just as his theory of knowledge and value is a philosophy of the act from the standpoint of the experiencing individual in interaction with an environment.  Action is very important to his social theory and, according to Mead, actions also occur within a communicative process.

The initial phase of an act constitutes a gesture. A gesture is a preparatory movement that enables other individuals to become aware of the intentions of the given organism. The rudimentary situation is a conversation of gestures, in which a gesture on the part of the first individual evokes a preparatory movement on the part of the second, and the gesture of the second organism in turn calls out a response in the first person. On this level no communication occurs. Neither organism is aware of the effect of its own gestures upon the other; the gestures are nonsignificant. For communication to take place, each organism must have knowledge of how the other individual will respond to its own ongoing act. Here the gestures are significant symbols. A significant symbol is a kind of gesture that only humans can make. Gestures become significant symbols when they arouse in the individual who is making them the same kind of response they are supposed to elicit from those to whom the gestures are addressed.  Only when we have significant symbols can we truly have communication. Mead grounded human perception in an "action-nexus". We perceive the world in terms of the "means of living." To perceive food is to perceive eating. To perceive a house is to perceive shelter. That is to say, perception is in terms of action. Mead's theory of perception is similar to that of J. J. Gibson.

Social acts
Mead argued, in tune with Durkheim, that the individual is a product of an ongoing, pre-existing society;  or, more specifically, of social interaction that is a consequence of a sui generis society. The self arises when the individual becomes an object to themself. Mead argued that we are objects first to other people, and secondarily we become objects to ourselves by taking the perspective of other people. Language enables us to talk about ourselves in the same way as we talk about other people, and thus through language we become other to ourselves. In joint activity, which Mead called social acts, humans learn to see themselves from the standpoint of their co-actors. A central mechanism within the social act, which enables perspective taking, is position exchange. People within a social act often alternate social positions (e.g., giving/receiving, asking/helping, winning/losing, hiding/seeking, talking/listening). In children's games there is repeated position exchange, for example in hide-and-seek, and Mead argued that this is one of the main ways that perspective taking develops.

However, for Mead, unlike Dewey and J. J. Gibson, the key is not simply human action, but rather social action. In humans the "manipulatory phase of the act" is socially mediated;  that is to say, in acting towards objects humans simultaneously take the perspectives of others toward that object. This is what Mead means by "the social act" as opposed to simply "the act" (the latter being a Deweyan concept). Non-human animals also manipulate objects, but that is a non-social manipulation; they do not take the perspective of other organisms toward the object. Humans, on the other hand, take the perspective of other actors towards objects, and this is what enables complex human society and subtle social coordination. In the social act of economic exchange, for example, both buyer and seller must take each other's perspectives toward the object being exchanged. The seller must recognize the value for the buyer, while the buyer must recognize the desirability of money for the seller. Only with this mutual perspective taking can the economic exchange occur. (Mead was influenced on this point by Adam Smith.)

Nature of the self

A final piece of Mead's social theory is the mind as the individual importation of the social process. Mead states that "the self is a social process", meaning that there are series of actions that go on in the mind to help formulate one's complete self. As previously discussed, Mead presented the self and the mind in terms of a social process. As gestures are taken in by the individual organism, the individual organism also takes in the collective attitudes of others, in the form of gestures, and reacts accordingly with other organized attitudes. This process is characterized by Mead as the I and the Me. The 'Me' is the social self and the 'I' is the response to the 'Me'. In other words, the 'I' is the response of an individual to the attitudes of others, while the 'Me' is the organized set of attitudes of others which an individual assumes.

Mead develops William James' distinction between the 'I' and the 'Me'. The 'Me' is the accumulated understanding of "the generalized otheri.e., how one thinks one's group perceives oneself, and so on. The 'I' is the individual's impulses. The 'I' is self as subject; the 'Me' is self as object. The 'I' is the knower; the 'Me' is the known. The mind, or stream of thought, is the self-reflective movements of the interaction between the 'I' and the 'Me'. There is neither 'I' nor 'Me' in the conversation of gestures; the whole act is not yet carried out, but the preparation takes place in this field of gesture. These dynamics go beyond selfhood in a narrow sense, and form the basis of a theory of human cognition. For Mead the thinking process is the internalized dialogue between the 'I' and the 'Me'. Mead rooted the self's "perception and meaning" deeply and sociologically in "a common praxis of subjects", found specifically in social encounters.

Understood as a combination of the 'I' and the 'Me', Mead's self proves to be noticeably entwined within a sociological existence. For Mead, existence in community comes before individual consciousness. First one must participate in the different social positions within society and only subsequently can one use that experience to take the perspective of others and thus become 'conscious'.

Philosophy of science
Mead was a major American philosopher by virtue of beingalong with John Dewey, Charles Peirce and William James one of the founders of pragmatism. He also made significant contributions to the philosophies of nature, science, and history, to philosophical anthropology, and to process philosophy. Dewey and Alfred North Whitehead considered Mead a thinker of the first rank. He is a classic example of a social theorist whose work does not fit easily within conventional disciplinary boundaries.

In his work on philosophy of science, Mead sought to find the psychological origin of science in the efforts of individuals to attain power over their environment. The notion of a physical object arises out of manipulatory experience. There is a social relation to inanimate objects, for the organism takes the role of things that it manipulates directly, or that it manipulates indirectly in perception. For example, in taking (introjecting or imitating) the resistant role of a solid object, an individual obtains cognition of what is "inside" nonliving things.  Historically, the concept of the physical object arose from an animistic conception of the universe.

Contact experience includes experiences of position, balance, and support, and these are used by the organism when it creates its conceptions of the physical world. Our scientific concepts of space, time, and mass are abstracted from manipulatory experience. Such concepts as that of the electron are also derived from manipulation. In developing a science we construct hypothetical objects in order to assist ourselves in controlling nature. The conception of the present as a distinct unit of experience, rather than as a process of becoming and disappearing, is a scientific fiction devised to facilitate exact measurement. In the scientific worldview, immediate experience is replaced by theoretical constructs. The ultimate in experience, however, is the manipulation and contact at the completion of an act.

Play and game and the generalized other
Mead theorized that human beings begin their understanding of the social world through "play" and "game". Play comes first in the child's development. The child takes different roles that he/she observes in "adult" society, and plays them out to gain an understanding of the different social roles. For instance, a child may first play the role of police officer and then the role of thief while playing "Cops and Robbers", and play the roles of doctor and patient when playing "Doctor". As a result of such play, the child learns to become both subject and object and begins to become able to build a self. However, it is a limited self, because the child can only take the role of distinct and separate others; they still lack a more general and organized sense of themself.

In the next stage, the game stage, it is required that a person develop a full sense of self. Whereas in the play stage the child takes on the role of distinct others, in the game stage the child must take on the role of everyone else involved in the game. Furthermore, these roles must have a definite relationship to one another.  To illustrate the game stage, Mead gives his famous example of a baseball game:

In the game stage, organization begins and definite personalities start to emerge.  Children begin to become able to function in organized groups and, most importantly, to determine what they will do within a specific group. Mead calls this the child's first encounter with "the generalized other", which is one of the main concepts that Mead proposes for understanding the emergence of the (social) self in human beings. "The generalized other" can be thought of as understanding the given activity and the actors' place within the activity from the perspective of all the others engaged in the activity. Through understanding "the generalized other", the individual understands what kind of behavior is expected, appropriate and so on, in different social settings.

Some may find that social acts (e.g. games and routine forms of social interaction) enable perspective taking through "position exchange". Assuming that games and routine social acts have differentiated social positions, and that these positions create our cognitive perspectives, then it might be that by moving between roles in a game (e.g. between hiding and seeking or buying and selling) we come to learn about the perspective of the other. This new interpretation of Mead's account of taking the perspective of the other has experimental support. Other recent publications argue that Mead's account of the development of perspective taking is relevant not only with respect to human ontogeny but also to the evolution of human sociality.

Writings
In a career spanning more than 40 years, Mead wrote almost constantly and published numerous articles and book reviews in both philosophy and psychology.  However, he did not publish any books. Following his death, several of his students put together and edited four volumes from records of Mead's social psychology course at the University of Chicago, his lecture notes (Mead's Carus Lectures, 1930, edited by Charles W. Morris), and his numerous unpublished papers.

In his lifetime, Mead published around 100 scholarly articles, reviews, and incidental pieces. Given their diverse nature, access to these writings is difficult. The first editorial efforts to change this situation date from the 1960s. In 1964, Andrew J. Reck collected twenty-five of Mead's published articles in Selected Writings: George Herbert Mead. Four years later, John W. Petras published George Herbert Mead: Essays on his Social Psychology, a collection of fifteen articles that included previously unpublished manuscripts.

More recently, Mary Jo Deegan (2001) published Essays in Social Psychology, a book project originally abandoned by Mead in the early 1910s. In 2010, Filipe Carreira da Silva edited G.H. Mead. A Reader, a comprehensive collection including thirty of Mead's most important articles, ten of them previously unpublished. Likewise, the Mead Project at Brock University in Toronto intends to publish all of Mead's 80-odd remaining unpublished manuscripts.

Bibliography

Collected volumes (posthumous)

 1932. The Philosophy of the Present.
 1934. Mind, Self, and Society.
1936. Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century.
 1938. The Philosophy of the Act.
1964. Selected Writings. — This volume collects articles Mead himself prepared for publication.
 1982. The Individual and the Social Self: Unpublished Essays by G. H. Mead.
2001. Essays in Social Psychology.
2010. G.H. Mead. A Reader.

Notable papers

 "Suggestions Towards a Theory of the Philosophical Disciplines" (1900);
 "Social Consciousness and the Consciousness of Meaning" (1910);
 "What Social Objects Must Psychology Presuppose" (1910);
 "The Mechanism of Social Consciousness" (1912);
 "The Social Self" (1913);
 "Scientific Method and the Individual Thinker"(1917);
 "A Behavioristic Account of the Significant Symbol" (1922);
 "The Genesis of Self and Social Control" (1925);
 "The Objective Reality of Perspectives" (1926);
 "The Nature of the Past" (1929); and
 "The Philosophies of Royce, James, and Dewey in Their American Setting" (1929).

See also

Notes

References

Further reading
 Aboulafia, Mitchell, ed. 1991. Philosophy, Social Theory, and the Thought of George Herbert Mead. Albany: SUNY Press.
 — 2001. The Cosmopolitan Self: George Herbert Mead and Continental Philosophy. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Biesta, Gert, and Daniel Tröhler, ed. 2008. G. H. Mead: the Philosophy of Education. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.
 Blumer, H. & Morrione, T. J. 2004. George Herbert Mead and Human Conduct. New York: Altamira Press.
 Burke, Thomas, and Skowroński, Krzysztof Piotr, eds. 2013. George Herbert Mead in the Twenty-first Century, Lexington.
 Conesa-Sevilla, J. 2005. "The Realm of Continued Emergence: The Semiotics of George Herbert Mead and its Implications to Biosemiotics, Semiotics Matrix Theory, and Ecological Ethics." Sign Systems Studies (September). Estonia: Tartu University.
da Silva, Filipe Carreira. 2007. G.H. Mead. A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press.
 — 2008. Mead and Modernity: Science, Selfhood and Democratic Politics. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Gillespie, Alex. 2001. "The Mystery of G.H. Mead's First Book" (Essays in Social Psychology book review). Theory & Psychology 13(3):422–24. Archived from the original 17 June 2010.
 — 2005. "G. H. Mead: Theorist of the social act." Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 35:19–39.
 — 2006. "Games and the development of perspective taking." Human Development 49:87–92.
Joas, Hans. 1985. G.H. Mead: A Contemporary Re-examination of His Thought. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1992. "Individuation through socialization: On George Herbert Mead's theory of socialization." in Postmetaphysical Thinking, by J. Habermas, translated by W. M. Hohengarten. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Honneth, Axel. 1996. "Recognition and socialization: Mead's naturalistic transformation of Hegel's idea." Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, by A. Honneth, translated by J. Anderson. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
 Lewis, J. D. 1979 "A social behaviorist interpretation of the Meadian 'I'." American Journal of Sociology 85:261–87.
 Lundgren, D. C. 2004. "Social feedback and self-appraisals: Current status of the Mead-Cooley hypothesis." Symbolic Interaction 27:267–86.
 Miller, David L. 1973 G. H. Mead: Self, Language and the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
 Nungesser, Frithjof. 2016. "Mead Meets Tomasello. Pragmatism, the Cognitive Sciences, and the Origins of Human Communication and Sociality" in: The Timeliness of George Herbert Mead. Ed. by H. Joas and D. R. Huebner. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 252–275.
 Nungesser, Frithjof. 2020. "The Social Evolution of Perspective-taking. Mead, Tomasello, and the Development of Human Agency" Pragmatism Today, 11(1): 84–105.
 Sánchez de la Yncera, Ignacio. 1994. La Mirada Reflexiva de G.H. Mead. Montalbán, ES: Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas.
 Shalin, Dmitri. 1988. "G. H. Mead, socialism, and the progressive agenda." American Journal of Sociology 93:913–51.

External links

Mead Project 2.0 — Mead's published and unpublished writings, many of which are available online, along with others.
George Herbert Mead — Mitchell Aboulafia, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
 Review materials for studying George Herbert Mead
Guide to the George Herbert Mead Papers 1855-1968 at the University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center

1863 births
1931 deaths
People from South Hadley, Massachusetts
20th-century American philosophers
20th-century American psychologists
American sociologists
American social psychologists
Pragmatists
Labeling theory
Communication scholars
Social philosophers
Philosophers of science
Philosophical anthropology
Philosophers of history
Process philosophy
Oberlin College alumni
Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni
University of Michigan faculty
University of Chicago faculty
Symbolic interactionism

George Herbert Mead


Rate of fire is how fast a weapon can fire or launch its projectiles. It is usually measured in rounds per minute (RPM or round/min), or per second (RPS or round/s). Pistols usually have a very slow RPM, which large machine guns may get up to 1000 RPM. The M61 Vulcan, a gatling-gun, could fire around 6000 RPM in tests.

Firearms

Rate of fire


Wilhelm Burgdorfer (June 27, 1925 – November 17, 2014) was a Swiss-American scientist and an international leader in the field of medical entomology.  He discovered the bacterial pathogen that causes Lyme disease, a spirochete named Borrelia burgdorferi in his honor.

Background
Burgdorfer was born on June 27, 1925, in Basel, Switzerland.  He earned his Ph.D. in zoology, parasitology, and bacteriology from the University of Basel and the Swiss Tropical Institute in Basel.

As a research subject for his thesis he chose to study the development of the African relapsing fever spirochete, Borrelia duttonii, in its tick vector Ornithodoros moubata, and to evaluate this tick's efficiency in transmitting spirochetes during feeding on animal hosts.

During his college years Burgdorfer was a member of a research team investigating outbreaks of Q fever in various parts of Switzerland and became interested in similar research activities carried out at the Rocky Mountain Laboratory (RML) in Hamilton, Montana, a U.S. National Institutes of Health research facility.  He joined the RML in 1952 as a research fellow, and later became a research associate in the USPHS's Visiting Scientist Program. In 1957, he became a U.S. citizen and shortly thereafter joined the RML staff as a medical entomologist.

Career

Burgdorfer's research concerned the interactions between animal and human disease agents and their transmitting arthropod vectors, particularly ticks, fleas and mosquitoes. His research contributions are published in more than 225 papers and books, and cover a wide field of investigations including those on relapsing fevers, plague, tularemia, Colorado tick fever, Rocky Mountain spotted fever and other bacterial and viral diseases.

Burgdorfer gained worldwide recognition for his 1982 discovery of a tick-borne spirochete as the long-sought cause of Lyme disease and related disorders in the U.S. and Europe. The agent was named after him — Borrelia burgdorferi.

Throughout his career, Burgdorfer participated in a number of World Health Organization (WHO) and other health organization-sponsored seminars and congresses.

From 1967 to 1972, he served as associate member on the Rickettsial Commission of the Armed Forces Epidemiology Board. For several years (1968–1971) he was also Co-Project Officer of the PL 480-sponsored Research Project on Rickettsial Zoonoses in Egypt and adjacent areas, and from 1979 to 1986, he directed the WHO-sponsored Reference Center for Rickettsial Diseases at RML in Montana, U.S.

Personal life
Burgdorfer was married to Gertrude "Dale" See Burgdorfer until she died in 2005. He later married Lois Rohr; she survived him at the time of his death. He died from complications of Parkinson's disease on November 17, 2014, at a hospital in Hamilton, Montana.

Later life
Although retiring in 1986, Burgdorfer continued his association with the Rocky Mountain Laboratories' Laboratory of Human Bacterial Pathogenesis as scientist emeritus.  He was also active on the Scientific/Medical Advisory Committee of the Lyme Disease Foundation.  In 1999, he delivered the keynote address at the 12th International Conference on Lyme Disease and Other Spirochetal and Tick-Borne Disorders .

Honors
 Schaudinn-Hoffman Plaque (1985, German Society of Dermatologists)
 Robert Koch Gold Medal (1988 Berlin, Germany)
 Bristol Award (1989, Infectious Diseases Society of America)
 Walter Reed Medal (1990, American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene)
 Doctor Medicina Honoris Causa (1986, University of Bern, Switzerland; 1991, University of Marseille, France)
 Honorary Degrees of Science (1990, Montana State University; 1994, Ohio State University).

Selected publications
Burgdorfer, W. Analyse des Infektionsverlaufes bei Ornithodoros moubata (Murray) unter Berücksichtigung der natürlichen Übertragung von Spirochaeta duttoni. Acta Trop. 8:193-262, 1951.
Burgdorfer, W. and Ekland C. M. Studies on the ecology of Colorado tick fever virus in western Montana. Amer. J. Hyg.' 69:127-137, 1959.
Burgdorfer, W. Evaluation of the fluorescent antibody technique for the detection of Rocky Mountain spotted fever rickettsiae in various tissues. Path. Microbiol. (Switzerland) 24 (Suppl.) 27–39, 1961.
Burgdorfer, W. Hemolymph test. A technique for detection of rickettsiae in ticks, Amer. J. Trop. Med. 19:1010-1014, 1970.
Burgdorfer, W., Barbour, A. G., Hayes, S. F., Benach, J. L., Grunwaldt E., and Davis, J. P. Lyme disease — a tick-borne spirochetosis? Science 216:1317-1319, 1982.
Burgdorfer, W. Discovery of the Lyme disease spirochete and its relation to tick vectors. Yale J. Biol. Med. 57:518-520, 1984.
Burgdorfer, W. How the discovery of Borrelia burgdorferi came about. Clin. Dermatol. 11:335-338, 1993.
Burgdorfer, W. Arthropod-Borne Spirochetoses. A Historical Perspective, Editorial, Eur. J. Clin. Microbiol.'' Infect. Dis. 201: 1–5, 2001.

See also
Lyme disease
Lyme disease controversy
Lyme disease microbiology
Jorge Benach
Allen Steere

References

External links
Willy Burgdorfer Collection of Lyme Disease Research Materials
 Willy Burgdorfer Oral History
Who Named It? entry on Willy Burgdorfer

1925 births
2014 deaths
Lyme disease researchers
American medical researchers
People from Hamilton, Montana
Neurological disease deaths in Montana
Deaths from Parkinson's disease
University of Basel alumni
Swiss emigrants to the United States

Willy Burgdorfer


Menstruation, or menses, is when an unfertilized female has blood come out of her vagina for 2–7 days every month. A more common word for menstruation is a "period".

Summary
Inside the thick part of the uterus are blood vessels and nutrients that a baby will need to grow. Every month in a human female who has gone through puberty, the brain sends signals to the ovaries that tell them to release an ovum (or egg). The ovum then travels through the fallopian tubes (with the expectation of becoming fertilized by a sperm cell) into the uterus. If an ovum is fertilized, it sticks to the wall of the uterus and starts to grow. If the ovum is not fertilized, it does not stick. The uterus then gets rid of the ovum and the extra tissue by releasing it from the body. The tissue and blood flows out of the uterus through the vagina. This is called menstruation or having a period. The bleeding normally lasts about 3-5 days, though some people may bleed longer or have a bit of bleeding between periods.

The uterus then starts preparing for another ovum. For most people, the time between their periods is about one month. For about 2 years after menstruation starts, the time between periods is not always the same. Some menstruators may skip a month, or have 2 periods close to each other. It is also possible and normal (within reasonable limits) to have cramps (rather painful squeezing feelings) or to feel bloated (swollen up) in the abdomen at periods.

People who have periods often use sanitary napkins or tampons to soak up the blood and tissue. A sanitary napkin is a piece of material that absorbs (takes in) liquids which is worn between the vulva and underpants. A tampon is a stick of absorbent material that is placed in the vagina. Pads and tampons can be disposable or reusable.The use of a menstrual cup or disc is also possible. A menstrual cup is a silicone cup that is inserted inside the vagina to collect blood and other tissues. A menstrual disc follows the same concept but is made of more flexible material and is round and flatter than a cup, it is also inserted higher in the vagina.

Cycle

Menstruation
Most people menstruate for 3–5 days every month. However, anywhere from 2–7 days is normal. The amount of blood lost is normally about 50ml. Menstruators usually use a pad or a tampon to keep the blood from staining their undergarments, but there are many other forms of sanitary protection.

Menopause
Menopause is menstruation stopping at the age of around 45-70, which is caused by hormones. Symptoms include irritability, heat, vaginal burning and/or discomfort, and vaginal dryness. A slang word for it is called "the change". Most people must take a few months to adjust to the dryness. After they stop their period they can no longer produce babies.

Physical appearance

The fluid that comes out looks like blood, but it is more than just blood. It also has endometrial tissue. This is the tissue that lines the inside of the uterus (womb).

Menses happens in the first days of the menstrual cycle. This is the changes that happen in a woman's body every month. These changes are started by changes in hormone levels in the blood. These changes also cause a person to ovulate and make an ovum (also called "egg"). Menstruation usually starts around the age of 11, even as early as 9 years old, and ends when the menstruator is too old to have children. However, some females can still have children from the age of 50-70.

Effect

Some people have pain in the low part of the abdomen when they menstruate. This is called dysmenorrhea, or cramps. Extreme and continuous cramps are not normal and should be checked upon with a medical practitionner. The hormones that are produced before and during a period can also make a woman feel moody, or just strange. This is called premenstrual syndrome (PMS), or premenstrual tension (PMT). A person can feel bloated or swollen and have long cramps. Some menstruators have extremely bad reactions to menstruation and may even feel suicidal. This is called premenstrual dysphoric disorder, or PMDD. Other physical effects include headaches, tender breasts, lower back pain, fatigue, acne, diarrhoea or constipation, trouble sleeping and more.

Materials
Most menstruators use something to absorb or catch their menses. There are a number of different methods available. The most common methods of absorbing the flow are sanitary towels (sometimes called "pads"), tampons and padded underwear. Some people use sea sponges, towels and other reusable absorbing items.

In addition to products to contain the menstrual flow, pharmaceutical companies likewise provide products — commonly non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) — to relieve menstrual cramps. Some herbs, such as dong quai, raspberry leaf and crampbark, are also claimed to relieve menstrual pain, however there is no documented scientific evidence.

Related pages
Sanitary napkin

References

Female reproductive system

Menstruation


The Popol Vuh (K'iche for "Council Book" or "Book of the Community";  Popol Wu'uj  in modern spelling) is a book written in the Classical Quiché language. It contains mythological stories and a genealogy of the rulers of the Post-Classic Quiché Maya kingdom of highland Guatemala.

The book contains a creation myth followed by mythological stories of two Hero Twins: Hunahpu (Modern K'iche': Junajpu) and Xbalanque (Modern K'iche': Xb'alanke). The second part of the book deals with details of the foundation and history of the Quiché kingdom.

The book is written in the Latin alphabet, but it is thought to have been based on an original Maya codex. The original manuscript which was written around 1550 has been lost, but a copy of another handwritten copy in the early 18th century exists today in Chicago.

The significance of the book is enormous since it is one of a small number of early Mesoamerican mythological texts — it is often considered the single most important piece of Mesoamerican literature.

Contents

Summary
This is a very general summary; divisions depend on text version
Part 1
 Gods create world.
 Gods create first "mud" or clay humans. Secondly, Maker and Creator, create "wood" humans; they are imperfect and emotionless.
 Gods destroy first humans in a "resin" flood; they become monkeys.
 Twin diviners Hunahpu & Xbalanque destroy arrogant Vucub-Caquix, then Zipacna & Cabracan.

Part 2
 Diviners Xpiyacoc and Xmucane beget brothers.
 HunHunahpu & Xbaquiyalo beget "Monkey Twins" HunBatz & HunChouen.
 Cruel Xibalba lords kill the brothers HunHunahpu & VucubHunahpu.
 HunHunahpu & Xquic beget "Hero Twins" Hunahpu & Xbalanque.
 "Hero Twins" defeat the Xibalba houses of Gloom, Knives, Cold, Jaguars, Fire, and Bats.

Part 3
 The first four "real" people are made: Jaguar Quiché, Jaguar Night, Naught, & Wind Jaguar.
 Tribes descend; they speak the same language and travel to TulanZuiva.
 The tribes language becomes confused, and they disperse.
 Tohil is recognized as a god and demands life sacrifices; later he must be hidden.

Part 4
 Tohil affects Earth Lords through priests, but his dominion destroys the Quiche.
 Priests try to abduct tribes for sacrifices; the tribes try to resist this.
 Quiche finds Gumarcah where Gucumatz (the feathered serpent lord) raises them to power.
 Gucumatz institutes elaborate rituals.
 Genealogies of the tribes

Creation Myth
The book begins with the creation myth of the K'ichee' Maya, which credits the creation of humans to the three water-dwelling feathered serpents:

There was only immobility and silence in the darkness, in the night. Only the Creator, the Maker, Tepeu, Gucumatz, the Forefathers, were in the water surrounded with light. They were hidden under green and blue feathers, and were therefore called Gucumatz...

and to the three other deities, collectively called "Heart of heaven":

Then while they meditated, it became clear to them that when dawn would break, man must appear. Then they planned the creation, and the growth of the trees and the thickets and the birth of life and the creation of man. Thus it was arranged in the darkness and in the night by the Heart of Heaven who is called Huracán. The first is called Caculhá Huracán. The second is ChipiCaculhá. The third is Raxa-Caculhá. And these three are the Heart of Heaven.

who together attempted to create human beings to keep him company.

Their first attempts proved unsuccessful. They attempted to make man of mud, but man could neither move nor speak. After destroying the mud men, they tried again by creating wooden creatures that could speak but had no soul or blood and quickly forgot him. Angered over the flaws in his creation, they destroyed them by tearing them apart. In their final attempt, the "True People" were constructed with maize. The following is an excerpt of this myth:

They came together in darkness to think and reflect. This is how they came to decide on the right material for the creation of man. ... Then our Makers Tepew and Q'uk'umatz began discussing the creation of our first mother and father. Their flesh was made of white and yellow corn. The arms and legs of the four men were made of corn meal.

Today
The Popol Vuh continues to be an important part in the belief system of many Quiché.

Excerpt
Here are the opening lines of the book, in modernized spelling and punctuation (from Sam Colop's edition):

Are uxe' ojer tzij
  waral K'iche' ub'i'.
Waral
  xchiqatz'ib'aj wi
  xchiqatikib'a' wi ojer tzij,
utikarib'al
uxe'nab'al puch rnojel xb'an pa
  tinamit K'iche'
  ramaq' K'iche' winaq.

"This is the root of the ancient word
  of this place called Quiché.
Here
  we shall write,
  we shall plant the ancient word,
the origin
the beginning of all what has been done in the
  Quiché Nation
  country of the Quiché people."

Here is the opening of the creation story:

Are utzijoxik wa'e
k'a katz'ininoq,
k'a kachamamoq,
  katz'inonik,
k'a kasilanik,
k'a kalolinik,
  katolona puch upa kaj.

"This is the account of how
all was in suspense,
all calm,
  in silence;
all motionless,
all pulsating,
  and empty was the expanse of the sky.

References

Other websites

 English translation of the Popol Vuh from Metareligion.
 Another one.
 And another.
 A Spanish One . In Spanish, with an introduction

Religious texts
Maya civilization
Creation myths
16th-century books

Popol Vuh


The Palmengarten is one of two botanical gardens in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.  It is in the city area Westend-Nord.

The garden was privately paid for and built by the architect Heinrich Siesmayer.  Work was done in 1871 and the garden opened to the public. One special visit was from the American entertainer Buffalo Bill.  Buffalo Bill performed his Western show at the garden in 1890. In 1931, it was placed in the care of the city of Frankfurt.  Control of the  garden was later moved to the American occupation authorities after World War II.  When the Palmengarten was returned to the city's control in the 1960s, a major rebuilding started. The halls that were destroyed in the war were redeveloped and expanded. In 1992, the reconstruction finished and the Palmengarten showed in its new form.

Next to the area of the Palmengarten is the Frankfurt Botanical Garden, which belongs to the biology department of Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt.

The botanical exhibits are placed according to their start in free-air or climate controlled greenhouses, which also contain many tropical and subtropical plants.

With , it is the biggest garden of its kind in Germany.

Related pages
 List of botanical gardens

Botanical gardens in Europe
Frankfurt

Palmengarten


Blasphemy is a word that means speaking badly about a religion, or insulting a god. Some religions see blasphemy as a religious crime. Many countries witha state religion have laws that make blasphemy a crime. For example, blasphemy can be punished with the death penalty in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan. In other countries, the punishment for the crime is a fine, or imprisonment.

Some countries do not have laws against blasphemy. For example, after the French Revolution, France made blasphemy legal to make sure people would have freedom of religion and the freedom of the press.

The United States, Canada, and many European countries, have laws to protect people who speak badly about religion. Sometimes people do this in a satirical way, like with a movie that makes fun of a religion. In these countries, profanity is often protected by freedom of speech as well.

Related pages
Heresy
Profanity
Sacrilege

References

Maledicta: The International Journal of Verbal Aggression  (ISSN US 0363-3659)
Levy, L. Blasphemy. Chapel Hill, 1993.
Dartevelle, P., S Borg, Denis, Ph., Robyn, J. (eds.). Blasphèmes et libertés. Paris: CERF, 1993
Plate, S. Brent Blasphemy: Art that Offends (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2006) []

Other websites
Catholic Encyclopedia: Blasphemy
Jewish Encyclopedia: Blasphemy
 Comprehensive academic study comparing global legal approaches to blasphemy in light of the Jyllands-Posten controversy
The Rational Response Squad: The Blasphemy Challenge
A More4 news film report on how insulting the prophet Mohammed in Pakistan is a capital offence, and defiling the Koran carries life imprisonment.

Theology

Blasphemy


Art & Language is a conceptual artists' collaboration founded around 1967 in the United Kingdom by Terry Atkinson (b. 1939), David Bainbridge (b. 1941), Michael Baldwin (b. 1945) and Harold Hurrell (b. 1940). The name of the group was derived from their journal, Art-Language The Journal of conceptual art. In their text-works, they created conceptual art as part of their discussions.

Art & Language is at the origin of conceptual art and their work was an important influence on its development.

Past members and associates

 Terry Atkinson
 David Bainbridge
 Kathryn Bigelow
 Ian Burn
 Sarah Charlesworth
 Michael Corris
 Preston Heller
 Graham Howard
 Harold Hurrell
 Joseph Kosuth
 Christine Kozlov
 Nigel Lendon
 Andrew Menard
 Philip Pilkington
 Neil Powell
 David Rushton
 Terry Smith
 Mayo Thompson

Awards
Terry Atkinson was Nominated in 1985 for the Turner Prize.

Art & Language was nominated in 1986 for the Turner Prize.

Permanent collections
Papers and works relating to New York Art & Language are held at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.

In March 2011, Philippe Méaille loaned 800 artworks of Art & Language to the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA). In June 2015, the Conseil départemental de Maine-et-Loire and Philippe Méaille signed a long term lease agreement for the Chateau de Montsoreau to promote contemporary art in the Loire Valley.

 Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.
 Arts Council of Great Britain, United Kingdom.
Centre Pompidou, Paris, France.
 Centro de Arte Contemporàneo de Malaga, Malaga, Spain.
 Château de Montsoreau-Museum of Contemporary Art, Montsoreau, France.
 Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Espoo, Finland.
 Fonds National d'Art Contemporain, Paris, France.
 FRAC Haute Normandie, Sotteville-lès-Rouen, France.
 FRAC Languedoc Roussillon, Montpellier, France.
 FRAC Nord Pas de Calais, Dunkerque, France.
 Grand-Hornu, Museum of Contemporary Arts, Belgium.
 Laguna Gallery of Contemporary Art, Laguna Beach, CA, USA.
 Les Abattoirs, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Toulouse, France.
 Lille Métropole Museum of Modern, Contemporary and Outsider Art, Villeneuve d'Ascq, France.
 MACBA, Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona, Spain.
 MAMCO, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Geneva, Switzerland].
 Migros Museum of Contemporary Art, Zurich, Switzerland.
 Musée d'Art Moderne (Saint-Etienne), Saint-Priest-en-Jarez, France.
 Museum fur Angewande Kunst, Vienna, Austria.
 Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung, Vienna, Austria.
 Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
 Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, FL, USA.
Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA.
 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Australia.
 National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia.
 Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent, Belgium.
Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom.
Victoria & Albert Museum, London, United Kingdom.

References

British artists
Conceptual artists

Art & Language


The Maya Embedded Language (MEL) is a scripting language used to simplify tasks in the 3D graphics software Autodesk Maya. Most tasks that can be achieved through Maya's GUI can be achieved with MEL, as well as certain tasks that are not available from the GUI. MEL offers a method of speeding up complicated or repetitive tasks, as well as allowing users to redistribute a specific set of commands to others that may find it useful.

Design

MEL is syntactically similar to Perl and Tcl. It provides some memory management and dynamic array-allocation, and offers direct access to functions specific to Maya. The majority of standard Maya commands are default MEL scripts, saved in the Maya Program Files directory.

MEL is fairly limited compared to mainstream scripting languages. It is primarily a language meant to journal the Maya session, so it lacks many advanced features such as associative arrays. Python was added to Maya as an alternative to MEL in Maya 8.5. Still MEL offers some advantages to Python:

 Discoverability of MEL is better since the built-in command echo server was created with MEL in mind.
 A lot of legacy code and inner working of Maya is in MEL form. This provides many insights into undocumented inner workings of Maya.

MEL is often criticized for its lack of programming features, and object orientation. In practice, however, MEL is used as a metaprogramming language where MEL just instructs Maya's node architecture to solve the problem. Since nodes form the actual computational core of Maya using a more robust readily apparent programming method would be a very inefficient approach. In many ways MEL complements the Maya API, with somewhat clear boundaries between allocated tasks. This makes MEL harder to learn and fully understand.

Uses

The tools designed using MEL scripts generally come under the following categories:

Data I/O
Motion capture data import
Proprietary game data export
Scene meta-data for production tracking
Geometry creation and modification
Custom primitives
Third-party renderer specific data type (e.g., RenderMan sub-divisional surfaces)
Modeling tools not offered in the base package
Animation tools
Muscle simulators
Rigging and setting up controls
Crowd AI behavior
Lighting /rendering tools
Automatic creation of common complex shader setups
Pre- and post-render effects
Making calls to third-party renderers
Dynamics
Custom particle behavior
Simulated object emergent flocking and swarming
Genetic algorithms
Cloth simulation
File and folder scene setup and maintenance
User interface customization
Custom character controls
Removal of invalid Maya commands
Custom UIs

Example

This is an example of a script which copies a selected object through its path:

// animated duplicates/instances script
proc animatedDuplication (int $rangeStart, int $rangeEnd, int $numOfDuplicates, int $duplicateOrInstance)
{
    int $range_start = $rangeStart;
    int $range_end = $rangeEnd;
    int $num_of_duplicates = $numOfDuplicates;
    int $step_size = ($range_end - $range_start) / $num_of_duplicates;
    int $i = 0;
    int $temp;

    currentTime $range_start;     // set to range start

    string $selectedObjects[];    // to store selected objects
    $selectedObjects = `ls -sl`;  // store selected objects
    select $selectedObjects;

    while ($i <= $num_of_duplicates)
    {
        $temp = $range_start + ($step_size * $i);
        currentTime ($temp);
        // selected the objects to duplicate or instance
        select $selectedObjects;
        if($duplicateOrInstance == 0)
        {
            duplicate;
        }
        else
        {
            instance;
        }
        $i++;
    }
}

 // Usage example:
 //  duplicate the current selection 5 times --
 //  evenly distributed between frame 1 and 240
 animatedDuplication(1, 240, 5, 0);

Features

Maya also offers an expression language that is a super-set of MEL, and results in nodes that are executed as part of Maya's dependency graph. Expressions are developed with Maya's expression editor, and allow scripts to trigger while Maya evaluates the scene file at each change in time, to simulate complex behaviors or perform other useful tasks.

References

 Mark R. Wilkins, Chris Kazmier: "MEL Scripting for Maya Animators". 2nd edition, Morgan Kaufmann 2005;
 Pisca, Nicholas, "YSYT - Maya MEL Basics for Designers". 1st edition, 0001d Publishing 2009;

External links

 MEL command reference (Maya 2013)
 MEL command reference (Maya 2014)
 MEL command reference (Maya 2015)
 MEL and Expressions - Autodesk Maya 2015 Help
 Mel Wiki
 Useful Scripts for Maya
 CGSociety - Maya Programming forum
 CGSociety - 'MEL scripts' thread
 CGSociety - 'Maya UI Building' thread
 MEL Scripting Tutorials for Maya - CreativeCrash
 variables in mel - ACCAD instructor Alan Price
 MEL video tutorials - lynda.com
 Digital Tutors search - MEL
 maya mel - polyextrude.com
 MEL - maya rigging wiki
 Mel Scripting - RobTheBloke
Scripting languages

Maya Embedded Language


The Hound That Thought He Was a Raccoon is a 1960 Walt Disney film directed by Tom McGowan. It was released on the same bill as Jungle Cat.

Plot

Mala, a female raccoon, lives with her cubs inside an old tree in the South. During a flood caused by an intense storm, the tree collapses and Mala is able to save only one of her cubs, Weecha. Nearby, Jeff Emory, a backwoods "Mr. Fix It," owns a pack of coonhounds, and recently Lulubelle, his prime female, has had a litter of pups. Nubbin is the most active pup and frequently explores the farmyard. One day his curiosity leads him inside a butter churn that Jeff is about to return to a neighbor, and Jeff loads the churn onto his old truck and drives off with Nubbin still inside. During the trip, the churn falls off the truck, rolls down the road, over an embankment and breaks up against a tree. Nubbin emerges from the wreckage dizzy and lost, but eventually finds the hollow tree where Mala is nursing Weecha. Although hounds and raccoons are natural enemies, Mala nurses Nubbin and mothers him.

Two weeks pass and as Nubbin explores the area, he encounters Old Grouch, Weecha's father, who attacks him. Mala intervenes and fights her mate, who later leaves the area. By the time summer arrives, Nubbin and Weecha are firm friends and have several adventures together. One day while chasing a rabbit, Nubbin is threatened by a bobcat, but Mala lures the bobcat away from him and gives her life to save the dog. Now alone, Weecha and Nubbin search for food and when they come upon Jeff fishing, steal his fish. Jeff realizes that Nubbin is Lulubelle's missing pup and captures both of them, putting Weecha in an unused rabbit hutch. Jeff is surprised when Nubbin refuses to abandon his friend, and later, Weecha manipulates the latch on his cage and escapes for a nighttime romp with Nubbin, during which he wrecks Jeff's workshop. When an iron rod falls against a grinding wheel Weecha has accidentally started, sparks fly and start a fire, but Weecha races back to his cage. After Jeff is awakened by his hounds' barking and extinguishes the fire, he discovers Weecha and Nubbin sleeping innocently.

Three weeks later, Jeff begins to train Nubbin and his other young hounds to locate raccoons by following their scent. At first Jeff uses a raccoon skin as bait, but when he switches to Weecha, Nubbin refuses to work and fights off all the other dogs. Several months later, Jeff is invited on a coon hunt in a neighboring valley and leaves with his favorite hound, Rounder. Nubbin and Weecha are now full grown although Weecha is still a captive in the rabbit hutch. However, the hound helps his friend to escape and Weecha, having learned how to manipulate the latches on the hutches, releases all of Jeff's rabbits. Unfortunately, he steps on the trigger of a shotgun and the shot alerts the hounds, who break out of their enclosure to chase the rabbits. Weecha hides inside a barrel, which the dogs roll over just as Jeff returns with Rounder. Weecha manages to escape but is pursued by Rounder. While fighting in a pond, Weecha grabs Rounder by the neck and almost drowns him, then escapes. By autumn, Weecha has completely reverted to the wild and survives by stealing duck eggs, as well as nuts and berries from pine squirrel nests.

In the spring, as Jeff and his friends begin a new hunting season with plans for a kill, Weecha finds and courts a mate, Waheena. When Weecha hears the hounds approaching, he instinctively uses a decoy trick learned from his father to draw the pack away from his mate. Nubbin is the leader of the pack, and when he corners Weecha, he recognizes his old friend and barks happily. Unfortunately, Nubbin's barking attracts the other dogs and he finds himself fighting his own kind in order to protect his friend. After Jeff arrives and sizes up the situation, he asks the other hunters to call off their dogs. As Weecha runs off, followed by Nubbin, Jeff explains their history. When Nubbin finds Weecha with his mate, Weecha chases him away, and Nubbin, realizing that their friendship can no longer continue, vows never to hunt Weecha again and returns to Jeff, his friend and master.

See also
 List of American films of 1960

References

1960 films
Films about dogs
American short films
Films scored by Buddy Baker (composer)
Disney short films
Films about raccoons
Films produced by Winston Hibler
1960s English-language films

The Hound That Thought He Was a Raccoon


Robert Tear (Barry, Glamorgan, Wales on 8 March 1939 – 29 March 2011) was a Welsh tenor and conductor.

Robert Tear ("Tear" rhymes with "dear") was educated in Wales.  He sang in the choir at St. Paul's Cathedral and then became a choral scholar at King's College, Cambridge.

In 1961 he left Cambridge and  started his career as a soloist.  He soon became very successful, singing with the English Opera Group.  He became well known for singing many roles in the operas of Benjamin Britten.  He sang the part of Quint in The Turn of the Screw, including performances in Moscow and Leningrad.

Tear sang solos with many great orchestras under many famous conductors including Leonard Bernstein, Carlo Maria Giulini and Herbert von Karajan.  He sang in many famous opera houses in the world.  He made over 250 recordings including many cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach, Benjamin Britten's Serenade, Nocturne and the War Requiem and Gustav Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde.  He also recorded many Lieder including Schubert's Die Winterreise.

Robert Tear often conducted in his later years.  In 1985 he conducted in Minneapolis in the United States.  He conducted many orchestras including the Northern Sinfonia, English Chamber Orchestra, Philharmonia, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, Royal Scottish National Orchestra and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.

As a singer Tear was especially known for his singing of the music of British composers Benjamin Britten and Tippett. He was the first to sing the role of Dov in Tippett's opera The Knot Garden.  He was also well known for his duets with the baritone Benjamin Luxon.  They sang many Victorian parlour songs (popular songs) together.

From 1992 to 1994, he was Artistic Director of the Vocal Faculty of the London Royal Schools of Music.  He held the Chair of International Singing at the Royal Academy of Music.  He was an honorary member of King's College, Cambridge and was made a CBE in 1984. He died in London in 2011.

References

1939 births
2011 deaths
British conductors
Musicians from Glamorgan
British opera singers
British tenors
Welsh singers

Robert Tear