Teras Teknologi Sdn Bhd (TERAS), a subsidiary of PLUS Malaysia Berhad (PMB), is a Malaysian global corporation based in Petaling Jaya.

TERAS is the creator, developer, and leading system integrator of Touch n Go and SmartTAG in multiple platform technology widely used throughout Malaysia as highway, parking and public transportation payments, and access control system by over 6 million users (in June 2009).

With 1,800 toll lanes committed to date, TERAS is the leading provider of Electronic Toll Collection system in South East Asia and control over 70% market share in Malaysia. TERAS now diversified its technology capabilities into transportation and property market.

History

1994–1997: Founding
TERAS was formed on 15 September 1994 by Renong Berhad to address the urgent needs of providing cost-effective, reliable and locally supported Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) as the outcome of Malaysia's large-scale program of public enterprises privatization outlined in Privatization Masterplan (PMP) in 1991. The program had enabled the imposition of tolls on roads previously built by the Public Works Ministry or the Malaysian Highway Authority (Lembaga Lebuhraya Malaysia, or LLM).

Following the incorporation of TERAS, Abd Karim Hercus who was instrumental in setting up Electronic Data Processing Department of Projek Lebuhraya Utara-Selatan (PLUS) was appointed as the first managing director. This in turn enabled PLUS TAG, predecessor of SmartTAG and South East Asia first ETC to be immediately developed through technical collaboration with Mitsubishi Electric Corporation of Japan and PLUS.

In 1996, TERAS created its own internally developed ETC named TERAS Revenue and Collections System (TRACS) which was instantly deployed for Penang Bridge, North–South Expressway Central Link (ELITE) and North–South Expressway (NSE/PLUS Expressways) nationwide highway network of over 800 lanes.

By 18 March 1997, TRACS was enhanced with development and introduction of Touch n Go (pre-paid smart card electronic payment system) at Jalan Pahang Toll Plaza.

The year also marked TERAS first international venture as ETC supplier and integrator for Manila–Cavite Expressway, Philippines.

1998–1999: Expansion
The period sees TERAS expanded its core businesses and technology diversification in two major areas; ETC and general Information and Communications Technology (ICT) projects.

In term of corporate ownership, the highlight was divestment by Renong Berhad of its 70% equity stake in TERAS to UEM Group for RM11.3 million cash (US$5 million equivalent at that time) in June 1999.

In ETC area, TERAS upgraded TRACS through the development of SmartTAG (a non-stop electronic toll collection) and completed its national implementation by 15 March 1999 (replacing PLUS TAG) at 20 toll plazas of North–South Expressway (NSE/PLUS Expressways).

Built on a non-stop ETC philosophy, SmartTAG incorporated infra-red communication, a proprietary technology control by an Austrian company; EFKON Gmnbh that communicated with infra-red transceivers mounted at the ceilings of toll plazas to allow vehicle drivers to drive through SmartTAG dedicated lanes and pay toll without stopping. It is designed to process up to 1,200 vehicles per hour.

A joint venture between EFKON, under Dr Helmut Rieder was set up with UEM Group that created Infrared Advance Technology Sdn Bhd (IRAT) to produce SmartTAG related hardware and on-board unit for mass production.

In general ICT projects, TERAS has bid and won contracts to supply total network environments and IT requirements for the Commonwealth Village in Bukit Jalil, in conjunction with the Commonwealth Games hosted by Malaysia in 1998. At the same year, TERAS was also contracted to design, build and equip TIMEdotCom data center in Glenmarie, Shah Alam.

As deterrence for Year 2000 problem (Y2K), TERAS was engaged by nine companies under UEM Group to ensure readiness, through creation of internal operations plans continuity in the event of possible technical glitches caused by the Y2K bug.

For financial year 1999, TERAS revenues breached US$20 million mark with over 140 employees employed. The year also marked the appointment of Akbar Ahmad as the new managing director of TERAS.

2000–2004: Stagnation
Early 2000 global recession gave significant impact to TERAS businesses and translated to negative business growth that lasted until mid-2004.

The negative business growth was attributed by the deferment of further ETC upgrading works at existing highways and of new highway projects in Malaysia and regionally. TERAS was further affected with cost-cutting measure implemented by most organisation where ICT projects were put as low priority.

As counter-measure strategy, TERAS deployed TRACS to other market usages, first as parking automation solution capitalising on Touch n Go platform in 2001. Following that, TERAS Automated Parking System (TAPS) was created and breakthrough was achieved with the first installation of 12 parking sites for Lien Hoe Group. It has grown to over 30 sites within the next 2 years.

In 2002, TRACS technology platform was also deployed to door access system for TIME Engineering, UEM Group, UEM Land, Macroworks, Tenaga Nasional Berhad (TNB) and various other companies; totalling over 100 operational access doors.

These measures enabled TERAS to remain profitable throughout this time-line even with negative business growth.

2005–2008: Rebound

The Malaysia's economy pick-up during the period has benefited TERAS with an average of 20% annual business growth.

The Minister of Works, Samy Vellu directive of compulsory minimum 2 Touch 'n Go lanes and 1 SmartTAG lane at all existing and new toll plazas to facilitate highway users ease of travel has positioned TERAS at a higher value.

Previously deferred highway construction projects also began in earnest. New Pantai Expressway (NPE), Maju Expressway (MEX), Stormwater Management and Road Tunnel (SMART), Duta–Ulu Klang Expressway (DUKE) and Butterworth Outer Ring Road (BORR) resumed and placed their ETC installation orders with TERAS whilst NSE called for third-lanes widening projects, toll plazas relocation and lanes upgrade, further contributed positively to TERAS.

With the realisation of the need to ensure sustainable growth, TERAS consolidated its business activities into three major segments; Transportation, Property and eBusiness.

TERAS first foray into property segment technology development was the implementation of resident/visitor integrated manual; Touch n' Go and SmartTAG access with security surveillance at Ledang Heights housing development, Nusajaya in 2005.

The property business segment secured a major US$2.2 million project of Integrated Building Management System with integration of Audio-visual, parking, security access, visitor management and facilities command center of 29-storey commercial office building at KL Sentral Business District, Kuala Lumpur in 2008.

Expanding out from ETC in transportation market, TERAS began development in Traffic Control and Surveillance System (TCSS) and scored major contract worth US$2.7 million with NSE for the setup of NSE Nationwide Traffic Monitoring Center (TMC) at Persada PLUS in 2008.

International market penetration was marked by TERAS completed the delivery and installation of ETC works for Bhiwandi–Kalyan–Shil Phata Road in India worth US$1.4 million in 2008. Similar planned project in Sri Lanka was however shelved.

By end 2008, TERAS effectively controlled 71% of ETC market share in Malaysia with over 1,200 cash highway lanes, 418 Touch n Go lanes, 198 SmartTAG lanes, 90 parking lanes, over 300 access control doors and 1,500 surveillance cameras installed

For the period of 1994–2008, TERAS has delivered a total contract worth US$160 million in 4 countries.

For financial year 2008 (audited in March 2009), TERAS recorded US$17 million revenue realised from US$36 million book order achieved.

Present

TERAS has worked with Kemuning–Shah Alam Highway (LKSA), Kuala Lumpur–Kuala Selangor Expressway (KLS) and South Klang Valley Expressway (SKVE) who contracted ETC projects to TERAS worth US$2.5 million, US$3.2 million and US$1.3 million respectively. LKSA is scheduled for traffic operation by 18 May 2010, KLS by third quarter 2010 and SKVE by first quarter 2011.

TERAS was also engaged and instructed by Malaysian Highway Authority (MHA) to conduct technology study for the implementation of Multi Lane Free Flow (MLFF) at North–South Expressway with 1,000 test users at Batu Tiga Plaza and 100 test users at Damansara–Puchong Expressway Penchala Toll Plaza . The study was scheduled and completed in December 2009; aimed at ascertaining feasibility of such technology for use in Malaysia in terms of users' acceptance, issues that might arises and cost benefits. Upon successful system study, MHA plan to implement MLFF as Malaysia next generation ETC with gradual nationwide implementation starting from June 2011 and completed by 2016.

Internationally, TERAS is now in the final stage of negotiation for implementation of ETC in Indonesia for Cikampek–Palimanan Toll Road and Cimmangis–Cibitung Toll Road. The projects are scheduled for completion by 2011 and 2012 respectively. Both said projects will conservatively add over US$10 million to TERAS balance sheet.

Evaluation
TERAS was commented for using proprietary technology control by EFKON as a single sourced party in its development of SmartTAG in 1998. The SmartTAG on board unit which is priced at RM100 per unit with compulsory purchase of Touch n Go reload amount of RM100, is heavily subsidised by the highway concessions to pay royalty to EFKON for each SmartTAG assembled by IRAT.

Further, it was speculated that SmartTAG infra-red technology will not be able to handle the requirement for Multi Lane Free Flow (MLFF). It is expected that the microwave 5.8 GHz transponder systems which are undergoing testing under instruction by Malaysian Highway Authority (MHA) to TERAS will be the replacement of SmartTAG. Final decision on the matter will be decided by the Malaysian Cabinet scheduled by mid-2010.

TERAS also being taken to task for its revenue dependencies on UEM Group of companies which contributed to 60% of its total revenues (50% from PLUS alone as the biggest highway concessions in Malaysia). Thus, the restructuring of the company on-going to further broaden its revenue stream.

To date, 18 of 25 Malaysia's highways concessions deployed 100% of its technology requirements from TERAS of which the balance 7 use at the minimum of 30%.

Operations
Effective November 2008, the company's operations are categorised into 3 "Business Segments":
 TRANSPORTATION
 Electronic Toll Collection (ETC)
 Automated Parking System
 Integrated Ticketing System (ITS)
 Bus Ticketing System (BTS)
 PROPERTY
 Access Control System (Commercial Building and Residential)
 Surveillance and Control System
 Tracking System
 eBUSINESS
 Network Infrastructure
 Computer software development
 Application Service Provider
 Internet Data Center
 Strategic IT Outsourcing

Awards
 Winner of Malaysia-Canada Business Excellence Award 2008 in Science and Technology category.
 Winner of Golden Bull Award 2008 as SME's Most Outstanding Company.
 Merit in MSC-APICTA (Asia Pacific ICT Award) 2007 for Best of Application & Infrastructure Tools category.
 Winner of Malaysia's Top 50 Enterprises Award for 2007, ranked 6th overall as the best privately held company in Malaysia.

Corporate governance
Current members of the board of directors of TERAS: YBhg Dato' Noorizah Hj Abd Hamid, En. Mohammad Fuad Khusairi and Ir Mohd Zulastri Mohd Amin.

The company businesses and daily operations are led by Ir. Abd. Rahim Seliman, chief operating officer.

See also

 Touch n Go
 SmartTAG
 Electronic Toll Collection System
 Multi Lane Free Flow (MLFF)
 Prolintas
 Malaysian Highway Authority
 Malaysian expressway system
 List of Expressways and Highways in Malaysia
 Chronology of Malaysian Expressway System Events
 North–South Expressway (NSE) also known as PLUS Expressway
 North Klang Valley Expressway
 Penang Bridge
 Malaysia–Singapore Second Link
 Damansara–Puchong Expressway
 Sprint Expressway
 Butterworth Outer Ring Road
 Stormwater Management and Road Tunnel (SMART)

References

External links
 Official website
 Visitor Management Systems
 Company Overview of Teras Teknologi Sdn Bhd, bloomberg.com

Electronics companies of Malaysia
Electronic toll collection
PLUS Expressways
Electronics companies established in 1994
Technology companies established in 1994
1994 establishments in Malaysia
Privately held companies of Malaysia

Teras Teknologi


Wilhelm Wilmers (b. at Boke in Westphalia, 30 January 1817; d. at Roermond, Netherlands, 9 May 1899) was a German Jesuit professor of philosophy and theology.

Life

He entered the Society of Jesus in 1834 at Brieg in the canton of Valais, Switzerland, was expelled from the country with the other Jesuits in 1847, and ordained priest at Ay in Southern France in 1848. Shortly after, he taught philosophy at Issenheim in Alsace, then exegesis at the Catholic University of Leuven, theology at Cologne, philosophy at Bonn and Aachen, and theology at Maria-Laach.

In 1860 Cardinal Geissel requested Wilmer's services as theologian at the provincial council of Cologne. Wilmers also attended the First Vatican Council in 1870 as theologian of Bishop Leo Meurin, Vicar Apostolic of Bombay.

After a brief residence at Bonn and Munster, he went to Ordrupshoj near Copenhagen where he wrote against the attacks on the Catholic Church by the Protestant preacher Martensen. This work was translated into Danish by the prefect Apostolic Hermann Grüder and published under the latter's name with the title: "Det protestaniske og katholiske Trosprincip" (Copenhagen, 1875).

In 1876 Wilmers was called by Cardinal Archbishop Louis Pie to the theological faculty of Poitiers. In 1880 he lectured on theology to the French Jesuits in Saint Helier, Jersey. Thenceforward he devoted himself entirely to writing, living first at Ditton Hall, England, and then at Exaten in the Netherlands.

Works

Besides the above treatise, Wilmers wrote:

"Lehrbuch der Religion" (1855–57);
"Geschichte der Religion" (1856), translated into several languages;
"Lehrbuch der Religion fur höhere Lehranstalted" (1869);
"Handbuch der Religion" (1871).

These treatises were frequently republished. His last works were "De religione revelata" and "De Christi ecclesia" (1897); he nearly finished the third volume of this series "De fide divine", which was published in 1902.

References

Attribution
, the entry cites:
Tholen, Menologium oder Lebensbilder aus der Gesch. der deutschen Ordensprovinz (Roermond, 1891), printed for private circulation.

1817 births
1899 deaths
19th-century German Jesuits
Jesuit theologians
19th-century German Catholic theologians
Academic staff of the University of Cologne
Academic staff of the University of Bonn
German philosophers
19th-century German male writers
German male non-fiction writers
People from the Province of Westphalia

Wilhelm Wilmers


Frozen Dead Guy Days (started 2002) is an annual celebration held in the town of  Nederland, Colorado until 2023 and in Estes Park, Colorado in 2023, to loosely celebrate the cryopreservation of Bredo Morstoel.

History
In 1989, a Norwegian citizen named Trygve Bauge brought the corpse of his recently deceased grandfather, Bredo Morstøl, to the United States.  The body was preserved on dry ice for the trip, and stored in liquid nitrogen at the Trans Time cryonics facility in San Leandro, California from 1990 to 1993.

In 1993, Bredo was returned to dry ice and transported to the town of Nederland, where Trygve and his mother Aud planned to create a cryonics facility of their own. When Trygve was deported from the United States for overstaying his visa, his mother, Aud, continued keeping her father's body cryogenically frozen in a shack behind her unfinished house.

Aud was eventually evicted from her home for living in a house with no electricity or plumbing, in violation of local ordinances.   At that time, she told a local reporter about her father's body, and those of two other individuals, and the reporter went to the local city hall in order to let them know about Aud's fears that her eviction would cause her father's body to thaw out.

According to an article in the February 7, 1995, The Denver Post, Aud Morstoel was found guilty by a jury of building-use and zoning violations.  The Nederland town judge ordered her to remove the frozen body of her father from Nederland by March 6 or face 10 days in jail and a $600.00 fine.

The story caused a sensation.  In response, the city added a broad new provision to Section 7-34 of its Municipal Code, "Keeping of bodies", outlawing the keeping of "the whole or any part of the person, body or carcass of a human being or animal or other biological species which is not alive upon any property".  However, because of the publicity that had arisen, they made an exception for Bredo, a grandfather clause. Trygve secured the services of Delta Tech, a local environmental company, to keep the cryonic facility running. Bo Shaffer, CEO of Delta Tech, was known locally as "The Iceman" and caretaker responsible for transporting the dry ice necessary for cryopreservation to the IC Institute, something he has done since 1995.  In that year, the local Tuff Shed supplier and a Denver radio station built a new shed in which to store the body of Bredo.   In the fall of 2012, Jane Curtis Gazit and Mike Wooten, took over as Bredo's caretakers, but they passed caretaking duties to Brad Wickham, a resident of Nederland, who is the current caretaker.

In honor of the town's unique resident, Nederland holds an annual celebration, first started in 2002.

Annual celebration

Frozen Dead Guy Days is typically celebrated on the second weekend of March.  Coffin races, a hearse parade, and "Frozen Dead Guy" lookalike contests are held.  A documentary on "Grandpa Bredo", called Grandpa's in the Tuff Shed, is shown.  A newer version of the film, Grandpa's Still in the Tuff Shed, was premiered in Nederland on March 7, 2003.

Other events include a tour of the Tuff Shed where Grandpa is still frozen; a "polar plunge" for those brave enough to go swimming in Colorado in early March (which generally requires breaking through the ice); coffin races (a team of 7 members build a 'coffin' and race an obstacle course carrying a teammate in said coffin), a dance, called "Grandpa's Blue Ball"; pancake breakfasts; Poetry Slam; a market showcasing local artists; Snowy Human Foosball, Fix-A-Frozen-Flat and frozen t-shirt competitions, and snow sculpture contests.  Glacier Ice Cream, headquartered in the nearby city of Boulder, makes a flavor specifically for the festival (named, appropriately enough, Frozen Dead Guy), consisting of fruit-flavored blue ice cream mixed with crushed Oreo cookies and sour gummy worms. Tours of the Tuff Shed where Grandpa is still frozen were suspended after 2005, after Grandpa's family "became frustrated with Frozen Dead Guy Days", but they resumed with the 2010 celebration.

There has been a growing increase in interest in the festival, with rising attendance numbers each year. The 2019 event had an estimated 25,000 visitors. Various fan films have documented the backstory of the festival. In March 2020, just days before the 19th annual weekend event, the festival was cancelled due to rising concerns about the risk of large crowds spreading the coronavirus pandemic, especially given the rising number of documented cases.

Although Trygve and Aud filed a complaint against Nederland involving money and naming rights in 2005, Frozen Dead Guy Days continued to be held annually. Long-time organizer Amanda MacDonald partially relinquished ownership and control of the event in 2019. The celebration was last held March 19-20, 2022 after a two year hiatus due to the coronavirus pandemic. Organizers announced the 2023 iteration would be cancelled, stating Nederland refuses "to work with the festival's current owners again."  For 2023, the festival will move to Estes Park.

References

External links

Nederland Municipal Code, Chapter 7-34 (PDF via Web Archive)

Tourist attractions in Boulder County, Colorado
Counterculture festivals
Culture of Boulder, Colorado
Festivals in Colorado
Recurring events established in 2002
March observances
2002 establishments in Colorado

Frozen Dead Guy Days


Stanley Albert Drake (November 9, 1921 – March 10, 1997) was an American cartoonist best known as the founding artist of the comic strip The Heart of Juliet Jones.

Born in Brooklyn, Drake worked in the back of a Dugan's Donut truck for a dollar-a-day salary while he was in high school. At  the age of 17, he contributed art to Popular Detective, Popular Sports and other pulps. Entering the comic book field as artist, letterer and writer, he became friends with cartoonist Bob Lubbers, who later suggested he draw newspaper comics.

He studied for two years at New York's Art Students League. In the Pacific theater during World War II, he did public relations work for Stars and Stripes. Returning to civilian life, he went into advertising, eventually heading a studio of 12 illustrators.

Comic strips
Juliet Jones, created in 1953 by Drake and writer Elliot Caplin, was a dramatic comic drawn by Drake in a naturalistic style.  Drake, whose assistants included Tex Blaisdell and Frank McLaughlin, stayed on the strip until 1989, when he was succeeded by Frank Bolle.  Comic strip artist Larry Lieber has said Drake was the biggest influence on his work.

In 1984, Drake replaced Mike Gersher as the artist on Blondie (written by Dean Young), and he continued drawing the strip until his death. His assistant on Blondie was Denis Lebrun.

Fine art
He was a prolific painter and created portraits of more than 40 cartoonists, work displayed at the Comic Artist's Museum in Sarasota, Florida.

Graphic novels
Drake drew comic books for Marvel Comics such as The Pitt. Internationally, he is known for the artwork on the Kelly Green series of graphic novels about a young widow who fights crime in the manner of an action hero. This series was written by Leonard Starr. It was serialized in Pilote magazine in black and white before being collected in color albums by the French firm Dargaud International Publishing.

An avid golfer, Drake created illustrations for Golf Digest and the book The Touch System for Better Golf.

Awards
He was recognized by the National Cartoonists Society with their Story Comic Strip Award (1969, 1970, 1972) for The Heart of Juliet Jones, and was awarded the Inkpot Award in 1984.

Health
Drake was a passenger during the September 1956 automobile accident that killed his fellow cartoonist Alex Raymond, and was badly injured, with a broken shoulder which stopped him from cartooning during his recovery, and both his ears having been ripped off and needing to be surgically reattached. As well, Drake had a congenital condition such that the bones of his skull did not properly fuse in infancy.

References

External links
NCS Awards
Frank McLaughlin interview, Comic Book Artist #9 (August 2000), pp 84–88
Stan Drake Papers 1954-1971 at Syracuse University (primary source material)

1921 births
1997 deaths
American comics artists
American comic strip cartoonists
Inkpot Award winners
Artists from Brooklyn
American military personnel of World War II

Stan Drake


Black Flag is an abandoned town in Western Australia, 30 km north west of Kalgoorlie. It is on the Black Flag to Ora Banda Road in the Goldfields-Esperance region of Western Australia.

The town derives its name from the Black Flag gold find that was discovered in 1893 when a prospector, R.H Henning, pegged the lease. The mine was producing and attracting more miners to the area in 1894, and the town was gazetted in 1897. A condenser was built in 1895 to produce drinking water for the towns population. John Forrest visited the town in the same year during his  tour through the goldfields.

A police station and a racecourse had been established in the town in 1896 and at the town's peak over eight hotels, a bakery, a bank and numerous other businesses were operating.

The population of the town was 313 (260 males and 53 females) in 1898.

The two biggest mines in town, Black Flag and Ladee Bountiful, closed down between 1906 and 1907 and the town was abandoned shortly afterwards.

The name of the town is thought to originate from a flag that had been hung up to indicate that a store was open for business.  However, Norman Sligo, in his book Mates and Gold, suggests that the name was because of the "hills and flats being coated with black ironstone wash".

The remains of the townsite are within the Credo Station leasehold.

References

Ghost towns in Western Australia
Goldfields-Esperance

Black Flag, Western Australia


Pastorita Huaracina (December 19, 1930 -  May 2001) born María Alvarado Trujillo, was a Peruvian singer who strongly identified with the traditions of the rural Andes. Her career began in the era of 78 rpm records and lasted into that of compact discs. In the 1950s she recorded 4 songs a month and sold more records in Peru than the Beatles. Her success established her reputation as the diva of Andean song and she won every award that pertained to her type of music. She toured extensively in Europe, Asia, and the Americas.

Biography

Pastorita Huaracina was born in the Malvas district of Aija Province, Ancash region. Reportedly, even as a young child tending the flocks, she already loved to sing. Raised speaking Quechua, upon the death of her mother she traveled to Lima at the age of 8, with no luggage or money and no one to meet her, and speaking very little Spanish.

She debuted as a performer on her 12th birthday. She began as a performer of Andean dances but later became a singer and composer of songs. She developed a reputation as disciplined trouper, always the first to arrive at a rehearsal or performance; this continued even once she became a star. She always advocated for authenticity in the performance of Andean music and dance, including the use of traditional outfits: "typical dress is not a costume, it is part of our identity, something we must assume with honor and pride, being conscious of whom we represent..."

Her singing became a symbol of liberty and of a demand for the rights of the serranos, the people of the high Andes, expressing beauty but also bearing the people's demand for opportunity and conditions for their development. On her program on Radio Santa Rosa, Canta el Perú Profundo she openly expressed her opposition to the dictatorship of Alberto Fujimori and Vladimiro Montesinos, and she was a longtime defender of the validity of the Quechua language. Loyal to her principles, she refused significant sums of money from politicians who solicited her for their electoral campaigns and from businesses which she felt unfairly exploited the people. Towards the end of her life, only one week after an operation and in delicate health, she voted in the Peruvian presidential election of 2001. She died of cancer in 2001

Notes

References

1930 births
2001 deaths
20th-century Peruvian women singers
20th-century Peruvian singers
Peruvian people of Quechua descent

Pastorita Huaracina


The Tarot of Marseilles is a standard pattern of Italian-suited tarot pack with 78 cards that was very popular in France in the 17th and 18th centuries for playing tarot card games and is still produced today. It was probably created in Milan before spreading to much of France, Switzerland and Northern Italy. The name is sometimes spelt Tarot of Marseille, but the name recommended by the International Playing-Card Society is Tarot de Marseille, although it accepts the two English names as alternatives. It was the pack which led to the occult use of tarot cards, although today dedicated decks are produced for this purpose.

Origins

Research by Michael Dummett and others demonstrates that the tarot pack was invented in northern Italy in the early 15th century and introduced into southern France when the French conquered Milan and the Piedmont in 1499. The antecedents of the Tarot de Marseille would then have been introduced into southern France at around that time. All Italian-suited tarot decks outside of Italy are descended from the Milan–Marseilles type with the exception of some early French and Belgian packs which show mixed influence from Bolognese tarot (see below). The earliest surviving cards of the Marseilles pattern were produced by Philippe Vachier of Marseilles in 1639 and went up for sale in 2023, having recently been discovered by Thierry Depaulis.

Etymology and English translation
The name Tarot de Marseille is not of particularly ancient vintage; it was coined as late as 1856 by the French card historian Romain Merlin, and was popularized  by French cartomancers Eliphas Levi, Gérard Encausse, and Paul Marteau who used this collective name to refer to a variety of closely related designs that were being made in the city of Marseilles in the south of France, a city that was a centre of playing card manufacture, and were (in earlier, contemporaneous, and later times) also made in other cities in France. The Tarot de Marseille is one of the standards from which many tarot decks of the 19th century and later are derived.

Others have also tended to use the initials TdM, allowing for ambiguity as to whether the M stands for Marseille or Milan, a region claimed for the origins of the image design.

In deference to the common appellation Marseille for the style and in recognition that the deck appears in other places, the term "Marseille-style" is at times also used.

Structure

Like other tarot decks, the Tarot de Marseille contains fifty-six cards in the four standard suits and twenty-two tarot cards. In the French language, the four suits are identified by their French names of Bâtons (Batons), Épées (Swords), Coupes (Cups), and Deniers (Coins). These count from Ace to 10. There was also an archaic practice of ranking the cards 10 to Ace for the suit of cups and coins in line with all other tarot games outside of France and Sicily.

As well, there are four face cards in each suit: a Valet (Knave or Page), Chevalier or Cavalier (Horse-rider or Knight), Dame (Queen) and Roi (King). The court cards are sometimes called les honneurs (the honours) or les lames mineures de figures (the minor picture cards) in French. For the valet de bâtons (French > "Page of Batons"), the title of that card generally appears on the side of the card, while in some old versions of the Tarot de Marseille that card, along with either some or all others, is left unnamed.

In the Tarot de Marseille, as is standard among Italian suited playing cards, the pip cards in the suit of swords are drawn as abstract symbols in curved lines, forming a shape reminiscent of a mandorla. On the even numbered cards, the abstract curved lines are all that is present. On the odd numbered cards, a single fully rendered sword is rendered inside the abstract designs. The suit of batons is drawn as straight objects that cross to form a lattice in the higher numbers; on odd numbered baton cards, a single vertical baton runs through the middle of the lattice. On the tens of both swords and batons, two fully rendered objects appear imposed on the abstract designs. The straight lined batons and the curved swords continue the tradition of Mamluk playing cards, in which the swords represented scimitars and the batons polo mallets.

In this abstraction, the Tarot, and the Italian playing cards tradition, diverges from that of Spanish playing cards, in which swords and batons are drawn as distinct objects. Cups and coins are drawn as distinct objects. Most decks fill up blank areas of the cards with floral decorations. The two of cups typically contains a floral caduceus-like symbol terminating in two heraldic dolphin heads. The two of coins usually joins the two coins by a ribbon motif; the ribbon is a conventional place for the manufacturer to include his name and the date.

There is also a suit of twenty-two atouts (trump cards). The Fool, which is unnumbered in the Tarot de Marseille, is viewed as separate and additional to the other twenty-one numbered trumps because it usually cannot win a trick.

The labelling of cards is a practice of French origin, Italians remembered their names by heart. The Sola Busca deck is an exception: all trumps are named and have roman numerals, the suited cards are numbered in hindo-Arabic, and the face suits beyond the page are named as well. Alexander the great being king of swords. The XIII card is generally left unlabelled in the various old and modern versions of the tarot de Marseille, but it is worth noting that in Noblet's deck (circa 1650), the card was named LAMORT (Death). In at least some printings of the French/English bilingual version of Grimaud's pack, the XIII card is named "La Mort" in French and named "Death" in English. In many modern cartomantic tarot decks (e.g., Rider–Waite), the XIII card is named Death.

The names given to the Marseilles pattern trumps differ from those in early Italian sources. The French la Force (Strength) is in Italian la Fortezza (Fortitude) for the cardinal virtue of Courage. L'Amoureux (the Lover) is in Italy l'Amore (Love). Le Jugement (the Judgement) is l'Angelo (the Angel) or le Trombe (the Trumpets). L'Ermite (the Hermit) is given either as il Gobbo (the Hunchback), il Vecchio (the Old Man), or as il Tempo (Time). Le Pendu (the Hanged Man) is il Traditore (the Traitor). La Torre/la Maison Dieu (the Tower/the House of God) is given either as la Sagitta (the arrow), la Saetta (Lightning), la Casa del Diavolo (the House of the Devil), la Casa del Dannato (the House of the Damned), il Fouco (the Fire), or as l'inferno (Hell). The ranking of the trumps vary according to region or time period.

The following trump images are from Jean Dodal's deck printed in Lyon in the early 18th century. Like most other tarot decks, it uses additive Roman numerals, hence "IIII" instead of "IV". The English names are based on IPCS terminology. Dummett calls Tarot I "The Mountebank", a word which, like the name on the card, bataleur, means 'street entertainer'.

Variants

Besançon and Swiss patterns

The use of obviously Christian traditional images (such as the Pope, the Devil, the Grim Reaper and the Last Judgement) and indeed controversial images such as La Papesse have spawned controversies from the Renaissance to the present because of its portrayal of a female pope. There is no solid historical evidence of a female pope, but this card may be based around the mythical Pope Joan.

One variant of the Tarot de Marseille, now called the Tarot of Besançon, replaces the controversial Popess and Pope and, in their stead, puts Juno with her peacock, and Jupiter with his eagle. Developed in Alsace at the beginning of the 18th century, this deck was popular among Catholics living in regions that bordered Protestant communities. Protestants, and Catholics living outside contentious zones, preferred using the Marseilles pattern. During the French Revolution, the Emperor and Empress cards became the subject of similar controversies and were displaced by Grandfather and Grandmother. It arrived in Besançon only at the beginning of the 19th century where mass-production caused the current association of this deck to that city. An updated variant of the Besançon pattern is the Swiss 1JJ Tarot which is still in use by Troccas and Troggu players.

Piedmontese and Lombard patterns

In the early eighteenth century the Marseilles Tarot was introduced in Northern Italy starting from the Kingdom of Sardinia, which also included the Savoy (now in France) and Piedmont, where the card manufacturing industry collapsed following a severe economic depression. The Piedmontese players did not have difficulties to accept the Marseilles Tarot, because the images were similar and even the French language captioning was widespread in many areas of Piedmont.

Around 1820 some manufacturers active in Turin, capital of the Kingdom of Sardinia, began to produce tarot decks in Marseille's pattern, but after few years they introduced captions in Italian and small variations in certain figures. For example, the Fool was not chased by a wild animal but had a butterfly in front of him. In a few decades, variation after variation, was consolidated the iconography of the Piedmontese Tarot, which therefore must be considered as a derivation of the Tarot of Marseilles. It is currently the most widely used tarot deck in Italy.

In the Austrian-ruled Duchy of Milan (modern-day Lombardy), the Marseilles pattern also took root with Italian captioning starting around 1810. The "Death" card was given several names by different manufacturers such as il Tredici (Thirteen), lo Specchio (the Mirror), and Uguaglianza (Equality). Production of this pattern stopped before the First World War.

Around 1835, Carlo Della Rocca of Milan engraved an elaborate interpretation of the Marseilles pattern. It became popular throughout Lombardy for the duration of the 19th century. It spread to Piedmont where a double-ended version was adapted to local tastes and was popular until the 1950s.

Early French decks and the Belgian pattern

A few early French decks exhibit certain curiosities. The 1557 luxury tarot deck by Catelin Geoffrey of Lyon, the early 17th century Tarot de Paris, and Jacques Viéville's Parisian deck (c.1650) share many things in common with each other and the Marseilles pattern but also have designs that seem to be derived from the Bologna-Florence tradition as seen in the Tarocco Bolognese and the Minchiate.

Adam C. de Hautot of Rouen produced a deck similar to Viéville's around the second quarter of the 18th century where la Papesse is replaced with Le 'Spagnol Capitano Eracasse (Italian > the 'Spanish Captain' Fracasso, a stock character from Commedia dell'arte). The Pope, often depicted holding an orb or a covered communion chalice, is replaced by Bacus (Bacchus, the Greek god of wine) holding a wine cup or bottle and a fruited vine cane or bunch of grapes while astride a beer barrel or wine cask; this was copied from the Deuce of Acorns found in some German-suited patterns. The Hanged Man is shown still pendant but right-side up. Temperance bears the motto FAMA SOL (Latin > "The Rumored or Omened Day") in a scroll, probably counseling patience until the day of their deliverance from Spain. The Tower is renamed La Foudre (French > "The Lightning"), and shows a man sitting beneath a tree being struck by lightning. The Star shows a man with compasses staring up at the sky next to a tower. The Moon shows a woman holding a distaff and The Sun shows a man on horseback bearing a banner. The World depicts a naked woman atop a globe parted into a moon in a starry sky and a sun in a blue sky over a tower on land. Unusually, the Fool is numbered as trump XXII likely showing that it functioned as the highest trump. Very similar decks were soon produced in the Austrian Netherlands (modern-day Belgium) until the beginning of the 19th century. Packaging indicates that they were locally called "Cartes de Suisse". This may suggest that Belgian players were being influenced by a new mode of play emanating from Switzerland in which the Fool is treated like the highest trump as in Troggu.

Dummett conjectures that this family of decks, especially those of Viéville's design, originate from the Savoy-Piedmont-Lombardy region and were used until the collapse of the local card manufacturing industry at the end of the 17th century (as described above). Viéville's ordering of the trumps is almost identical to 16th century orders in Pavia and Mondovì. However, no cards from this region before the 18th century are known to have survived to prove or disprove this theory.

Later history
All cards were originally printed from woodcuts; the cards were later coloured either by hand or by the use of stencils. Tarot was recorded as being very popular card game throughout France during the 16th and early 17th century but later fell into obscurity with the exception of eastern France and Switzerland. Very few Marseilles pattern cards from the 17th century have survived, chiefly among them are Noblet's. In contrast, dozens of decks from the 18th century have made it to the present. From eastern France and Switzerland, the game spread north to Sweden and east to Russia starting from the middle of the 18th century, making it one of the most popular card games of that era until being overtaken by Whist in the 19th century.

One well-known artisan producing tarot cards in the Marseilles pattern was Nicolas Conver (circa 1760). It was the Conver deck, or a deck very similar to it, that came to the attention of Antoine Court de Gébelin in the late 18th century. Court de Gébelin's writings, which contained much by way of speculation as to the supposed Egyptian origin of the cards and their symbols, called the attention of occultists to tarot decks. As such, Conver's deck became the model for most subsequent esoteric decks, starting with the deck designed by Etteilla forward. Cartomancy with the Tarot was definitely being practised throughout France by the end of the 18th century; Alexis-Vincent-Charles Berbiguier reported an encounter with two "sibyls" who divined with Tarot cards in the last decade of the century at Avignon.

From the mid-18th to early 19th centuries, Marseilles and Besançon tarots were replaced by the French-suited animal tarots throughout most of Europe. These were then superseded by genre art tarots like the Industrie und Glück. French players ignored animal tarots but during the 20th century, they switched over to the genre art Tarot Nouveau. French truck drivers were still using the Marseilles pattern for French tarot as late as the 1970s.

In 1997 Alejandro Jodorowsky and Phillipe Camoin completed their reconstructed version of the Tarot of Marseille. Since then Jodorowky, in collaboration with Marianne Costa, published a Tarot book based around this reconstructed version of the Marseille deck.

Influence on French and English tarot design and usage
In the English-speaking world, where there is little or no tradition of using tarots as playing cards, tarot decks only became known through the efforts of occultists influenced by French tarotists such as Etteilla, and later, Eliphas Lévi. These occultists later produced esoteric decks that reflected their own ideas, and these decks were widely circulated in the anglophone world. Various esoteric decks such as the Rider–Waite Tarot deck (conceived by A. E. Waite and rendered by Pamela Colman Smith), and the Thoth Tarot deck (conceived by Aleister Crowley and rendered by Lady Frieda Harris)—and tarot decks inspired by those two decks—are most typically used. Waite, Colman Smith, Crowley and Harris were all former members of the influential, Victorian-era Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn at different respective points in time; and the Golden Dawn, in turn, was influenced by Lévi and other French occult revivalists. Although there were various other respective influences (e.g., Etteilla's pip card meanings in the case of Waite/Colman Smith), Waite/Colman Smith's and Crowley/Harris' decks were greatly inspired by the Golden Dawn's member-use tarot deck and the Golden Dawn's tarot curriculum.

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was essentially the first in the Anglophone world to venture into esoteric tarot. Francophone occultists such as Court de Gebelin, Etteilla, Eliphas Lévi, Oswald Wirth and Papus were influential in fashioning esoteric tarot in the French-speaking world; the influence of these occultists has come to bear even on interpretation of the Tarot de Marseille cards themselves. Even though the Tarot de Marseille decks are not "occult" per se, the imagery of the Tarot de Marseille decks is claimed by Levi to have Hermetic influences (e.g., alchemy, astronomy, etc.). Referring to the Tarot, Eliphas Levi declares: "This book, which may be older than that of Enoch, has never been translated, but is still preserved unmutilated in primeval characters, on detached leaves, like the tablets of the ancients... It is, in truth, a monumental and extraordinary work, strong and simple as the architecture of the pyramids, and consequently enduring like those - a book which is the summary of all sciences, which can resolve all problems by its infinite combinations, which speaks by evoking thought, is the inspirer and moderator of all possible conceptions, and the masterpiece perhaps of the human mind. It is to be counted unquestionably among the very great gifts bequeathed to us by antiquity..." However, Dummett has shown Levi's claim to be entirely fictitious.

In the French-speaking world, users of the tarot for divination and other esoteric purposes such as Alejandro Jodorowsky, Kris Hadar, and many others, continue to use the Tarot de Marseille. In the mid-1990s Jodorowsky contacted a late descendant of the Camoin family, who has printed the Tarot of Marseilles since the 19th century. They worked together for almost a decade to put together a 78-card deck, including the original detail and 11 color printing.

Paul Marteau pioneered the number-plus-suit-plus-design approach to interpreting the numbered Minor Arcana cards ['pip cards'] of the Tarot de Marseille. Before Marteau's book Le Tarot de Marseille (which was first published "circa" 1930s), cartomantic meanings (such as Etteilla's) were generally the only ones published for interpreting Marseille pip cards. Even nowadays, many French tarotists employ only the Major Arcana cards for divination. In recognition of this, many French-language Tarot de Marseille discuss the symbolism and interpretation of only the Major Arcana.

Many of the images of the Rider–Waite deck are derived from the Tarot de Marseille, although the influence of other decks is also apparent.

Despite its name, very few people in present-day Marseille are familiar with the Tarot de Marseille, and tarot readers are rare to come by.

Reproductions
Due to its continuing popularity, there have been numerous facsimiles, restorations, and recreations of the Tarot of Marseilles:

 The French publisher Grimaud's Marseilles deck, published in 1970, was designed by Paul Marteau.
 The Italian firm Lo Scarabeo prints a reproduction of an 18th-century deck by Nicholas Conver, with a reconstructed card missing from their original.
 Lo Scarabeo also prints a version based on a 1751 Swiss deck by Claude Burdel, with an alteration that sees a 'zero' added upon the Fou. (But see Stuart Kaplan, Encyclopedia of Tarot Vol. II, page 327, which shows a 1750 Swiss deck by Rochus Schär, in which Le Mat card is numbered with a zero).
 The French firm Héron publishes a photo-reproduction of the complete Conver deck held in the Bibliothèque Nationale.
 The Spanish publisher Fournier prints an edition.
 U.S. Games Systems printed the CBD Marseilles Tarot by Yoav Ben-Dov, which was based on the Nicholas Conver deck.
 Cartamundi released a deck based on the 1701 Dodal Tarot de Marseille.
 The Dodal deck held in the Bibliothèque Nationale was photographically published by Dussere.
 Jean-Claude and Roxanne Flornoy have also published renditions of the Noblet and the Dodal decks.
 In 1998 Alejandro Jodorowsky and Philippe Camoin published a restored version of the Tarot of Marseilles based on a study of all the oldest existing decks and wooden moulds.
 in 2003, Daniel Rodes and Encarna Sanchez of Le Mat published  El Tarot de Marsella: Los antiguos iconos del Tarot reconstruidos, featuring a reconstructed Marseilles Tarot.
 Igor Barzilai published a restoration of the Nicolas Conver tarot, hand-painted, and using old paper techniques.
 In 2019, Krisztin Kondor and William Rader of Artisan Tarot of Denver, Colorado, published a restored and redrawn edition of the Nicolas Conver tarot. Artwork was added to bring the cards up to the popular tarot aspect ratio of 2.75″ x 4.75″. Two versions were published in French and English. Additionally, Kondor released a limited edition 11-3/4" x 16-1/2" linocut print of Le Bateluer, in eight colors of ink on archival quality paper.

References

Literature
  – a history of the Tarot, and a compilation of Tarot card games.

 Depaulis, Thierry (2023). "Un Tarot de Marseille de 1639!" in Le Vieux Papier, fasc. 447, January 2023, pp. 194–200.
 Depaulis, Thierry (2013). "The 'Tarot de Marseille' - Facts and Fallacies (I), The Playing-Card, Vol. 42, No. 1 (July–September 2013) and No. 2 (October–December 2013).

External links

 Vergnano Tarot 1830 by Giordano Berti

Tarot playing card decks
French tarot
Divination Tarot decks

Tarot of Marseilles


Cheng San Group Representation Constituency (Simplified Chinese: 静山集选区;Traditional Chinese: 靜山集選區) was a Group Representation Constituency (GRC) in the North-eastern region in Singapore. The GRC consisted of the eastern part of Ang Mo Kio, Jalan Kayu, Seletar Hills, part of Serangoon North, a large part of Hougang, Buangkok, and the whole of Sengkang New Town and Punggol New Town.

History

The GRC was formed in 1988, and absorbed the constituencies of Cheng San, Chong Boon and Jalan Kayu. In the 1991 general election, the constituency was enlarged to include the former Punggol ward. For the general election in 1997, parts of the Chong Boon division of the GRC, bounded by Ang Mo Kio Avenue 10, Ang Mo Kio Avenue 3, Central Expressway and Ang Mo Kio Avenue 1, were transferred to Ang Mo Kio GRC. The GRC was an opposition favourite in the 1991 election, and was hotly contested in the 1997 general election between People's Action Party and Workers' Party. The Punggol district were split into 3 wards which are Punggol Central, Punggol East and Punggol South as a result of the growing population of Hougang to suppress the population of Sengkang and Punggol since 1999 and it necessitated the redrawing boundaries. After a hotly contested election in 1997, the GRC was split and subsumed into three GRCs in 2001 general election. The GRCs which absorbed Cheng San GRC were Ang Mo Kio GRC, Pasir Ris–Punggol GRC and Aljunied GRC due to redrawing of electoral districts by the Elections Department.

Due to the unclear separation of power between the Prime Minister's Office and the Elections Department, the Opposition has often criticised the absorption of Cheng San GRC as gerrymandering on the part of the ruling party.

1997 general election
Cheng San GRC became the hotspot constituency during the 1997 General Elections. The People's Action Party team led by the then-Minister for Education Lee Yock Suan, faced the contest by a Workers' Party team led by the then-Secretary-General and former opposition Member of Parliament, Joshua Benjamin Jeyaretnam, and Tang Liang Hong, a senior lawyer.

Having been automatically 're-elected' due to walkovers in their own constituencies, then-Prime Minister of Singapore Goh Chok Tong and his two deputies from the People's Action Party (PAP) campaigned on behalf for the PAP's candidates in the Cheng San GRC. Goh described himself as "a special candidate" of the constituency and declared that his credibility and reputation as Prime Minister were at stake in the contest. The PAP campaign took on a two-pronged focus. Firstly, the PAP accused Tang of being anti-Christian and a Chinese chauvinist, labelling him a "dangerous man". Secondly, the Prime Minister told Cheng San voters that if they returned PAP candidates to power in the election, they would get a host of benefits. These included access to better transport facilities such as the MRT and LRT, new housing projects, such as Punggol 21, and opportunities to upgrade their HDB apartments and public housing estates. The PAP emphasised that constituencies that failed to return PAP candidates to power would not receive priority in government upgrading programmes and might end up becoming slums.

The Workers' Party's rallies in Cheng San GRC attracted huge crowds. On the eve of Polling Day, 50,000 people attended the Workers' Party rally at Yio Chu Kang Stadium. However, the news coverage of this astounding turnout was disproportionately understated, causing much online criticism of the Straits Times in reporting objectively.

On Polling Day, several former PAP ministers, including Goh Chok Tong, Tony Tan and Lee Hsien Loong were within the precinct of polling stations in Cheng San GRC, although they were not themselves candidates in the constituency. The Workers Party believed that this violated the Parliamentary Elections Act,  as unauthorised personnel are prohibited from polling stations by election law to prevent undue influence and harassment on voters and staff. The Workers' Party's candidates filed police reports, citing the violation of two sections of the Parliamentary Elections Act:
 Section 82(1)(d): "No person shall wait outside any polling station on polling day, except for the purpose of gaining entry to the polling station to cast his vote".
 Section 82(1)(e): "No person shall loiter in any street or public place within a radius of 200 metres of any polling station on polling day."
Their complaints were not prosecuted by the police, on the advice of the Attorney-General Chan Sek Keong. The Attorney-General, in his letter to the Minister of Law, interpreted the statute as being irrelevant to people within the polling station, and that remaining within the polling station itself, as opposed to being within a perimeter of 200 meters from the external walls of the polling station, was not an offence. He added that "the possibility of a person inside a polling station influencing or intimidating voters in the presence of the presiding officer and his officials, the polling agents etc was considered so remote that it was discounted by the Act."

The WP then questioned if the AG was suggesting that it was acceptable for people to enter and loiter on the grounds of the polling station instead of outside the station. Later, the Workers' Party renewed its call for a multi-party Election Commission to ensure fair play in the conduct of Parliamentary elections.

WP lost in Cheng San GRC, obtaining 44,132 votes, which was 45.2% of the valid votes in the constituency of approximately 98,000 voters. Cheng San GRC ceased to exist in the next election and thus was redrawn into several neighbouring constituencies.

Members of Parliament

Electoral results

Elections in 1980s

Elections in 1990s

References

1988 General Election's Result
1991 General Election's Result
1997 General Election's Result
Results for 1997 General Election in Cheng San GRC which was its last appearance

See also
Cheng San SMC
Eunos Group Representation Constituency

Singaporean electoral divisions
Ang Mo Kio
Hougang
Punggol
Sengkang


, Temple of Crossing the Blue Shore, is a Tendai Buddhist temple in Wakayama Prefecture, Japan.  In 2004, it was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site along with other locations, under the name "Sacred Sites and Pilgrimage Routes in the Kii Mountain Range".  According to a legend, it was founded by the priest Ragyō Shōnin, a monk from India.  The temple was purposely built near Nachi Falls, where it may have previously been a site of nature worship.  Seiganto-ji is part of the Kumano Sanzan shrine complex, and as such can be considered one of the few jingū-ji (shrine temples, see article Shinbutsu shūgō) still in existence after the forcible separation of Shinto and Buddhism operated by the Japanese government during the Meiji restoration.

It is Saigoku Kannon Pilgrimage's No.1 (first stop) and an Important Cultural Properties of Japan.

History
During the reign of Emperor Nintoku (313 – 399), according to temple legend, Ragyō Shōnin, a monk from India, came here following the river in search of a suitable place in which to practice his austerities and found Nachi waterfall. After practicing shugyō, Kannon appeared to him at the base of the waterfall and so he built a hermitage dedicated to Kannon in this place.

During the reign of Empress Suiko (592 – 628), Shōbutsu Shōnin came here from Yamato in order to undergo austerity practices. At that time he carved a 4 meter high image of Nyoirin Kannon from a single piece of camellia tree. The Hondō (main temple) was built to enshrine this image which became the focus of the Nachi Kannon cult and is the image that is enshrined in the present Nyorindō.

In 988 Emperor Kazan (花山天皇) (968-1008) visited the Kumano area on his first pilgrimage and, being deeply moved by the image of Kannon, he declared this Temple One of the Saigoku Kannon pilgrimage. It is said that Emperor Kazan completed 1000 days of severe spiritual training under the waterfall, after which he had a vision of Kannon in the form of the kami Kumano Gongen. The kami instructed the emperor to find the priest Butsugan of Hasedera (Temple 8 of the pilgrimage), who helped the emperor to remap out the current pilgrimage route.

Emperor Kazan wrote all the goeika poems that are still used throughout the pilgrimage as sacred hymns. It became a custom in later years for other emperors who went on this pilgrimage to also compose poems of their own for each of the sacred sites.

Because Emperor Gotoba (1180-1239; r. 1183–1198) made the pilgrimage to Kumano 31 times and his successor Emperor Go-Shirakawa (1127 – 1192; reigned 1155 – 1158) made it 34 times, the pilgrimage became popular during this era.  However, members of court had been coming here for about 400 years prior to this, believing it was near to Kannon's paradise island located to the south of Japan called Fudaraku (Potala in Sanskrit).

The temple buildings, like many of the temples on the pilgrimage route, were burned to the ground by Oda Nobunaga during the civil wars of the 16th century. The Nyorindō (Main Temple) was rebuilt in 1587 by Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the Imperial Regent who unified Japan after the wars. It is typical of Momoyama Era style of architecture with a shingled distinctive roof called irimoya. The Nyorindō is heritage listed as a nationally Important Cultural Property.

When the government reinstated the power of the Emperor during the Meiji era (1868 - 1912), an attempt was made to separate Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines that had for over a thousand years shared the same grounds. Because of this, Seigantoji was formally abolished, the priests stripped of their authority and no funding was given to the temple. At that time Seigantoji had three main temples as well as 37 residential and training building. But all that remained after the Meiji Restoration was the Nyorindō and the abbot's quarters. However, gradually over the following century it was slowly rebuilt due to its position as an important part of the Kumano-Nachi syncretic mountain veneration religion of Shugendō.

In 1918, a Sutra mound was excavated at the base of the waterfall and found to contain many important archaeological artifacts, including statues, mirrors, altar fittings and Sutra cylinders. These are now displayed in the Ryuhoden ("Treasure Hall"), located next to the Pagoda. These Sutra mounds were created by priests in times of war to hide their treasures but also many items were buried in this way as a result of the belief that the end of the world was coming at the start of the 10th century.

Building and Places of Interest within the temple grounds
 Daimonsaka Forest Path
 Sanmon (Mountain Gate)
 Kumano Nachi Taisha shrine (heiden)
 Homotsuden Treasure Hall
 Nyoirindō (The Temple of the Wish-fulfilling Kannon), the main temple (Hondō)
 Sanjūdō pagoda (3-storey pagoda)
 Nachi-no-Taki (Nachi Waterfall)
 Nyohōdō (Hall of Lantern)
 Sonsho-in Abbot's Quarters
 Waniguchi "Crocodile Mouth" Gong
 Fudarakusan-ji

Images

See also
Kumano Shrine

Notes

References

Seiganto-ji's official site
Sacred Japan, History of Seigantoji, accessed on September 23, 2009

Pagodas in Japan
Important Cultural Properties of Japan
Buddhist temples in Wakayama Prefecture
Shinbutsu shūgō
Tendai temples
World Heritage Sites in Japan
Kumano Sanzan
Temples of Avalokiteśvara

Seiganto-ji


Lovisenberg Church (Norwegian: Lovisenberg kirke) is a church in the neighborhood of Lovisenberg in  the district of St. Hanshaugen in Oslo, Norway. The church is a basilica in Romanesque Revival style. The building is made of red brick and has a gable roof covered with slate. The bell tower is located to the side of the ridge and baptismal sacristy is to the right of the main entrance.

The church is adorned with stained glass by Maria Vigeland in the choir showing the birth of Jesus, the Crucifixion and the Angel in the empty tomb.  She has also created pieces of stained glass in side windows.  On the altar is a cross from Oberammergau.  The pulpit, the altar rail, the benches and other fixtures are made of spruce of the local carpenter master, A. Berger.  The baptismal font is in blue white marble from Velfjord, Nordland.  The church got a new organ in 1995. The two church bells are created by Olsen Nauen Bell Foundry.

Lovisenberg Church is listed and protected by law by the Norwegian Directorate for Cultural Heritage.

References

External links

Official parish website

Lutheran churches in Oslo
Cultural heritage of Norway
1912 establishments in Norway
20th-century Church of Norway church buildings
Churches completed in 1912

Lovisenberg Church


Hope UK is a United Kingdom Christian charity based in London, England which educates children and young people about drug and alcohol abuse. Local meetings started in 1847 and a formal organisation was established in 1855 with the name The United Kingdom Band of Hope Union.

Band of Hope

The Band of Hope was first proposed by Rev. Jabez Tunnicliff, who was a Baptist minister in Leeds, following the death in June 1847 of a young man whose life was cut short by alcohol.  While working in Leeds, Tunnicliff had become an advocate for total abstinence from alcohol.  In the autumn of 1847, with the help of other temperance workers including Anne Jane Carlile, the Band of Hope was founded. Its objective was to teach children the importance and principles of sobriety and teetotalism. In 1855, a national organisation was formed amidst an explosion of Band of Hope work. Meetings were held in churches throughout the UK and included Christian teaching.

Set up in an era when alcoholic drinks was generally viewed as a necessity of life, next only to food and water, the Band of Hope and other temperance organisations fought to counteract the influence of pubs and brewers, with the specific intention of rescuing 'unfortunates' whose lives had been blighted by drink and teach complete abstinence.

Christians and Temperance Societies saw this as a way of providing activities for children that encouraged them to avoid alcohol problems. Alcohol-free premises were established, rallies, marches and demonstrations were mounted to oppose the "evils" of hard liquor that were attended by thousands of supporters, and coffee taverns were established to keep teetotalers on the straight and narrow path.

"Signing the pledge" was one of the innovative features. The pledge was a promise not to drink alcohol and millions of people signed up. There were also lectures that were illustrated by magic lantern, the technological equivalent to present day computerised PowerPoint displays, and noted personalities were invited to speak at public meetings in support of the cause. Guy Aldred, the boy preacher was an active propagandist for the Band of Hope, before focussing his activities on Anarchist-Communist politics.

By 1897, its estimated membership was over 3 million. Band of Hope also had chapters in Australia prior to World War I. By the early 1950s, however, the temperance movement had all but succumbed to a changing society and cultural habits. Lack of support for the Band of Hope eventually brought about their transformation into Hope UK.

Hope UK remains concerned with children's welfare, giving priority to the development of resources and training for parents and children's workers of many kinds. The charity also attempts to persuade churches and other Christian organisations to include drugs awareness work within their programmes and play their part in helping to reduce the UK's alcohol and other drugs problems. Hope UK is a member of The National Council for Voluntary Youth Services (NCVYS).

Training

The charity provides training courses across the UK, ranging from short workshops to two-day Open College Network (OCN) accredited courses.

Hope UK's drug educators undergo a 120-hour OCN accredited course to prepare them for leading drug awareness sessions and training courses. This course is also available for those who want to provide drug education as part of their own work.

The charity provides a two-day OCN-accredited "Young People, Drugs and the Role of the Youth Worker" course for people that work with children and young people. It also provides "Drug Prevention for Family Workers", a two-day course for those working in family centres, with parents, or for Children's or Community Development workers.

Sessions for Church Workers include the application of faith principles to drug issues; Church drug policies and practice; and suggested action by churches for and with their communities. Hope UK's Church Leaders' Pack is also available as a paper resource.

See also
Church Penitentiary Association
National Council for Voluntary Youth Services
Temperance movement in the United Kingdom

References

External links
Hope UK, "A national charity providing drug and alcohol education and training for children and young people, parents and youth workers"
The National Council for Voluntary Youth Services (NCVYS)

Christian charities based in the United Kingdom
Social welfare charities based in the United Kingdom
Temperance organizations in the United Kingdom
Alcohol abuse in the United Kingdom
Charities based in London

Hope UK


The  PL-11 Airtruck is a New Zealand agricultural aircraft.

A strikingly unusual aircraft, the PL-11 Airtruck was developed from the Kingsford Smith PL.7 as a replacement for the de Havilland Tiger Moth in the New Zealand aerial topdressing market by Luigi Pellarini for Waitomo Aircraft. The prototype was constructed using bits of war surplus ex-RNZAF North American Harvards. It featured all aluminium structure, a high-wing monoplane with a steel stub wing and V lift struts, steerable tricycle undercarriage, an extremely stubby pod fuselage, the cockpit (made from shortened Harvard glazing) being mounted directly over the radial engine, providing excellent forward view and very high drag, beneath it was room for a superphosphate hopper or up to 5 people in a cabin. The strangeness was completed by twin booms each supporting unconnected tail units, (the idea being a truck could reverse between the tail units to load the hopper). Despite the outlandish appearance, the Airtruck was surprisingly successful, if unable to compete with the Fletcher Fu24 in its design market.

The first Bennett Airtruck, ZK-BPV, took to the air on 2 August 1960, and crashed during trials in October 1963. Following company reorganization the second example, known as the Waitomo PL-11 Airtruck and registered ZK-CKE, flew in March 1965. It commenced commercial operations late in February 1967 but crashed a few days later. An unconfirmed report indicates that a third airframe was largely constructed but never flew.

A shortage of Harvard parts led to the type being redesigned for all-new construction by the Transavia Corporation, as the Transavia PL-12 Airtruk, 118 of which were produced in Australia between 1965 and 1985.

Specifications (Waitomo Airtruck)

References

 Taylor, John W. R. Jane's All The World's Aircraft 1965-66. London:Sampson Low, Marston & Company, 1965.

External links

Airliners.net info page
New Zealand forum discussion

1960s New Zealand agricultural aircraft
Aircraft manufactured in New Zealand
High-wing aircraft
Twin-boom aircraft
Single-engined tractor aircraft
Aircraft first flown in 1960

Bennett Airtruck


Buffalo Girls is a 1990 novel written by American author Larry McMurtry about Calamity Jane. It is written in the novel prose style mixed with a series of letters from Calamity Jane to her daughter. In her letters, Calamity describes herself as being a drunken hellraiser but never an outlaw. Her letters also describe her larger-than-life cohorts.

McMurtry depicts gritty events and relationships in the life of fur trappers, cowboys, soldiers, prostitutes, and Indians as the Wild West fades away, changing their way of life.  The characters struggle, and many fail, to adapt to the settling of the West.  In an effort to adapt and relive the Wild West, many of the characters, along with Calamity Jane, resort to performing in Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West show. They exploit and are exploited by their frontier lifestyle, before being defeated by it in the end.

Film adaptation
Buffalo Girls was later the basis for the 1995 CBS made-for-TV movie starring Anjelica Huston as Calamity Jane and Melanie Griffith as Dora DuFran. Wild Bill Hickok was played by Sam Elliott, Annie Oakley by Reba McEntire, and Buffalo Bill Cody by Peter Coyote. The film also included Gabriel Byrne, Tracey Walter, Floyd Red Crow Westerman, Jack Palance, Russell Means (as Sitting Bull), and John Diehl (as George Armstrong Custer).

Some filming took place in Bristol Zoo and Bath.

References

1990 American novels
Novels by Larry McMurtry
American novels adapted into films
American novels adapted into television shows
Western (genre) novels
Wild West shows
Films about Wild West shows
Cultural depictions of Calamity Jane
Cultural depictions of Buffalo Bill
Cultural depictions of Sitting Bull
Cultural depictions of Annie Oakley
Cultural depictions of Wild Bill Hickok
Cultural depictions of George Armstrong Custer

Buffalo Girls


Tuojiangosaurus is an armoured dinosaur that lived during the upper Jurassic period approximately 150 million years ago

Tuojiangosaurus comes from Szechuan, China. Ancient Chinese records tell of local villagers selling mythical dragon bones to make medicine. These were probably the fossils of Tuojiangosaurus.

Tuojiangosaurus wasn't a dragon. It was a dinosaur. To protect it, it had 17 pairs of spiky plates down its back and tail. A frightening set of tail spikes completed this plant-eater's armour.

With one deadly swing of its spiked tail Tuojiangosaurus could hurt the belly of an attacking predator.

The Chinese province where Tuojiangosaurus was found is home to the Zigong Dinosaur Park, the first dinosaur museum in Asia.

Dinosaurs

Tuojiangosaurus


James John Herbert, OBE (8 April 1943 – 20 March 2013) was an English horror writer. A full-time writer, he also designed his own book covers and publicity. His books have sold 54 million copies worldwide, and have been translated into 34 languages, including Chinese and Russian.

Biography
Born in London, Herbert was the son of Herbert Herbert, a stall-holder at London's Brick Lane Market. He attended a Catholic school in Bethnal Green called Our Lady of the Assumption, then at 11 won a scholarship to St Aloysius Grammar School in Highgate. He left school at 15 and studied at Hornsey College of Art, joining the art department of John Collings, a small advertising agency.  He left the agency to join Charles Barker Advertising where he worked as art director and then group head.

Herbert lived in Woodmancote, near Henfield in West Sussex. He had two brothers: Peter, a retired market trader and John, an insurance broker. Herbert would write his drafts in longhand on "jumbo pads". In 1979 Herbert had to pay damages when it was ruled that he had based part of his novel The Spear on the work of another writer, The Spear of Destiny by Trevor Ravenscroft. In 2010 Herbert was honoured with the World Horror Convention Grand Master Award, presented to him by Stephen King. Later in the same year, he was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2010 Birthday Honours, presented by Prince Charles.

On 20 March 2013, Herbert died suddenly at his home in Sussex at the age of 69. No cause of death was given and a spokeswoman for the publisher said that he had not been ill. He is survived by his wife, Eileen, and three daughters. His estate was valued at £8.3 million.

Work
His first two books, The Rats and The Fog, were disaster novels with man-eating giant black rats in the first and an accidentally released chemical weapon in the second. The first print run of The Rats (100,000 copies) sold out in three weeks. Herbert wrote three sequels to The Rats: Lair, which deals with a second outbreak of the mutant black rats, this time in the countryside around Epping Forest rather than in the first book's London slums; in Domain, a nuclear war results in rats having become the dominant species in a devastated city; the third sequel, the graphic novel The City, is an adventure set in the post-nuclear future.

With his third novel, the ghost story The Survivor, Herbert used supernatural horror rather than the science fiction horror of his first two books. In Shrine, he explored his Roman Catholic heritage with the story of an apparent miracle which turns out to be something much more sinister. Haunted, the story of a sceptical paranormal investigator taunted by malicious ghosts, began life as a screenplay for the BBC, though this was not the screenplay used in the eventual film version. Its sequels were The Ghosts of Sleath and Ash. Others of Herbert's books, such as Moon, Sepulchre and Portent, are structured as thrillers and include espionage and detective story elements along with the supernatural.
The Jonah is in large part the story of a police investigation, albeit by a policeman whose life is overshadowed by a supernatural presence. The Spear deals with a neo-Nazi cult in Britain and an international conspiracy which includes a right-wing US general and an arms dealer.

'48 is an alternative history novel set in 1948 in which the Second World War ended with the release of a devastating plague by the defeated Hitler and, like The Spear, features British characters who sympathise with the Nazis. Others narrates the story of a physically deformed private detective. Herbert had previously tackled the theme of reincarnation in his fourth novel, Fluke, the fantasy story of a dog who somehow remembers his previous life as a human being. Rumbo, one of the characters from Fluke also turns up in The Magic Cottage. Once... includes another reference to the character of Rumbo (along with an in-joke of elven folk having names of reversed titles of Herbert's previous novels; 'Hanoj', 'Niamod', 'Noom', etc.).

Nobody True continues the theme of life after death, being narrated by a ghost whose investigation of his own death results in the destruction of his illusions about his life. Herbert described Creed as his Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. The character Joe Creed is a cynical, sleazy paparazzo who is drawn into a plot involving fed-up and underappreciated monsters.

The novel The Secret of Crickley Hall, originally scheduled for release in April 2006, was eventually released in October. A long novel about a haunted country house in England, it examined the relationship between religious zealotry and child abuse. One of the characters in this novel is named after a real person, who won the honour by having the winning bid in the 2004 BBC Radio 2 Children in Need Auction. Various biographical and critical pieces by and about Herbert have been collected in James Herbert: By Horror Haunted, edited by Stephen Jones, and also in James Herbert – Devil in the Dark, written by Craig Cabell.

Herbert released a new novel virtually every year from 1974 to 1988, wrote six novels during the 1990s and released three new works in the 2000s. "I am very insecure about being a writer", he stated in the book Faces of Fear. "I don't understand why I am so successful. And the longer I stay that way, the better it's going to be, because that's what keeps me on the edge, striving if you like."

Herbert's final novel has an eerie political edge. Ash imagines Princess Diana and her secret son as well as Lord Lucan, Colonel Gaddafi and Robert Maxwell living together in a Scottish castle.

He was the subject of a This is Your Life programme in 1995, when he was surprised by Michael Aspel at the London Dungeon.

Reception
"Herbert was by no means literary, but his work had a raw urgency," said Stephen King. "His best novels, The Rats and The Fog, had the effect of Mike Tyson in his championship days: no finesse, all crude power. Those books were best sellers because many readers (including me) were too horrified to put them down."

"There are few things I would like to do less than lie under a cloudy night sky while someone read aloud the more vivid passages of Moon," Andrew Postman wrote in The New York Times Book Review. "In the thriller genre, do recommendations come any higher?"

List of works

Novels
The Rats (1974; first instalment in the Rats series)
The Fog (1975)
The Survivor (1976)
Fluke (1977)
The Spear (1978)
Lair (1979; second instalment in the Rats series)
The Dark (1980)
The Jonah (1981)
Shrine (1983)
Domain (1984; third instalment in the Rats series)
Moon (1985)
The Magic Cottage (1986)
Sepulchre (1987)
Haunted (1988)
Creed (1990)
Portent (1992)
The Ghosts of Sleath (1994)
'48 (1996)
Others (1999)
Once (2001)
Nobody True (2003)
The Secret of Crickley Hall (2006)
Ash (2012)

Graphic novel
The City (1993; fourth instalment in the Rats series)

Non-fiction
James Herbert: By Horror Haunted (1992)
James Herbert's Dark Places (1993)

Short stories
 "Maurice and Mog"
 "Breakfast"
 "Hallowe'en's Child"
 "They Don't Like Us"
 "Extinct"
 "Cora's Needs"

Adaptations
The Survivor (1981 film)
Deadly Eyes (1982 film adapted from The Rats)
The Rats (1985 computer game for the Commodore 64 and Sinclair Spectrum)
Fluke (a 1991 five-part BBC Radio 4 reading; a 1995 film adaptation)
Haunted (1995 film)
The Magic Cottage (1998 BBC Radio 4 Dramatisation)
The Secret of Crickley Hall (2012 three-part BBC One television serial)
The Unholy (2021 film adapted from Shrine)

See also

List of horror fiction writers

Notes

References

Bibliography
Sources

Further reading

External links

James Herbert discusses his novel Haunted with Neil Gaiman – a British Library sound recording
Desert Island Discs appearance (14 September 1986)

1943 births
2013 deaths
20th-century English male writers
20th-century English novelists
Alumni of Middlesex University
British alternative history writers
English horror writers
English male novelists
English Roman Catholics
English thriller writers
Officers of the Order of the British Empire
Writers from London
People from Horsham District

James Herbert


The Wesleyan Avenue Historic District is a residential historic district in the Elmwood section of Providence, Rhode Island.  It includes 25 houses, on a one-block section of Wesleyan Avenue between Taylor and Broad Streets, with a few of them on the two end streets.  They are large two-plus story wood-frame houses, set on modest lot, all of which were built between 1875 and 1900.  The houses are in a diversity of styles popular at that time, including Second Empire, Stick style, and Queen Anne.  The district includes what is one of Providence's finest Stick style houses, the Samuel Darling House at 53 Wesleyan Avenue.  It was built in 1885, and displays a wealth of applied wood work, decorative shingling, and intricately carved porch details.

The district was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.

See also
National Register of Historic Places listings in Providence, Rhode Island

References

Historic districts in Providence County, Rhode Island
Geography of Providence, Rhode Island
National Register of Historic Places in Providence, Rhode Island
Historic districts on the National Register of Historic Places in Rhode Island

Wesleyan Avenue Historic District


Philipp Eduard Anton von Lenard (7 June 1862 – 20 May 1947) was a Hungarian-born German physicist. He won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1905 for his work on cathode rays. His most important work was his study of the photoelectric effect. He discovered that the energy (speed) of the electrons from a cathode depends on the wavelength, not the intensity of the light.

Lenard was a nationalist and anti-Semite. He was a supporter of Adolf Hitler in the 1920s. He was a role model for the "Deutsche Physik" movement during the Nazi period. He said that Albert Einstein's contributions to science were "Jewish physics".

Early life and work
Philipp Lenard was born in Pressburg (today's Bratislava), on 7 June 1862 in the Kingdom of Hungary. The Lenard family were of German-descent. His father, Philipp von Lenardis (1812–1896), was a wine-merchant in Pressburg. His mother was Antonie Baumann (1831–1865). In 1880, he studied physics and chemistry in Vienna and Budapest, going back to Pressburg in 1882. After being refused an assistant's position in the University of Budapest in 1883, he moved to Heidelberg. He studied under the  Robert Bunsen, and also one semester in Berlin with Hermann von Helmholtz. He gained a doctoral degree in 1886. In 1887 he went back to Budapest to work for Loránd Eötvös. After working in Aachen, Bonn, Breslau, Heidelberg (1896–1898), and Kiel (1898–1907), he went back to the University of Heidelberg in 1907 as the head of the Philipp Lenard Institute. In 1905, Lenard became a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. In 1907, he became a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

He studied phosphorescence, luminescence, and the conductivity of flames.

Contributions to physics

Photoelectric investigations

Lenard began the study of cathode rays in 1888. These rays were made in simple, partially evacuated glass tubes. Inside were metallic electrodes across which a high voltage could be placed. It was difficult to study the rays inside the sealed glass tubes. They were difficult to access, and there were still air molecules in the tubes. Lenard was able to make small metallic windows in the glass, thick enough to be able to withstand the pressure, but thin enough to let the rays pass through. He could pass the rays out into the laboratory, or into another chamber that was completely airless. These windows are now known as Lenard windows. He could easily detect the rays and measure their intensity by using paper sheets with a layer of phosphorescent materials.

Lenard saw that the absorption of cathode rays was proportional to the density of the material they passed through. This was opposite to the idea that they were some sort of electromagnetic radiation. He also showed that the rays could pass through the air and appeared to be scattered by it. This meant that they must be particles that were even smaller than the molecules in air. He confirmed some of J.J. Thomson's work, and this showed that cathode rays were streams of negatively charged energetic particles. He called them quanta of electricity or for short quanta, after Helmholtz. J.J. Thomson had called them corpuscles, but electrons became the everyday term. Lenard used this knowledge, together with the results of his and others' earlier experiments on the absorption of the rays in metals. He showed that electrons were parts of the atom. Lenard worked out that atoms were mostly empty space. He said that every atom consists of empty space and electrically neutral corpuscules called "dynamids", each consisting of an electron and an equal positive charge.

He experimented using a Crookes tube. He showed that the rays produced by irradiating metals in a vacuum with ultraviolet light were like cathode rays. He found that the energy of the rays was independent of the light intensity, but was greater for shorter wavelengths of light.

Albert Einstein explained this as a quantum effect.  This theory said that the plot of the cathode ray energy versus the frequency would be a straight line with a slope equal to Planck's constant, h. This was proved some years later. Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for this theory. Lenard did not like the attention given to Einstein. He did not believe in Einsteins theories, including relativity. However he did agree with Einstein's explanation of the photoelectric effect.

Lenard received the 1905 Nobel Prize for Physics in recognition of this work.

Meteorological contributions
Lenard was the first person to study what is now called the Lenard effect in 1892. This is the separation of electric charges related to the aerodynamic breakup of water drops. It is also known as spray electrification or the waterfall effect.

He studied the size and shapes of raindrops. He built a wind tunnel in which water droplets could be held still for a few seconds. He discovered that large raindrops are not tear-shaped, but are rather shaped like a hamburger bun.

Deutsche Physik
Lenard was a strong German nationalist, and did not like "English physics". He thought the English had stolen their ideas from Germany. He joined the National Socialist Party before it was popular. He said that Germany should rely on "Deutsche Physik" and ignore what he said were the false and deliberately misleading ideas of "Jewish physics". By this he meant the theories of Albert Einstein, including "the Jewish fraud" of relativity. He became an advisor to Adolf Hitler, and the Chief of Aryan physics.

Lenard retired from Heidelberg University as professor of theoretical physics in 1931. He was removed from his honorary position by Allied occupation forces in 1945. The Helmholtz-Gymnasium Heidelberg had been named the Philipp Lenard Schule from 1927 until 1945. it was renamed in September 1945, The military government were removing Nazi street names and monuments . Lenard died in 1947 in Messelhausen, Germany.

 Royal Society: Rumford Medal, 1896
 Italian Society of Sciences: Matteucci Medal, 1896
 French Academy of Sciences: Prix La Caze, 1897
 Franklin Institute: Franklin Medal, 1932
 Nobel Prize for Physics, 1905
 A crater near the north pole of the moon was after him in 2008.

Bibliography

 Lenard, Philipp (1931) (in German). Erinnerungen eines Naturforschers. New edition: Erinnerungen eines Naturforschers – Kritische annotierte Ausgabe des Originaltyposkriptes von 1931/1843 (Arne Schirrmacher, ed.). Springer Verlag, Heidelberg 2010, 344 pages, , e-.

Notes

References

Other websites
 Nobel Foundation biography
 On Cathode Rays
 The Cathode Ray Tube site

 Newspaper clippings about  Philipp Lenard in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW

Politicians of the Nazi Party
German inventors
Hungarian Nobel Prize winners
German Nobel Prize winners
German physicists
Nobel Prize in Physics winners
People from Bratislava
1947 deaths
1862 births
CS1 Hungarian-language sources (hu)

Philipp Lenard


Boutonneuse fever (also called, Mediterranean spotted fever, fièvre boutonneuse, Kenya tick typhus, Indian tick typhus, Marseilles fever, or Astrakhan fever) is a fever as a result of a rickettsial infection caused by the bacterium Rickettsia conorii and transmitted by the dog tick Rhipicephalus sanguineus. Boutonneuse fever can be seen in many places around the world, although it is endemic in countries surrounding the Mediterranean Sea. This disease was first described in Tunisia in 1910 by Conor and Bruch and was named boutonneuse (French for "spotty") due to its papular skin-rash characteristics.

Presentation
After an incubation period around seven days, the disease manifests abruptly with chills, high fevers, muscular and articular pains, severe headache, and photophobia. The location of the bite forms a black, ulcerous crust (tache noire). Around the fourth day of the illness, a widespread rash appears, first macular and then maculopapular, and sometimes petechial.

Diagnosis
The diagnosis is made with serologic methods, either the classic Weil–Felix test, (agglutination of Proteus OX strains), ELISA, or immunofluorescence assays in the bioptic material of the primary lesion.
The Weil–Felix test demonstrated low sensitivity (33%) in diagnosing acute rickettsial infections and low specificity, with a positive titre of 1:320 seen in 54% of healthy volunteers and 62% of non-rickettsial fever patients. Therefore, the use of the WFT should be discouraged in the diagnosis of acute rickettsial infections.

Treatment
The illness can be treated with tetracyclines (doxycycline is the preferred treatment), chloramphenicol, macrolides, or fluoroquinolones.

See also
 Rocky Mountain spotted fever

References

External links

Bacterium-related cutaneous conditions
Tick-borne diseases
Rickettsioses

Boutonneuse fever


Microsoft Small Basic is a programming language, interpreter and associated IDE. Microsoft's simplified variant of BASIC, it is designed to help students who have learnt visual programming languages such as Scratch learn text-based programming. The associated IDE provides a simplified programming environment with functionality such as syntax highlighting, intelligent code completion, and in-editor documentation access. The language has only 14 keywords.

History

Microsoft announced Small Basic in October 2008, and released the first stable version for distribution on July 12, 2011, on a Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) website, together with a teaching curriculum and an introductory guide. Between announcement and stable release, a number of Community Technology Preview (CTP) releases were made.

On March 27, 2015, Microsoft released Small Basic version 1.1, which fixed a bug and upgraded the targeted .NET Framework version from version 3.5 to version 4.5, making it the first version incompatible with Windows XP.

Microsoft released Small Basic version 1.2 on October 1, 2015. Version 1.2 was the first update after a four-year hiatus to introduce new features to Small Basic. The update added classes for working with Microsoft's Kinect motion sensors, increased the number of languages supported by the included Dictionary object, and fixed a number of bugs.

On February 19, 2019, Microsoft announced Small Basic Online (SBO). It is open source software released under MIT License on GitHub.

On January 2021, a community member started evolving Small Basic by adding a form designer and a mini Win Forms library with some new syntax features, and released its it under the name Small Visual Basic in Jul 28, 2021.

Language
In Small Basic, one writes the illustrative "Hello, World!" program as follows:
TextWindow.WriteLine("Hello, World!")

Microsoft Small Basic is Turing complete. It supports conditional branching, loop structures, and subroutines for event handling.  Variables are weakly typed and dynamic with no scoping rules.

Conditional branching
The following example demonstrates conditional branching. It ask the user for Celsius or Fahrenheit and then comments on the answer in the appropriate temperature unit.
' A Program that gives advice at a requested temperature.
TextWindow.WriteLine("Do you use 'C'elsius or 'F'ahrenheit for temperature?")
TextWindow.WriteLine("Enter C for Celsius and F for Fahrenheit:")
question_temp: ' Label to jump back to input if wrong input was given
tempunit = TextWindow.Read()
' Temperature Definitions in Celsius:
tempArray["hot"] = 30     ' 30 °C equals 86 °F
tempArray["pretty"] = 20  ' 20 °C equals 68 °F
tempArray["cold"]= 15     ' 15 °C equals 59 °F

If tempunit = "C" OR tempunit = "c" Then
  TextWindow.WriteLine("Celsius selected!")
  tempunit = "C" ' Could be lowercase, thus make it uppercase
ElseIf tempunit = "F" OR tempunit = "f" Then
  TextWindow.WriteLine("Fahrenheit selected!")
  ' We calculate the temperature values for Fahrenheit based on the Celsius values
  tempArray["hot"] = ((tempArray["hot"] * 9)/5) + 32
  tempArray["pretty"] = ((tempArray["pretty"] * 9)/5) + 32
  tempArray["cold"] = ((tempArray["cold"] * 9)/5) + 32
  tempunit = "F" ' Could be lowercase, thus make it uppercase
Else
  GOTO question_temp ' Wrong input, jump back to label "question_temp"
EndIf
TextWindow.Write("Enter the temperature today (in " + tempunit +"): ")
temp = TextWindow.ReadNumber()
If temp >= tempArray["hot"] Then
  TextWindow.WriteLine("It is pretty hot.")
ElseIf temp >= tempArray["pretty"] Then
  TextWindow.WriteLine("It is pretty nice.")
ElseIf temp >= tempArray["cold"] Then
  TextWindow.WriteLine("Don't forget your coat.")
Else
  TextWindow.WriteLine("Stay home.")
EndIf

Small Basic does not support an inline If statement as does Visual Basic, for example: If temp > 50 Then TextWindow.WriteLine("It is pretty nice.")

Looping
This example demonstrates a loop. Starting from one and ending with ten, it multiplies each number by four and displays the result of the multiplication.
TextWindow.WriteLine("Multiplication Tables")
For i = 1 To 10
  TextWindow.Write(i * 4)
EndForWhile loops are also supported, and the demonstrated For loop can be augmented through the use of the Step keyword. The Step keyword is used in setting the value by which the counter variable, i, is incremented each iteration.

Data types
Small Basic supports basic data types, like strings, integers and decimals, and will readily convert one type to another as required by the situation. In the example, both the Read and ReadNumber methods read a string from the command line, but ReadNumber rejects any non-numeric characters. This allows the string to be converted to a numeric type and treated as a number rather than a string by the + operator.TextWindow.WriteLine("Enter your name: ")
name = TextWindow.Read()

TextWindow.Write("Enter your age: ")
age = TextWindow.ReadNumber()

TextWindow.WriteLine("Hello, " + name + "!")
TextWindow.WriteLine("In 5 years, you shall be " + ( age + 5 ) + " years old!")

As Small Basic will readily convert among data types, numbers can be manipulated as strings and numeric strings as numbers. This is demonstrated through the second example.
TextWindow.WriteLine(Math.log("100")) 'Prints 2
TextWindow.WriteLine("100" + "3000") ' Prints 3100
TextWindow.WriteLine("Windows " + 8) ' Prints Windows 8
TextWindow.WriteLine(Text.GetLength(1023.42)) ' Prints 7 (length of decimal representation including decimal point)
In the second example, both strings are treated as numbers and added together, producing the output 3100. To concatenate the two values, producing the output 1003000, it is necessary to use the Text.Append(text1, text2) method.

Libraries

Standard library
The Small Basic standard library includes basic classes for mathematics, string handling, and input/output, as well as more exotic classes that are intended to make using the language more fun for learners. Examples of these include a Turtle graphics class, a class for retrieving photos from Flickr, and classes for interacting with Microsoft Kinect sensors.

To make the classes easier to use for learners, they have been simplified. This simplification is demonstrated through the code used to retrieve a random mountain-themed image from Flickr:

For i = 1 To 10
  pic = Flickr.GetRandomPicture("mountains")
  Desktop.SetWallPaper(pic)
  Program.Delay(10000)
EndFor

Turtle graphics
Small Basic includes a "Turtle" graphics library that borrows from the Logo family of programming languages. For example, to draw a square using the turtle, the turtle is moved forward by a given number of pixels and rotated 90 degrees in a given direction. This action is then repeated four times to draw the four sides of the square.

For i = 1 to 4
  Turtle.Move(100) ' Forward 100 pixels
  Turtle.Turn(90) ' Turn 90 degrees right
EndFor

More complex drawings are possible by altering the turning angle of the turtle and the number of iterations of the loop. For example, one can draw a hexagon by setting the turn angle to 60 degrees and the number of iterations to six.

Third-party libraries
Small Basic allows the use of third-party libraries. These libraries must be written in a CLR-compatible language, and the compiled binaries must target a compatible .NET Framework version. The classes provided by the library are required to be static, flagged with a specific attribute, and must use a specific data type.

An example of a class to be used in Small Basic is provided below, written in C#.

[SmallBasicType]
public static class ExampleClass
{
    public static Primitive Add(Primitive A, Primitive B) => A + B;

    public static Primitive SomeProperty
    {
        get;
        set;
    }

    public static Primitive Pi => (Primitive)3.14159;
}

If available, the Small Basic development environment will display documentation for third-party libraries. The development environment accepts documentation in the form of an XML file, which can be automatically generated from source code comments by tools such as Microsoft Visual Studio and MonoDevelop.

References

Further reading

Small Basic Programming Tutorials by Kidware Software
 Learn to Program with Small Basic by No Starch
 The Basics of Small Basic discussion with Vijaye Raji and Erik Meijer on SmallBasic
 Introduction to Small Basic  discussion with Vijaye Raji and Robert Hess on SmallBasic
 Microsoft Small Basic for .NET  Review of Microsoft Small Basic, with sample application
 Category:Microsoft Small Basic Tasks implemented in Microsoft Small Basic on rosettacode.org

External links

Small Basic
BASIC programming language family
Educational programming languages
.NET programming languages
Computer-related introductions in 2008
Small Basic
Small Basic
Programming languages created in 2008
Articles with example C Sharp code
Software using the MIT license
Pedagogic integrated development environments
Windows-only free software
Free integrated development environments

Microsoft Small Basic


The Töss is a river of the canton of Zürich. It starts with the confluence of the Vordertöss and the Hindertöss in the Zürcher Oberland, at Tössscheidi on  on the border between the municipalities of Wald west of the Dägelschberg (), east of the Hüttchopf (), and north of the Tössstock ()).

The Vordertöss (lit.: 'Front Töss') rises on the south side of the Tössstock on the north faces of the Schwarzeberg () and Höchhand () before it circumvent the Tössstock on its western flank.

The larger tributary, the Hindertöss (lit.: 'Back Töss') collects the waters, either, by its tributary, the Chreuelbach, below the Höchhand, the western faces of the Habrütispitz () and Rossegg (), or, from its own sources below Schindelegg (), and the south faces of Schindelberghöchi () and the Dägelschberg, and passes the Tössstock on its northern hillside.

The Töss flows to the north before it meets the main valley of its own name, Töss Valley (Tösstal) just before Steg im Tösstal. Here, the river and its valley turns to the west in order to flow through Bauma then turns to the north again. West of the village Turbenthal it turns west again, and the valley gets even more ragged than before.

It traverses Winterthur on its most western part of the city, just northeast of the Töss, a city mountain. After joining the Eulach on the western exit of the city, the river Töss then continues more or less westnorthwestern and joins the Rhine after about  on Rhine's large southern bend called Tössegg west of Teufen and just before Eglisau.

References

Rivers of Switzerland
Rivers of the canton of Zürich

Töss (river)