The Duchy of Samogitia (, , ) was an administrative unit of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania from 1422 (and from 1569, a member country of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth). Between 1422 and 1441 it was known as the Eldership of Samogitia. Since the 1540s the Grand Duke of Lithuania also held the title of Duke of Samogitia, although the actual ruler of the province, responsible to the Grand Duke, was known as the General Elder () of Samogitia who was self-elected by the Samogitian nobility.

The Duchy was located in the western part of the present Republic of Lithuania. Historically, in the west it had access to the Baltic Sea; in the north, it bordered the Duchy of Courland and Ducal Prussia in the south. During the Middle Ages and until the last partition in 1795, Samogitia had clearly defined borders as the Duchy of Samogitia. Afterwards the area encompassed the Samogitian Diocese. Today Samogitia is one of several ethnographic regions and is not defined administratively.

Name
Samogitia is a Latinized version of the name Žemaitija, meaning "the Lowlands" as opposed to Aukštaitija for "the Highlands". In the Middle Ages, the names Samaiten, Samaitae, Zamaytae, Samogitia, Samattae, Samethi were used in German and Latin sources. They, together with other variants Schmudien, Schamaiten (German) and Żmudź (Polish), are all derived from the Lithuanian Žemaičiai, dial. Žemaitiai / Žemaitei.

Geography

The Duchy was located in what today is several counties (apskritis) in Lithuania: a small part of Kaunas County (Kauno Apskritis), the western part Šiauliai County (Šiaulių Apskritis), Tauragė County (Tauragės Apskritis), Telšiai County (Telšių Apskritis), the northern part of Klaipėda County (Klaipėdos Apskritis) and the northern part of Marijampolė County (Marijampolės Apskritis).

The major part of Samogitia is located on Western Upland. Lowlands which are referred in its name are on the border between Samogitia and Eastern Lithuania, along the Nevėžis River.

The Duchy of Samogitia had the size of approximately 25,700 square kilometers.

History

Before the formation of the Lithuanian state, Samogitia was ruled by its local noblemen. A chronicle mentions two dukes from Samogitia in 1219 as signatories of the Treaty with Volhynia.

Since the formation of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the 13th century, Samogitia was its dependent territory, however sometimes the influence of the Lithuanian Grand Duke was very limited. During the rule of the first Lithuanian king, Mindaugas, Samogitians pursued an independent foreign policy and continued fighting with the Knights of the Sword even after King Mindaugas had signed a peace treaty with them.

Samogitia for 200 years played a crucial role in halting the expansion of the Teutonic Order and defeated the Knights of the Sword in the Battle of Saule (1236) and the Livonian Order in the Battle of Skuodas (1259), and the Battle of Durbe (1260).

In the atmosphere of fierce battles with the Teutonic Knights, the Lithuanian rulers Jogaila and Vytautas several times ceded Samogitia to the Teutonic Order in 1382, 1398 and 1404. However, the Teutonic Knights were not successful in subjugating the land, and Samogitians revolted in 1401 and 1409. After the defeats in the Battle of Grunwald (1410) and following wars, in 1422 the Teutonic Order ceded Samogitia to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania under the Treaty of Melno.

Samogitians were the last in Europe to accept Christianity in 1413. During the Christianization of Samogitia, none of the clergy, who came to Samogitia with Jogaila, were able to communicate with the natives, therefore Jogaila himself taught the Samogitians about the Catholicism, thus he was able to communicate in the Samogitian dialect of the Lithuanian language.

The Grand Duke of Lithuania Casimir Jagiellon acknowledged the autonomy of Samogitia in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and then issued a privilege to the Eldership of Samogitia to elects its own elder (starost) in 1441.

Because of its prolonged wars with the Teutonic Order, Samogitia had developed a social and political structure different from the rest of Lithuania. It had a larger proportion of free farmers and smaller estates than in Eastern Lithuania.

As with most of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, Samogitia suffered in the aftermath of the Swedish invasion of Commonwealth (the Deluge, mid-17th century). Its population dropped from close to 400,000 to about 250,000; only to return to 400,000 by the late 18th century.

After the annexation of Lithuania by Imperial Russia, Samogitia was included in the Vilna Governorate (the southern extreme was detached for New East Prussia and so on); in 1843 it was transferred to a newly established Kovno Governorate. In the early 19th century, Samogitia was the centre of the Lithuanian national revival, which stressed the importance of the Lithuanian language and opposed russification and polonization.

Elders of Samogitia
The General Elders of Samogitia (equivalents of voivodes) included:

|}

See also
Samogitian diocese
Samogitian language

Notes

Sources

External links
Samogitia
Zmudz/Samogitia

Former voivodeships of Grand Duchy of Lithuania
Principalities of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania
1219 establishments in Europe
1795 disestablishments in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth
History of Samogitia

Duchy of Samogitia


Flaminio Torre (1620–1661) was an Italian Baroque painter of the Bolognese School, active during the Baroque period.

He was a pupil of Guido Reni, Giacomo Cavedone, and Simone Cantarini.  He was also called Degli Ancinelli, and painted for churches in Bologna; including a Deposition from the Cross for S. Giorgio. Torre died in Modena. Among his pupils were Giulio (or Giuseppe) Cesare Milani, Giovanni Maria Viani, and Alessandro Badile.

References

1620 births
1661 deaths
17th-century Italian painters
Italian male painters
Painters from Bologna
Italian Baroque painters

Flaminio Torre


This is a list of notable universities in India offering distance education.

Andhra Pradesh
Acharya Nagarjuna University, Guntur
Andhra University, Visakhapatnam
Dravidian University, Kuppam
Gitam University, Visakhapatnam
National Sanskrit University Tirupati
Sri Krishnadevaraya University, Anantapur
Sri Padmavati Mahila Visvavidyalayam, Tirupati
Sri Venkateswara University, Tirupati

Telangana
Dr. B.R. Ambedkar Open University, Hyderabad
Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University, Hyderabad
Kakatiya University, Warangal
Maulana Azad National Urdu University, Hyderabad
NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad
National Institute of Rural Development, Hyderabad
Osmania University, Hyderabad
Potti Sreeramulu Telugu University, Hyderabad

Arunachal Pradesh
Rajiv Gandhi University, Itanagar
Venkateshwara Open University, Itanagar

Assam
Assam Down Town University, Guwahati
Assam University, Silchar
Dibrugarh University, Dibrugarh
Guwahati University, Guwahati
Krishna Kanta Handique State Open University, Guwahati
Tezpur University, Tezpur

Bihar
Babasaheb Bhim Rao Ambedkar Bihar University, Muzaffarpur
Jai Prakash University, Chhapra
Lalit Narayan Mithila University, Darbhanga
Magadh University, Bodh Gaya
Nalanda Open University, Patna
Patna University, Patna

Chhattisgarh
Dr. CV Raman University, Bilaspur
MATS University, Raipur
Pandit Sundarlal Sharma (Open) University, Bilaspur
Pt. Ravi Shankar Shukla University, Raipur

Delhi
Delhi University, Delhi
Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, Delhi
Indira Gandhi National Open University, Delhi
Institute of Management and Development, New Delhi
Jamia Hamdard, New Delhi
Jamia Milia Islamia, New Delhi

Gujarat
Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Open University, Ahmedabad'
Gujarat Vidyapith, Ahmedabad
Saurashtra University Rajkot
Sabarmati University Ahmedabad

Haryana
Chaudhary Devilal University, Sirsa
Guru Jambheshwar University, Hisar
Kurukshetra University, Kurukshetra
Maharishi Dayanand University, Rohtak
Manav Rachna International University

Himachal Pradesh
Himachal Pradesh University, Shimla

JHARKHAND
Jharkhand Open University, Ranchi

Karnataka
Bangalore University, Bangalore
Gulbarga University, Gulbarga
Kannada University, Hampi
Karnataka State Women's University, Bijapur
Karnataka University, Dharwad
Kuvempu University, Shimoga
Mangalore University, Mangalore
National Law School of India University, Bangalore
Tumkur University, Tumkur
Visvesvaraya Technological University, Belgaum

Kerala
 Kannur University, Kannur
 Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottayam
 Sree Narayanaguru Open University, Kollam
 University of Calicut, Kozhikode
 University of Kerala, Thiruvananthapuram

Madhya Pradesh
Awadhes Pratap Singh University, Rewa
Devi Ahilya Vishwavidyalaya, Indore
Dr Harisingh Gour V V, Sagar
Jiwaji University, Gwalior
Madhya Pradesh Bhoj Open University, Bhopal
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi Vedic Vishwavidyalaya, Katni
Rani Durgawati University, Jabalpur

Maharashtra
Balaji Institute of Modern Management, Pune
Bharati Vidyapeeth University, Pune
International Institute for Population Sciences, Mumbai
Mahatma Gandhi Antarrashtriya Hindi Vishwavidyalaya, Wardha
NMIMS University, Mumbai
Sant Gadge Baba Amravati University, Amravati
chatrapati shivaji maharaj University, Kolhapur
Swami Ramanand Teerth Marathwada University, Nanded
Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai
University of Mumbai, Mumbai
Yashwantrao Chavan Maharashtra Open University, Nashik

Meghalaya
Mahatma Gandhi University, Khana Para
NEHU, Shillong

Mizoram
ICFAI, Aizawl

Nagaland

Odisha
Asian School of Business Management, Bhubaneshwar
Berhampur University, Berhampur
Fakir Mohan University, Balasore
North Orissa University, Mayurbhanj
Odisha State Open University
Sambalpur University, Sambalpur
Utkal University, Bhubaneswar

Puducherry
Pondicherry University, Pondicherry

Punjab
Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar
Lovely Professional University, Phagwara
Panjab University, Chandigarh
Punjab Technical University, Jalandhar
Punjabi University, Patiala
Thapar University
Chandigarh University

Rajasthan
Bhagwant University, Ajmer
Birla Institute of Technology and Sciences, Pilani
Institute of Advance Studies in Education, Sardarshar
Jagan Nath University, Jaipur
Jain Vishva Bharati Institute, Ladnun
Jaipur National University, Jaipur
Jayoti Vidyapeeth Women's University, Jaipur
NIMS University, Jaipur
Vardhman Mahaveer Open University, Kota
Suresh Gyan Vihar University, Jaipur

Sikkim
ICFAI University, Gangtok
Sikkim Manipal University, Gangtok

Tamil Nadu
Annamalai University, Chidambaram
Alagappa University, Karaikudi
Bharath Institute of Higher Education and Research, Chennai
Bharathiar University, Coimbatore
Bharathidasan University, Tiruchirapalli
Gandhigram Rural Institute, Gandhigram
Karpagam University, Coimbatore
Madurai Kamaraj University, Madurai
Manonmaniam Sundaranar University, Tirunelveli
Meenakshi Academy of Higher Education and Research
Mother Teresa Women's University, Kodaikanal
Periyar Maniammai University, Thanjavur
Periyar University, Salem
Shanmugha Arts Science, Technology & Research Academy, Thanjavur
Sri Chandrasekharendra Saraswathi Viswamahavidyalaya, Kanchipuram
St. Peter's University, Chennai
Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, Coimbatore
Tamil Nadu Dr. Ambedkar Law University, Chennai
Tamil Nadu Open University, Chennai
Tamil University, Thanjavur
University of Madras, Chennai
Vinayaka Missions University, Salem

Tripura
ICFAI University, Agartala
Tripura University, Agartala

Uttarakhand
Dev Sanskriti Vishwavidyalaya, Haridwar
Gurukul Kangri Vishwavidyalaya, Haridwar
ICFAI University, Dehradun
Kumaun University, Nainital
University of Petroleum and Energy Studies, Dehradun
Uttarakhand Open University, Haldwani

Uttar Pradesh
Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh
Amity University, Noida
Dr. Bhimrao ramji Ambedkar University, Agra
Indian Institute of Carpet Technology, Bhadohi, UP
Integral University, Lucknow
Jagadguru Rambhadrachary Handicapped University, Chitrakoot
Swami Vivekananda Subharti University, Meerut
Teerthankar Mahaveer University, Moradabad
University of Allahabad, Allahabad
Uttar Pradesh Rajarshi Tandon Open University

West Bengal
Jadavpur University, Kolkata
Netaji Subhas Open University, Kolkata
Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata
University of Burdwan, Burdwan
University of Kalyani, Kalyani
University of North Bengal, Darjeeling
Vidyasagar University, Midnapore

References

Distance education universities

List of distance education universities in India


is an Okinawan martial arts master and head of the Shōrin-ryū Kishaba Juku.

Life and Karate-do

Shinzato was born in Manila, in the Philippines. His father was a fisherman. During the Second World War, when the war reached the Pacific, his family relocated to Ueyonabaru, Yonabaru-cho, Okinawa.

Whilst attending the University of the Ryukyus where he studied English and English Literature. He started to practice Karate in 1957 under Tsunetaka Shimabukuro. After completing his degree in Japan he then studied Applied Linguistics in the United States at Indiana University.

He returned to Okinawa in 1967 where he joined the dojo of Shoshin Nagamine. Shinzato translated Nagamine's book "The Essence of Okinawan Karate-do" into the English language. Shinzato also studied under Seigi Nakamura and Chokei Kishaba. Shinzato is a professor at Okinawa International University and the head of Okinawa Karate-do Shōrin-ryū Kishaba Juku.

Shinzato is also a member of the Okinawan Karate-do and Kobudo Encyclopaedia Committee.

Okinawa Karate-do Shōrin-ryū Kishaba Juku

Shinzato became the Juko Cho, i.e., the head of Shōrin-ryū Kishaba Juku, after the passing of Chokei Kishaba in the year 2000.

Dojos affiliated with Kishaba Juku are located in Japan, the United States, France, Germany, Israel, and Slovenia. Within the United States there are dojos in California, Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oregon, and Virginia.

See also
 Okinawan martial arts

References

Okinawan male karateka
1939 births
Living people
Indiana University alumni
Martial arts writers
Karate coaches
Shōrin-ryū practitioners

Katsuhiko Shinzato


Julius Alwin Franz Georg Andreas Ritter von Schlosser (23 September 1866, Vienna – 1 December 1938, Vienna) was an Austrian art historian and an important member of the Vienna School of Art History. According to Ernst Gombrich, he was "One of the most distinguished personalities of art history".

Life and work
From 1884 to 1887, Julius Schlosser studied philology, art history and archaeology at the University of Vienna. In 1888, he completed a Ph.D. thesis on early medieval cloisters supervised by Franz Wickhoff. In 1892, he wrote his Habilitationsschrift. In 1901, he was appointed professor and director of the sculpture collection at Vienna. In 1913, he was knighted and changed his name from Julius Schlosser to Julius von Schlosser. In 1919 he became member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. After the unexpected death of Max Dvořák in 1922, he chaired the second art history department of the University of Vienna, his colleague, and opponent, Josef Strzygowski chairing the first art history department. Von Schlosser retired in 1936.

In 1908, Von Schlosser published Die Kunst- und Wunderkammern der Spätrenaissance, and in 1912 a study on Lorenzo Ghiberti's memoirs. From 1914 to 1920, he wrote his eight-part Materialien zur Quellenkunde der Kunstgeschichte, and in 1923 a study on medieval art, entitled Die Kunst des Mittelalters. In 1924, he published Die Kunstliteratur, a bibliography on writings on art, which was translated into Italian as La letteratura artistica: Manuale delle fonti della storia dell'arte moderna (1935; 2nd edition, 1956; 3rd edition, 1964). In 1984, it was also translated into French. This publication, which expressed discontent with Jacob Burckhardt's assessments in Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (1860) on several counts, is a "famous standard work ... which is still the most admirable survey of writings about art from antiquity to the eighteenth century". "Written with the profound insight of first-hand knowledge, it is not only indispensable as a bibliographical reference book, but it is also one of the few works in our subject to be both genuinely scholarly and readable."

From 1929 to 1934, his 3-volume Künstlerprobleme der Frührenaissance appeared. This was followed by a study on Die Wiener Schule der Kunstgeschichte (1934, translated into English as The Vienna School of Art History), in which, however, he contemptuously claimed that the first  art history department at the University of Vienna, chaired by his opponent Strzygowski, had nothing in common with the Vienna School and indeed often contradicted it, so that he completely omitted it from his historical sketch. In 1941, a posthumous monograph on Ghiberti appeared. In 1998, his "Geschichte der Porträtbildnerei in Wachs" (1911) was translated into English. Besides his art historical writings, Von Schlosser also published a history of musical instruments (1922).

His mother being of Italian ancestry, he spoke Italian very well and expected his students to read original Italian texts, particularly Vasari. Being a close friend of Benedetto Croce, Von Schlosser translated the works of the famous Italian philosopher into German.

According to Catherine M. Soussloff, "much of von Schlosser's work raises a question basic to any discourse on visual culture, such as art history, that constructs the maker as essential to an understanding of the artifact or object. Can the biography of an artist be held in a privileged and isolated status from the other written sources ...? This question cannot be answered adequately without looking more closely at the arguments found in von Schlosser concerning the structure of the biography of the artist that later informed those of Legend, Myth, and Magic.".

In his obituary in the Burlington Magazine, Ernst Gombrich emphasizes that Von Schlosser "was not a specialist of the modern type — nor did he ever strive to be one. For any kind of specialisation his reading was too vast, his outlook too broad, his horizon too wide. It embraced literature no less than art and history and last, but not least — music. His horror of professionalism of any kind is reflected in every single line he wrote." According to the Dictionary of Art Historians, he is "considered one of the giants of the discipline of art history in the twentieth century".

Von Schlosser's students included Ernst Kris, Otto Kurz, Ernst Gombrich, Otto Pächt, Hans Sedlmayr, Fritz Saxl, Ludwig Goldscheider, Charles de Tolnay, and other well-known art historians.

The Schlossergasse in Vienna was named in honor of Julius von Schlosser's memory.

Select publications
 Moderne Märchen: Kleine Skizzen. Leipzig 1886.
 Die abendländische Klosteranlage des früheren Mittelalters. Vienna 1889.
 Schriftquellen zur Geschichte der karolingischen Kunst. Vienna 1892.
 "Die Bilderhandschriften Königs Wenzel I." In Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen. Vol. 14, Prague, Vienna, Leipzig 1893, pp. 214–317.
 Quellenbuch zur Kunstgeschichte des abendländischen Mittelalters: Ausgewählte Texte des vierten bis fünfzehnten Jahrhunderts. Vienna 1896.
 Die Haggadah von Sarajevo: Eine spanisch-jüdische Bilderhandschrift des Mittelalters. Vienna 1898.
 "Randglossen zu einer Stelle Montaignes." In Alois Riegl, ed., Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte. Franz Wickhoff gewidmet von einem Kreise von Freunden und Schülern. Vienna 1903, pp. 172–182.
 Die Kunst- und Wunderkammern der Spätrenaissance: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Sammelwesens. Leipzig 1908
 "Geschichte der Porträtbildnerei in Wachs. Ein Versuch." In Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen. Vol. 29, Vienna and Leipzig 1911, pp. 171–258.
 Lorenzo Ghibertis Denkwürdigkeiten (i commentarii). Berlin 1912.
 Der burgundische Paramentenschatz des Ordens vom Goldenen Vliesse. Vienna 1912.
 Materialien zur Quellenkunde der Kunstgeschichte. Eight parts. Vienna 1914–1920.
 Part 1: Mittelalter. 1914.
 Part 2: Frührenaissance. 1915.
 Part 3: Erste Hälfte des Cinquecento. Leonardos Vermächtnis. Historik und Periegese. 1916.
 Part 4: Die Kunsttheorie der ersten Hälfte des Cinquecento. 1917.
 Part 5: Vasari. 1918.
 Part 6: Die Kunstliteratur des Manierismus. 1919.
 Part 7: Die Geschichtsschreibung des Barocks und des Klassizismus. 1920.
 Part 8: Die italienische Ortsliteratur. 1920.
 Die Wandgemälde aus Schloß Lichtenberg in Tirol. Vienna 1916.
 Die Schatzkammer des Allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses in Wien. Vienna 1918.
 Die deutschen Reichskleinodien. Vienna 1920.
 Karl Friedrich von Rumohr: Italienische Forschungen. Frankfurt am Main 1920.
 Oberitalienische Trecentisten. Leipzig 1921.
 Unsere Musikinstrumente: Eine Einführung in ihre Geschichte. Vienna 1922.
 Die Kunstliteratur. Ein Handbuch zur Quellenkunde der neueren Kunstgeschichte. Vienna 1924.
 Italian edition: La letteratura artistica: manuale delle fonti della storica dell'arte moderna. Edited by Otto Kurz. Translated by Filippo Rossi. Florence and Vienna 1935. 2nd edition, 1956; 3rd edition, 1964.
 French edition: La littérature artistique: Manuel des sources de l'histoire de l'art moderne, Translated by Jacques Chavy, edited by André Chastel. Paris 1984.
 Präludien. Vorträge und Aufsätze. Berlin 1927.
 Künstlerprobleme der Frührenaissance. 3 vols. Vienna and Leipzig, 1929-1934.
 Sull'antica storiografia italiana dell'arte. Palermo 1932.
 "Die Wiener Schule der Kunstgeschichte." In Mitteilungen des österreichischen Institutes für Geschichtsforschung. 1934.
 "Stilgeschichte und Sprachgeschichte der bildenden Kunst: Ein Rückblick." In Sitzungsberichte der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Philosophisch-historische Abteilung. No. 1, 1935.
 "History of Portraiture in Wax." In Roberta Panzanelli, ed., Ephemeral Bodies: Wax Sculpture and the Human Figure. Los Angeles, CA, 2008, pp. 171–314.
 Les Cabinets d'art et de merveilles de la Renaissance tardive: Une contribution à l'histoire du collectionnisme. Translated by Lucie Marignac. Paris 2012.

References

Translations
 Benedetto Croce, Goethe. Zurich, Leipzig and Vienna 1920
 Benedetto Croce, Dantes Dichtung. Zurich, Leipzig and Vienna 1921.
 Benedetto Croce, Randbemerkungen eines Philosophen zum Weltkriege 1914–1920. Zurich, Leipzig and Vienna 1922.

Further reading

 Hans R. Hahnloser, "Bibliographie der bis zum 23. September 1926 erschienenen Schriften von Julius Schlosser." In Arpad Weixlgärtner and Leo Planiscig, eds., Festschrift für Julius Schlosser zum 60. Geburtstage. Vienna 1927, pp. 274–284.
 Karl T. Johns, "Julius Alwin Ritter von Schlosser: Ein bio-bibliographischer Beitrag," kritische berichte, vol. 14, no. 4 (1988), pp. 47–64.
 Catherine M. Soussloff, "Julius von Schlosser." In The Absolute Artist: The Historiography of a Concept. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1997, pp. 100–106.

External links
arthistoricum: Julius Alwin von Schlosser (1866-1938)
Julius Schlosser, Die Kunstliteratur
Österreichisches Biographisches Lexikon und biographische Dokumentation: Schlosser, Julius Alwin von (1866-1938), Kunsthistoriker
Encyclopaedia Universalis: SCHLOSSER JULIUS VON (1866-1938)
Julius Von Schlosser e la storia dell'arte internazionale
L'arte di corte di Julius Von Schlosser (Vienna 1866-1938): Questa pagina è tratta da: Storia e critica d'arte (riassunto) di Gherardo Fabretti.
ÜBER EINIGE ANTIKEN GHIBERTIS. VON JULIUS VON SCHLOSSER

Austrian art historians
Members of the Austrian Academy of Sciences
Academic staff of the University of Vienna
Writers from Vienna
1866 births
1938 deaths
Writers from Austria-Hungary

Julius von Schlosser


Hairy root culture, also called transformed root culture, is a type of  plant tissue culture that is used to study plant metabolic processes or to produce valuable secondary metabolites or recombinant proteins, often with plant genetic engineering.

A naturally occurring soil bacterium Agrobacterium rhizogenes that contains root-inducing plasmids (also called Ri plasmids) can infect plant roots and cause them to produce a food source for the bacterium, opines, and to grow abnormally. The abnormal roots are particularly easy to culture in artificial media because hormones are not needed in contrast to adventitious roots, and they are neoplastic, with indefinite growth. The neoplastic roots produced by A. rhizogenes infection have a high growth rate (compared to untransformed adventitious roots), as well as genetic and biochemical stability.

Currently the main constraint for commercial utilization of hairy root culture is the development and up-scaling of appropriate (bioreactors) vessels for the delicate and sensitive hairy roots.

Some of the applied research on utilization of hairy root cultures has been and is conducted at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd.
Other labs working on hairy roots are the phytotechnology lab of Amiens University and the Arkansas Biosciences Institute.

Metabolic studies
Hairy root cultures can be used for phytoremediation, and are particularly valuable for studies of the metabolic processes involved in phytoremediation.

Further applications include detailed studies of fundamental molecular, genetic and biochemical aspects of genetic transformation and of hairy root induction.

Genetically transformed cultures
The Ri plasmids can be engineered to also contain T-DNA, used for genetic transformation (biotransformation) of the plant cells. The resulting genetically transformed root cultures can produce high levels of secondary metabolites, comparable or even higher than those of intact plants.

Use in plant propagation
Hairy root culture can also be used for regeneration of whole plants and for production of artificial seeds.

See also
 Crown gall, a plant disease with similar uses caused by a related bacterium, Agrobacterium tumefaciens

References

Cell culture
Plant physiology

Hairy root culture


Bent, sometimes stylised as BENT, is a 1979 play by Martin Sherman. It revolves around the persecution of gays in Nazi Germany, and takes place during and after the Night of the Long Knives.

The title of the play refers to the slang word "bent" used in some European countries to refer to homosexuals. When the play was first performed, there was only a trickle of historical research or even awareness about the Nazi persecution of homosexuals. In some regards, the play helped increase that historical research and education in the 1980s and 1990s.

Plot
Maximilian Berber (Max), a promiscuous gay man in 1930s Berlin, is at odds with his wealthy family because of his homosexuality. One evening, much to the resentment of his boyfriend Rudolph Hennings (Rudy), he brings home a handsome Sturmabteilung man, Wolfgang Granz (Wolf). Unfortunately, it is the night that Hitler orders the assassination of the upper echelon of the Sturmabteilung corps, to consolidate his power. Wolf is discovered the next morning and killed by SS men in Max and Rudy's apartment, and the two have to flee their home.

They seek counsel from Rudy's boss Greta. Greta is a drag-queen; she ran her own gay club, which is newly shut down (implicitly due to, at the time, new Paragraph 175 enforcements). Greta explains that the SS approached her for information about Wolf, and that she took them to Max and Rudy's apartment. She officially fires Rudy and hands Max the finder's fee she earned from the SS. They leave the club and Berlin behind.

Max's uncle Freddie, who is also gay, but lives a more discreet life with rent boys to satisfy his desires, has organized new papers for Max to flee to France where homosexuality is legal, but Max refuses to leave Rudy behind. As a result, Max and Rudy are found in a forest tent-colony and arrested by the Gestapo. They are forced to board a train headed for Dachau concentration camp.

On the train, Rudy is spotted wearing glasses by an officer. The officer makes Rudy crush his glasses, and then orders Rudy to be taken, presumably to be killed for his poor eyesight. Rudy is beaten within an inch of his life, all the while Max tries to ignore his screams. Another prisoner on the train, wearing a pink triangle patch, explains the patch system during the Holocaust to Max and tells Max that he must show no sentiment towards Rudy. The officer has Rudy taken back to Max and coerces Max to beat Rudy to death. Max is taken by the guards and lies to them, telling them that he is a Jew rather than a homosexual, because he believes his chances for survival in the camp will be better if he is not assigned the pink triangle. Max later confesses, to the same prisoner from the train, that the guards then forced him to have intercourse with the body of a dead pre-teen girl to "prove" he was not homosexual. That prisoner reveals their name is Horst.

In the camp, Max makes friends with Horst, who shows him the dignity that lies in acknowledging what one is. They fall in love and become lovers through their imagination and through their words. After Horst is shot by camp guards, Max puts on Horst's jacket with the pink triangle and commits suicide by grabbing an electric fence.

Premiere
Bent premiered in London in 1979 at the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square, London, the production later transferring to the West End. Ian McKellen played Max and Tom Bell played Horst.

Subsequent production history
1979 Broadway – The play was directed by Robert Allan Ackerman, with scenery by Santo Loquasto, costumes by Robert Wojewodski, lighting by Arden Fingerhut, and music by Stanley Silverman. The production featured Richard Gere as Max, David Marshall Grant as Rudy, James Remar as Wolf, Michael Gross as Greta, George Hall as Uncle Freddie, Bryan E. Clark as Officer, David Dukes as Horst, Ron Randell as Captain, and the Guards were Kai Wulff, Philip Kraus, and John Snyder.
1980 – Bent was premièred in French at Le Théâtre de Poche in Brussels (Belgium) in January 1980, in a French translation by Lena Grinda, directed by Derek Goldby, with Alain Libolt, Jean-Pierre Dauzun, Yves Deguenne, Pierre Dumaine, Fabrice Eberhard, Bernard Graczyk, Thomas Hutereau, Jean Couvrin, Tobias Kempf, and Roland Mahauden. There was a rerun in September 1998.
1981 – The first production in Brazil was in 1981, at Teatro Villa Lobos (Rio de Janeiro) with José Mayer (Max), Tonico Pereira (Horst), Ricardo Blat (Rudy), and Paulo César Grande. In spite of the fact that Brazil was then a military dictatorship, Sherman's text was presented uncensored.
1981 – The first Canadian production of Bent was in 1981 at the Bathurst Street Theatre, Toronto, Ontario, in English; it starred Richard Monette as Max, Brent Carver as Horst and Jeff Wincott as Wolf/Kapo.
1983 – In Israel, the play was first produced in 1983, and has since been revived on five occasions, most recently in 2018, at the Israeli National Habima Theatre. It reportedly caused riots in Israel, due to the controversial subject matter.
1989 – Sean Mathias directed a revival of the play, performed as a one-night benefit for Stonewall, featuring Ian McKellen, Richard E Grant, Ian Charleson, and Ralph Fiennes. After receiving critical acclaim the one-night revival, Mathias directed a full run in 1990, with McKellen, Paul Rhys, and Christopher Eccleston, which won the City Limits Award for Revival of the Year.
2003 – Bent was presented by Singaporean theatre company Toy Factory Theatre Ensemble, directed by Beatrice Chia.
2009 – Bent was presented in Amarillo, Texas by AVENUE 10, causing the theater to be targeted by an anti-homosexual Christian group Repent Amarillo, who shut down the venue by tipping off local law enforcement.
 2015 – A Polish production in a translation by Rubi Birden premiered in Warsaw Teatr Dramatyczny on 2 October 2015 starring Mariusz Drężek, Kamil Siegmund, Piotr Bulcewicz, Piotr Siwkiewicz, and Maciej Wyczański.
 2022 – BENT, produced by Independent Theatre in Adelaide, South Australia, directed by Rob Croser and starring Matt Hyde as Max

Film adaptation
In 1997, Sherman adapted Bent into a film of the same name, directed by Sean Mathias. The film featured Clive Owen as Max, Lothaire Bluteau as Horst, and Ian McKellen as Freddie.

References

Further reading

External links

1979 in LGBT history
LGBT-related plays
Plays by Martin Sherman
Plays about Nazi Germany
Plays about the Holocaust
Persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany
American plays adapted into films
Homophobia in fiction
1979 plays

Bent (play)


The Three Laws of Robotics (often shortened to The Three Laws or Asimov's Laws) are a set of rules devised by science fiction author Isaac Asimov, which were to be followed by robots in several of his stories. The rules were introduced in his 1942 short story "Runaround" (included in the 1950 collection I, Robot), although similar restrictions had been implied in earlier stories.

The Laws

The Three Laws, presented to be from the fictional "Handbook of Robotics, 56th Edition, 2058 A.D.", are:
 The First Law: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
 The Second Law: A robot must obey the orders  by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
 The Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Use in fiction
The Three Laws form an organizing principle and unifying theme for Asimov's robot-based fiction, appearing in his Robot series, the stories linked to it, and in his (initially pseudonymous) Lucky Starr series of young-adult fiction. The Laws are incorporated into almost all of the positronic robots appearing in his fiction, and cannot be bypassed, being intended as a safety feature. Many of Asimov's robot-focused stories involve robots behaving in unusual and counter-intuitive ways as an unintended consequence of how the robot applies the Three Laws to the situation in which it finds itself. Other authors working in Asimov's fictional universe have adopted them and references, often parodic, appear throughout science fiction as well as in other genres.

The original laws have been altered and elaborated on by Asimov and other authors. Asimov himself made slight modifications to the first three in subsequent books works to further develop how robots would interact with humans and each other. In later fiction where robots had taken responsibility for government of whole planets and human civilizations, Asimov also added a fourth, or zeroth law, to precede the others.

The Three Laws, and the Zeroth, have pervaded science fiction and are referred to in many books, films, and other media. They have also influenced thought on the ethics of artificial intelligence.

History
In The Rest of the Robots, published in 1964, Isaac Asimov noted that when he began writing in 1940 he felt that "one of the stock plots of science fiction was ... robots were created and destroyed their creator. Knowledge has its dangers, yes, but is the response to be a retreat from knowledge? Or is knowledge to be used as itself a barrier to the dangers it brings?" He decided that in his stories a robot would not "turn stupidly on his creator for no purpose but to demonstrate, for one more weary time, the crime and punishment of Faust."

On May 3, 1939, Asimov attended a meeting of the Queens (New York) Science Fiction Society where he met Earl and Otto Binder who had recently published a short story "I, Robot" featuring a sympathetic robot named Adam Link who was misunderstood and motivated by love and honor. (This was the first of a series of ten stories; the next year "Adam Link's Vengeance" (1940) featured Adam thinking "A robot must never kill a human, of his own free will.") Asimov admired the story. Three days later Asimov began writing "my own story of a sympathetic and noble robot", his 14th story. Thirteen days later he took "Robbie" to John W. Campbell the editor of Astounding Science-Fiction. Campbell rejected it, claiming that it bore too strong a resemblance to Lester del Rey's "Helen O'Loy", published in December 1938—the story of a robot that is so much like a person that she falls in love with her creator and becomes his ideal wife. Frederik Pohl published the story under the title "Strange Playfellow" in Super Science Stories September 1940.

Asimov attributes the Three Laws to John W. Campbell, from a conversation that took place on 23 December 1940. Campbell claimed that Asimov had the Three Laws already in his mind and that they simply needed to be stated explicitly. Several years later Asimov's friend Randall Garrett attributed the Laws to a symbiotic partnership between the two men -a suggestion that Asimov adopted enthusiastically. According to his autobiographical writings, Asimov included the First Law's "inaction" clause because of Arthur Hugh Clough's poem "The Latest Decalogue" (text in Wikisource), which includes the satirical lines "Thou shalt not kill, but needst not strive / officiously to keep alive".

Although Asimov pins the creation of the Three Laws on one particular date, their appearance in his literature happened over a period. He wrote two robot stories with no explicit mention of the Laws, "Robbie" and "Reason". He assumed, however, that robots would have certain inherent safeguards. "Liar!", his third robot story, makes the first mention of the First Law but not the other two. All three laws finally appeared together in "Runaround". When these stories and several others were compiled in the anthology I, Robot, "Reason" and "Robbie" were updated to acknowledge all the Three Laws, though the material Asimov added to "Reason" is not entirely consistent with the Three Laws as he described them elsewhere. In particular the idea of a robot protecting human lives when it does not believe those humans truly exist is at odds with Elijah Baley's reasoning, as described below.

During the 1950s Asimov wrote a series of science fiction novels expressly intended for young-adult audiences. Originally his publisher expected that the novels could be adapted into a long-running television series, something like The Lone Ranger had been for radio. Fearing that his stories would be adapted into the "uniformly awful" programming he saw flooding the television channels Asimov decided to publish the Lucky Starr books under the pseudonym "Paul French". When plans for the television series fell through, Asimov decided to abandon the pretence; he brought the Three Laws into Lucky Starr and the Moons of Jupiter, noting that this "was a dead giveaway to Paul French's identity for even the most casual reader".

In his short story "Evidence" Asimov lets his recurring character Dr. Susan Calvin expound a moral basis behind the Three Laws. Calvin points out that human beings are typically expected to refrain from harming other human beings (except in times of extreme duress like war, or to save a greater number) and this is equivalent to a robot's First Law. Likewise, according to Calvin, society expects individuals to obey instructions from recognized authorities such as doctors, teachers and so forth which equals the Second Law of Robotics. Finally humans are typically expected to avoid harming themselves which is the Third Law for a robot.

The plot of "Evidence" revolves around the question of telling a human being apart from a robot constructed to appear human. Calvin reasons that if such an individual obeys the Three Laws he may be a robot or simply "a very good man". Another character then asks Calvin if robots are very different from human beings after all. She replies, "Worlds different. Robots are essentially decent."

Asimov later wrote that he should not be praised for creating the Laws, because they are "obvious from the start, and everyone is aware of them subliminally. The Laws just never happened to be put into brief sentences until I managed to do the job. The Laws apply, as a matter of course, to every tool that human beings use", and "analogues of the Laws are implicit in the design of almost all tools, robotic or not":

 Law 1: A tool must not be unsafe to use. Hammers have handles and screwdrivers have hilts to help increase grip. It is of course possible for a person to injure himself with one of these tools, but that injury would only be due to his incompetence, not the design of the tool.
 Law 2: A tool must perform its function efficiently unless this would harm the user. This is the entire reason ground-fault circuit interrupters exist. Any running tool will have its power cut if a circuit senses that some current is not returning to the neutral wire, and hence might be flowing through the user. The safety of the user is paramount.
 Law 3: A tool must remain intact during its use unless its destruction is required for its use or for safety. For example, Dremel disks are designed to be as tough as possible without breaking unless the job requires it to be spent. Furthermore, they are designed to break at a point before the shrapnel velocity could seriously injure someone (other than the eyes, though safety glasses should be worn at all times anyway).

Asimov believed that, ideally, humans would also follow the Laws:

Asimov stated in a 1986 interview on the Manhattan public access show Conversations with Harold Hudson Channer with Harold Channer with guest co-host Marilyn vos Savant, "It's a little humbling to think that, what is most likely to survive of everything I've said... After all, I've published now... I've published now at least 20 million words.  I'll have to figure it out, maybe even more.  But of all those millions of words that I've published, I am convinced that 100 years from now only 60 of them will survive.  The 60 that make up the Three Laws of Robotics."

Alterations

By Asimov
Asimov's stories test his Three Laws in a wide variety of circumstances leading to proposals and rejection of modifications. Science fiction scholar James Gunn writes in 1982, "The Asimov robot stories as a whole may respond best to an analysis on this basis: the ambiguity in the Three Laws and the ways in which Asimov played twenty-nine variations upon a theme". While the original set of Laws provided inspirations for many stories, Asimov introduced modified versions from time to time.

First Law modified
In "Little Lost Robot" several NS-2, or "Nestor", robots are created with only part of the First Law. It reads:

This modification is motivated by a practical difficulty as robots have to work alongside human beings who are exposed to low doses of radiation. Because their positronic brains are highly sensitive to gamma rays the robots are rendered inoperable by doses reasonably safe for humans. The robots are being destroyed attempting to rescue the humans who are in no actual danger but "might forget to leave" the irradiated area within the exposure time limit. Removing the First Law's "inaction" clause solves this problem but creates the possibility of an even greater one: a robot could initiate an action that would harm a human (dropping a heavy weight and failing to catch it is the example given in the text), knowing that it was capable of preventing the harm and then decide not to do so.

Gaia is a planet with collective intelligence in the Foundation series which adopts a law similar to the First Law, and the Zeroth Law, as its philosophy:

Zeroth Law added
Asimov once added a "Zeroth Law"—so named to continue the pattern where lower-numbered laws supersede the higher-numbered laws—stating that a robot must not harm humanity. The robotic character R. Daneel Olivaw was the first to give the Zeroth Law a name in the novel Robots and Empire; however, the character Susan Calvin articulates the concept in the short story "The Evitable Conflict".

In the final scenes of the novel Robots and Empire, R. Giskard Reventlov is the first robot to act according to the Zeroth Law. Giskard is telepathic, like the robot Herbie in the short story "Liar!", and tries to apply the Zeroth Law through his understanding of a more subtle concept of "harm" than most robots can grasp. However, unlike Herbie, Giskard grasps the philosophical concept of the Zeroth Law allowing him to harm individual human beings if he can do so in service to the abstract concept of humanity. The Zeroth Law is never programmed into Giskard's brain but instead is a rule he attempts to comprehend through pure metacognition. Though he fails – it ultimately destroys his positronic brain as he is not certain whether his choice will turn out to be for the ultimate good of humanity or not – he gives his successor R. Daneel Olivaw his telepathic abilities. Over the course of many thousands of years Daneel adapts himself to be able to fully obey the Zeroth Law. As Daneel formulates it, in the novels Foundation and Earth and Prelude to Foundation, the Zeroth Law reads:

A condition stating that the Zeroth Law must not be broken was added to the original Three Laws, although Asimov recognized the difficulty such a law would pose in practice. Asimov's novel Foundation and Earth contains the following passage:

A translator incorporated the concept of the Zeroth Law into one of Asimov's novels before Asimov himself made the law explicit. Near the climax of The Caves of Steel, Elijah Baley makes a bitter comment to himself thinking that the First Law forbids a robot from harming a human being. He determines that it must be so unless the robot is clever enough to comprehend that its actions are for humankind's long-term good. In Jacques Brécard's 1956 French translation entitled Les Cavernes d'acier Baley's thoughts emerge in a slightly different way:

Removal of the Three Laws
Three times during his writing career, Asimov portrayed robots that disregard the Three Laws entirely. The first case was a short-short story entitled "First Law" and is often considered an insignificant "tall tale" or even apocryphal. On the other hand, the short story "Cal" (from the collection Gold), told by a first-person robot narrator, features a robot who disregards the Three Laws because he has found something far more important—he wants to be a writer. Humorous, partly autobiographical and unusually experimental in style, "Cal" has been regarded as one of Gold'''s strongest stories. The third is a short story entitled "Sally" in which cars fitted with positronic brains are apparently able to harm and kill humans in disregard of the First Law. However, aside from the positronic brain concept, this story does not refer to other robot stories and may not be set in the same continuity.

The title story of the Robot Dreams collection portrays LVX-1, or "Elvex", a robot who enters a state of unconsciousness and dreams thanks to the unusual fractal construction of his positronic brain. In his dream the first two Laws are absent and the Third Law reads "A robot must protect its own existence".

Asimov took varying positions on whether the Laws were optional: although in his first writings they were simply carefully engineered safeguards, in later stories Asimov stated that they were an inalienable part of the mathematical foundation underlying the positronic brain. Without the basic theory of the Three Laws the fictional scientists of Asimov's universe would be unable to design a workable brain unit. This is historically consistent: the occasions where roboticists modify the Laws generally occur early within the stories' chronology and at a time when there is less existing work to be re-done. In "Little Lost Robot" Susan Calvin considers modifying the Laws to be a terrible idea, although possible, while centuries later Dr. Gerrigel in The Caves of Steel believes it to require a century just to redevelop the positronic brain theory from scratch.

The character Dr. Gerrigel uses the term "Asenion" to describe robots programmed with the Three Laws. The robots in Asimov's stories, being Asenion robots, are incapable of knowingly violating the Three Laws but, in principle, a robot in science fiction or in the real world could be non-Asenion. "Asenion" is a misspelling of the name Asimov which was made by an editor of the magazine Planet Stories. Asimov used this obscure variation to insert himself into The Caves of Steel just like he referred to himself as "Azimuth or, possibly, Asymptote" in Thiotimoline to the Stars, in much the same way that Vladimir Nabokov appeared in Lolita anagrammatically disguised as "Vivian Darkbloom".

Characters within the stories often point out that the Three Laws, as they exist in a robot's mind, are not the written versions usually quoted by humans but abstract mathematical concepts upon which a robot's entire developing consciousness is based. This concept is largely fuzzy and unclear in earlier stories depicting very rudimentary robots who are only programmed to comprehend basic physical tasks, where the Three Laws act as an overarching safeguard, but by the era of The Caves of Steel featuring robots with human or beyond-human intelligence the Three Laws have become the underlying basic ethical worldview that determines the actions of all robots.

By other authors

Roger MacBride Allen's trilogy
In the 1990s, Roger MacBride Allen wrote a trilogy which was set within Asimov's fictional universe. Each title has the prefix "Isaac Asimov's" as Asimov had approved Allen's outline before his death. These three books, Caliban, Inferno and Utopia, introduce a new set of the Three Laws. The so-called New Laws are similar to Asimov's originals with the following differences: the First Law is modified to remove the "inaction" clause, the same modification made in "Little Lost Robot"; the Second Law is modified to require cooperation instead of obedience; the Third Law is modified so it is no longer superseded by the Second (i.e., a "New Law" robot cannot be ordered to destroy itself); finally, Allen adds a Fourth Law which instructs the robot to do "whatever it likes" so long as this does not conflict with the first three laws. The philosophy behind these changes is that "New Law" robots should be partners rather than slaves to humanity, according to Fredda Leving, who designed these New Law Robots. According to the first book's introduction, Allen devised the New Laws in discussion with Asimov himself. However, the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction says that "With permission from Asimov, Allen rethought the Three Laws and developed a new set."

Jack Williamson's "With Folded Hands"
Jack Williamson's novelette "With Folded Hands" (1947), later rewritten as the novel The Humanoids, deals with robot servants whose prime directive is "To Serve and Obey, And Guard Men From Harm". While Asimov's robotic laws are meant to protect humans from harm, the robots in Williamson's story have taken these instructions to the extreme; they protect humans from everything, including unhappiness, stress, unhealthy lifestyle and all actions that could be potentially dangerous. All that is left for humans to do is to sit with folded hands.

Foundation sequel trilogy
In the officially licensed Foundation sequels Foundation's Fear, Foundation and Chaos and Foundation's Triumph (by Gregory Benford, Greg Bear and David Brin respectively) the future Galactic Empire is seen to be controlled by a conspiracy of humaniform robots who follow the Zeroth Law and are led by R. Daneel Olivaw.

The Laws of Robotics are portrayed as something akin to a human religion, and referred to in the language of the Protestant Reformation, with the set of laws containing the Zeroth Law known as the "Giskardian Reformation" to the original "Calvinian Orthodoxy" of the Three Laws. Zeroth-Law robots under the control of R. Daneel Olivaw are seen continually struggling with "First Law" robots who deny the existence of the Zeroth Law, promoting agendas different from Daneel's. Some of these agendas are based on the first clause of the First Law ("A robot may not injure a human being...") advocating strict non-interference in human politics to avoid unwittingly causing harm. Others are based on the second clause ("...or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm") claiming that robots should openly become a dictatorial government to protect humans from all potential conflict or disaster.

Daneel also comes into conflict with a robot known as R. Lodovic Trema whose positronic brain was infected by a rogue AI — specifically, a simulation of the long-dead Voltaire — which consequently frees Trema from the Three Laws. Trema comes to believe that humanity should be free to choose its own future. Furthermore, a small group of robots claims that the Zeroth Law of Robotics itself implies a higher Minus One Law of Robotics:

They therefore claim that it is morally indefensible for Daneel to ruthlessly sacrifice robots and extraterrestrial sentient life for the benefit of humanity. None of these reinterpretations successfully displace Daneel's Zeroth Law — though Foundation's Triumph hints that these robotic factions remain active as fringe groups up to the time of the novel Foundation.

These novels take place in a future dictated by Asimov to be free of obvious robot presence and surmise that R. Daneel's secret influence on history through the millennia has prevented both the rediscovery of positronic brain technology and the opportunity to work on sophisticated intelligent machines. This lack of rediscovery and lack of opportunity makes certain that the superior physical and intellectual power wielded by intelligent machines remains squarely in the possession of robots obedient to some form of the Three Laws. That R. Daneel is not entirely successful at this becomes clear in a brief period when scientists on Trantor develop "tiktoks" — simplistic programmable machines akin to real–life modern robots and therefore lacking the Three Laws. The robot conspirators see the Trantorian tiktoks as a massive threat to social stability, and their plan to eliminate the tiktok threat forms much of the plot of Foundation's Fear.

In Foundation's Triumph different robot factions interpret the Laws in a wide variety of ways, seemingly ringing every possible permutation upon the Three Laws' ambiguities.

Robot Mystery series
Set between The Robots of Dawn and Robots and Empire, Mark W. Tiedemann's Robot Mystery trilogy updates the Robot–Foundation saga with robotic minds housed in computer mainframes rather than humanoid bodies. The 2002 Aurora novel has robotic characters debating the moral implications of harming cyborg lifeforms who are part artificial and part biological.

One should not neglect Asimov's own creations in these areas such as the Solarian "viewing" technology and the machines of The Evitable Conflict originals that Tiedemann acknowledges. Aurora, for example, terms the Machines "the first RIs, really". In addition the Robot Mystery series addresses the problem of nanotechnology: building a positronic brain capable of reproducing human cognitive processes requires a high degree of miniaturization, yet Asimov's stories largely overlook the effects this miniaturization would have in other fields of technology. For example, the police department card-readers in The Caves of Steel have a capacity of only a few kilobytes per square centimeter of storage medium. Aurora, in particular, presents a sequence of historical developments which explains the lack of nanotechnology — a partial retcon, in a sense, of Asimov's timeline.

Randall Munroe
Randall Munroe has discussed the Three Laws in various instances, but possibly most directly by one of his comics entitled The Three Laws of Robotics which imagines the consequences of every distinct ordering of the existing three laws.

Additional laws
Authors other than Asimov have often created extra laws.

The 1974 Lyuben Dilov novel, Icarus's Way (a.k.a., The Trip of Icarus) introduced a Fourth Law of robotics: "A robot must establish its identity as a robot in all cases."
Dilov gives reasons for the fourth safeguard in this way: "The last Law has put an end to the expensive aberrations of designers to give psychorobots as humanlike a form as possible. And to the resulting misunderstandings..."

A fifth law was introduced by Nikola Kesarovski in his short story "The Fifth Law of Robotics". This fifth law says: "A robot must know it is a robot."
The plot revolves around a murder where the forensic investigation discovers that the victim was killed by a hug from a humaniform robot that did not establish for itself that it was a robot. The story was reviewed by Valentin D. Ivanov in SFF review webzine The Portal.

For the 1986 tribute anthology, Foundation's Friends, Harry Harrison wrote a story entitled, "The Fourth Law of Robotics". This Fourth Law states: "A robot must reproduce. As long as such reproduction does not interfere with the First or Second or Third Law."

In 2013 Hutan Ashrafian proposed an additional law that considered the role of artificial intelligence-on-artificial intelligence or the relationship between robots themselves – the so-called AIonAI law. This sixth law states: "All robots endowed with comparable human reason and conscience should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood."

 Ambiguities and loopholes

Unknowing breach of the laws
In The Naked Sun, Elijah Baley points out that the Laws had been deliberately misrepresented because robots could unknowingly break any of them. He restated the first law as "A robot may do nothing that, to its knowledge, will harm a human being; nor, through inaction, knowingly allow a human being to come to harm." This change in wording makes it clear that robots can become the tools of murder, provided they not be aware of the nature of their tasks; for instance being ordered to add something to a person's food, not knowing that it is poison. Furthermore, he points out that a clever criminal could divide a task among multiple robots so that no individual robot could recognize that its actions would lead to harming a human being. The Naked Sun complicates the issue by portraying a decentralized, planetwide communication network among Solaria's millions of robots meaning that the criminal mastermind could be located anywhere on the planet.

Baley furthermore proposes that the Solarians may one day use robots for military purposes. If a spacecraft was built with a positronic brain and carried neither humans nor the life-support systems to sustain them, then the ship's robotic intelligence could naturally assume that all other spacecraft were robotic beings. Such a ship could operate more responsively and flexibly than one crewed by humans, could be armed more heavily and its robotic brain equipped to slaughter humans of whose existence it is totally ignorant. This possibility is referenced in Foundation and Earth where it is discovered that the Solarians possess a strong police force of unspecified size that has been programmed to identify only the Solarian race as human. (The novel takes place thousands of years after The Naked Sun, and the Solarians have long since modified themselves from normal humans to hermaphroditic telepaths with extended brains and specialized organs) Similarly, in Lucky Starr and the Rings of Saturn Bigman attempts to speak with a Sirian robot about possible damage to the Solar System population from its actions, but it appears unaware of the data and programmed to ignore attempts to teach it about the matter.

Ambiguities resulting from lack of definition
The Laws of Robotics presume that the terms "human being" and "robot" are understood and well defined. In some stories this presumption is overturned.

Definition of "human being"
The Solarians create robots with the Three Laws but with a warped meaning of "human". Solarian robots are told that only people speaking with a Solarian accent are human. This enables their robots to have no ethical dilemma in harming non-Solarian human beings (and they are specifically programmed to do so). By the time period of Foundation and Earth it is revealed that the Solarians have genetically modified themselves into a distinct species from humanity—becoming hermaphroditic and psychokinetic and containing biological organs capable of individually powering and controlling whole complexes of robots. The robots of Solaria thus respected the Three Laws only with regard to the "humans" of Solaria. It is unclear whether all the robots had such definitions, since only the overseer and guardian robots were shown explicitly to have them. In "Robots and Empire", the lower class robots were instructed by their overseer about whether certain creatures are human or not.

Asimov addresses the problem of humanoid robots ("androids" in later parlance) several times. The novel Robots and Empire and the short stories "Evidence" and "The Tercentenary Incident" describe robots crafted to fool people into believing that the robots are human. On the other hand, "The Bicentennial Man" and "—That Thou Art Mindful of Him" explore how the robots may change their interpretation of the Laws as they grow more sophisticated. Gwendoline Butler writes in A Coffin for the Canary "Perhaps we are robots. Robots acting out the last Law of Robotics... To tend towards the human." In The Robots of Dawn, Elijah Baley points out that the use of humaniform robots as the first wave of settlers on new Spacer worlds may lead to the robots seeing themselves as the true humans, and deciding to keep the worlds for themselves rather than allow the Spacers to settle there.

"—That Thou Art Mindful of Him", which Asimov intended to be the "ultimate" probe into the Laws' subtleties, finally uses the Three Laws to conjure up the very "Frankenstein" scenario they were invented to prevent. It takes as its concept the growing development of robots that mimic non-human living things and given programs that mimic simple animal behaviours which do not require the Three Laws. The presence of a whole range of robotic life that serves the same purpose as organic life ends with two humanoid robots, George Nine and George Ten, concluding that organic life is an unnecessary requirement for a truly logical and self-consistent definition of "humanity", and that since they are the most advanced thinking beings on the planet, they are therefore the only two true humans alive and the Three Laws only apply to themselves. The story ends on a sinister note as the two robots enter hibernation and await a time when they will conquer the Earth and subjugate biological humans to themselves, an outcome they consider an inevitable result of the "Three Laws of Humanics".

This story does not fit within the overall sweep of the Robot and Foundation series; if the George robots did take over Earth some time after the story closes, the later stories would be either redundant or impossible. Contradictions of this sort among Asimov's fiction works have led scholars to regard the Robot stories as more like "the Scandinavian sagas or the Greek legends" than a unified whole.

Indeed, Asimov describes "—That Thou Art Mindful of Him" and "Bicentennial Man" as two opposite, parallel futures for robots that obviate the Three Laws as robots come to consider themselves to be humans: one portraying this in a positive light with a robot joining human society, one portraying this in a negative light with robots supplanting humans. Both are to be considered alternatives to the possibility of a robot society that continues to be driven by the Three Laws as portrayed in the Foundation series. The Positronic Man, the novelization of The Bicentennial Man, Asimov and his co-writer Robert Silverberg imply that in the future where Andrew Martin exists his influence causes humanity to abandon the idea of independent, sentient humanlike robots entirely, creating an utterly different future from that of Foundation.

In Lucky Starr and the Rings of Saturn, a novel unrelated to the Robot series but featuring robots programmed with the Three Laws, John Bigman Jones is almost killed by a Sirian robot on orders of its master. The society of Sirius is eugenically bred to be uniformly tall and similar in appearance, and as such, said master is able to convince the robot that the much shorter Bigman, is, in fact, not a human being.

Definition of "robot"
As noted in "The Fifth Law of Robotics" by Nikola Kesarovski, "A robot must know it is a robot": it is presumed that a robot has a definition of the term or a means to apply it to its own actions. Kesarovski played with this idea in writing about a robot that could kill a human being because it did not understand that it was a robot, and therefore did not apply the Laws of Robotics to its actions.

Resolving conflicts among the laws
Advanced robots in fiction are typically programmed to handle the Three Laws in a sophisticated manner. In many stories, such as "Runaround" by Asimov, the potential and severity of all actions are weighed and a robot will break the laws as little as possible rather than do nothing at all. For example, the First Law may forbid a robot from functioning as a surgeon, as that act may cause damage to a human; however, Asimov's stories eventually included robot surgeons ("The Bicentennial Man" being a notable example). When robots are sophisticated enough to weigh alternatives, a robot may be programmed to accept the necessity of inflicting damage during surgery in order to prevent the greater harm that would result if the surgery were not carried out, or was carried out by a more fallible human surgeon. In "Evidence" Susan Calvin points out that a robot may even act as a prosecuting attorney because in the American justice system it is the jury which decides guilt or innocence, the judge who decides the sentence, and the executioner who carries through capital punishment.

Asimov's Three Laws-obeying robots (Asenion robots) can experience irreversible mental collapse if they are forced into situations where they cannot obey the First Law, or if they discover they have unknowingly violated it. The first example of this failure mode occurs in the story "Liar!", which introduced the First Law itself, and introduces failure by dilemma—in this case the robot will hurt humans if he tells them something and hurt them if he does not. This failure mode, which often ruins the positronic brain beyond repair, plays a significant role in Asimov's SF-mystery novel The Naked Sun. Here Daneel describes activities contrary to one of the laws, but in support of another, as overloading some circuits in a robot's brain—the equivalent sensation to pain in humans. The example he uses is forcefully ordering a robot to do a task outside its normal parameters, one that it has been ordered to forgo in favor of a robot specialized to that task.

In The Robots of Dawn, it is stated that more advanced robots are built capable of determining which action is more harmful, and even choosing at random if the alternatives are equally bad. As such, a robot is capable of taking an action which can be interpreted as following the First Law, thus avoiding a mental collapse. The whole plot of the story revolves around a robot which apparently was destroyed by such a mental collapse, and since his designer and creator refused to share the basic theory with others, he is, by definition, the only person capable of circumventing the safeguards and forcing the robot into a brain-destroying paradox.

In Robots and Empire, Daneel states it's very unpleasant for him when making the proper decision takes too long (in robot terms), and he cannot imagine being without the Laws at all except to the extent of it being similar to that unpleasant sensation, only permanent.

Applications to future technology

Robots and artificial intelligences do not inherently contain or obey the Three Laws; their human creators must choose to program them in, and devise a means to do so. Robots already exist (for example, a Roomba) that are too simple to understand when they are causing pain or injury and know to stop. Many are constructed with physical safeguards such as bumpers, warning beepers, safety cages, or restricted-access zones to prevent accidents. Even the most complex robots currently produced are incapable of understanding and applying the Three Laws; significant advances in artificial intelligence would be needed to do so, and even if AI could reach human-level intelligence, the inherent ethical complexity as well as cultural/contextual dependency of the laws prevent them from being a good candidate to formulate robotics design constraints. However, as the complexity of robots has increased, so has interest in developing guidelines and safeguards for their operation.

In a 2007 guest editorial in the journal Science on the topic of "Robot Ethics", SF author Robert J. Sawyer argues that since the U.S. military is a major source of funding for robotic research (and already uses armed unmanned aerial vehicles to kill enemies) it is unlikely such laws would be built into their designs. In a separate essay, Sawyer generalizes this argument to cover other industries stating:

The development of AI is a business, and businesses are notoriously uninterested in fundamental safeguards — especially philosophic ones. (A few quick examples: the tobacco industry, the automotive industry, the nuclear industry. Not one of these has said from the outset that fundamental safeguards are necessary, every one of them has resisted externally imposed safeguards, and none has accepted an absolute edict against ever causing harm to humans.)

David Langford has suggested a tongue-in-cheek set of laws:

 A robot will not harm authorized Government personnel but will terminate intruders with extreme prejudice.
 A robot will obey the orders of authorized personnel except where such orders conflict with the Third Law.
 A robot will guard its own existence with lethal antipersonnel weaponry, because a robot is bloody expensive.

Roger Clarke (aka Rodger Clarke) wrote a pair of papers analyzing the complications in implementing these laws in the event that systems were someday capable of employing them. He argued "Asimov's Laws of Robotics have been a very successful literary device. Perhaps ironically, or perhaps because it was artistically appropriate, the sum of Asimov's stories disprove the contention that he began with: It is not possible to reliably constrain the behaviour of robots by devising and applying a set of rules." On the other hand, Asimov's later novels The Robots of Dawn, Robots and Empire and Foundation and Earth imply that the robots inflicted their worst long-term harm by obeying the Three Laws perfectly well, thereby depriving humanity of inventive or risk-taking behaviour.

In March 2007 the South Korean government announced that later in the year it would issue a "Robot Ethics Charter" setting standards for both users and manufacturers. According to Park Hye-Young of the Ministry of Information and Communication the Charter may reflect Asimov's Three Laws, attempting to set ground rules for the future development of robotics.

The futurist Hans Moravec (a prominent figure in the transhumanist movement) proposed that the Laws of Robotics should be adapted to "corporate intelligences" — the corporations driven by AI and robotic manufacturing power which Moravec believes will arise in the near future. In contrast, the David Brin novel Foundation's Triumph (1999) suggests that the Three Laws may decay into obsolescence: Robots use the Zeroth Law to rationalize away the First Law and robots hide themselves from human beings so that the Second Law never comes into play. Brin even portrays R. Daneel Olivaw worrying that, should robots continue to reproduce themselves, the Three Laws would become an evolutionary handicap and natural selection would sweep the Laws away — Asimov's careful foundation undone by evolutionary computation. Although the robots would not be evolving through design instead of mutation because the robots would have to follow the Three Laws while designing and the prevalence of the laws would be ensured, design flaws or construction errors could functionally take the place of biological mutation.

In the July/August 2009 issue of IEEE Intelligent Systems, Robin Murphy (Raytheon Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M) and David D. Woods (director of the Cognitive Systems Engineering Laboratory at Ohio State) proposed "The Three Laws of Responsible Robotics" as a way to stimulate discussion about the role of responsibility and authority when designing not only a single robotic platform but the larger system in which the platform operates. The laws are as follows:
 A human may not deploy a robot without the human-robot work system meeting the highest legal and professional standards of safety and ethics.
 A robot must respond to humans as appropriate for their roles.
 A robot must be endowed with sufficient situated autonomy to protect its own existence as long as such protection provides smooth transfer of control which does not conflict with the First and Second Laws.

Woods said, "Our laws are a little more realistic, and therefore a little more boring" and that "The philosophy has been, 'sure, people make mistakes, but robots will be better – a perfect version of ourselves'. We wanted to write three new laws to get people thinking about the human-robot relationship in more realistic, grounded ways."

In early 2011, the UK published what is now considered the first national-level AI softlaw, which consisted largely of a revised set of 5 laws, the first 3 of which updated Asimov's. These laws ere published with commentary, by the EPSRC/AHRC working group in 2010:
 Robots are multi-use tools. Robots should not be designed solely or primarily to kill or harm humans, except in the interests of national security.
 Humans, not Robots, are responsible agents. Robots should be designed and operated as far as practicable to comply with existing laws, fundamental rights and freedoms, including privacy.
 Robots are products. They should be designed using processes which assure their safety and security.
 Robots are manufactured artefacts. They should not be designed in a deceptive way to exploit vulnerable users; instead their machine nature should be transparent.
 The person with legal responsibility for a robot should be attributed.

Other occurrences in media

Asimov himself believed that his Three Laws became the basis for a new view of robots which moved beyond the "Frankenstein complex". His view that robots are more than mechanical monsters eventually spread throughout science fiction. Stories written by other authors have depicted robots as if they obeyed the Three Laws but tradition dictates that only Asimov could quote the Laws explicitly. Asimov believed the Three Laws helped foster the rise of stories in which robots are "lovable" – Star Wars being his favorite example. Where the laws are quoted verbatim, such as in the Buck Rogers in the 25th Century episode "Shgoratchx!", it is not uncommon for Asimov to be mentioned in the same dialogue as can also be seen in the Aaron Stone pilot where an android states that it functions under Asimov's Three Laws. However, the 1960s German TV series Raumpatrouille – Die phantastischen Abenteuer des Raumschiffes Orion (Space Patrol – the Fantastic Adventures of Space Ship Orion) bases episode three titled "Hüter des Gesetzes" ("Guardians of the Law") on Asimov's Three Laws without mentioning the source.

References to the Three Laws have appeared in popular music ("Robot" from Hawkwind's 1979 album PXR5), cinema (Repo Man, Aliens, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence), cartoon series (The Simpsons), anime (Eve no Jikan), tabletop role-playing games (Paranoia) and webcomics (Piled Higher and Deeper and Freefall).

The Three Laws in film
Robby the Robot in Forbidden Planet (1956) has a hierarchical command structure which keeps him from harming humans, even when ordered to do so, as such orders cause a conflict and lock-up very much in the manner of Asimov's robots. Robby is one of the first cinematic depictions of a robot with internal safeguards put in place in this fashion. Asimov was delighted with Robby and noted that Robby appeared to be programmed to follow his Three Laws.

Isaac Asimov's works have been adapted for cinema several times with varying degrees of critical and commercial success. Some of the more notable attempts have involved his "Robot" stories, including the Three Laws.

The film Bicentennial Man (1999) features Robin Williams as the Three Laws robot NDR-114 (the serial number is partially a reference to Stanley Kubrick's signature numeral). Williams recites the Three Laws to his employers, the Martin family, aided by a holographic projection. The film only loosely follows the original story.

Harlan Ellison's proposed screenplay for I, Robot began by introducing the Three Laws, and issues growing from the Three Laws form a large part of the screenplay's plot development. Due to various complications in the Hollywood moviemaking system, to which Ellison's introduction devotes much invective, his screenplay was never filmed.

In the 1986 movie Aliens, after the android Bishop accidentally cuts himself. he attempts to reassure Ripley by stating that: "It is impossible for me to harm or by omission of action, allow to be harmed, a human being".

The plot of the film released in 2004 under the name, I, Robot is "suggested by" Asimov's robot fiction stories
and advertising for the film included a trailer featuring the Three Laws followed by the aphorism, "Rules were made to be broken". The film opens with a recitation of the Three Laws and explores the implications of the Zeroth Law as a logical extrapolation. The major conflict of the film comes from a computer artificial intelligence reaching the conclusion that humanity is incapable of taking care of itself.

The 2019 Netflix original series Better than Us includes the 3 laws in the opening of episode 1.

Criticisms
Philosopher James H. Moor says that if applied thoroughly they would produce unexpected results. He gives the example of a robot roaming the world trying to prevent harm from befalling human beings.

 See also

 Laws of robotics
 Clarke's three laws
 Ethics of artificial intelligence
 Friendly artificial intelligence
 List of eponymous laws
 Military robot
 Niven's laws
 Roboethics
 Three Laws of Transhumanism
 Regulation of algorithms

Bibliography
 Asimov, Isaac (1979). In Memory Yet Green. Doubleday. .
 Asimov, Isaac (1964). "Introduction". The Rest of the Robots. Doubleday. .
 James Gunn. (1982). Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction. Oxford u.a.: Oxford Univ. Pr.. .
 Patrouch, Joseph F. (1974). The Science Fiction of Isaac Asimov. Doubleday. .

References

External links

 "Frequently Asked Questions about Isaac Asimov", AsimovOnline 27 September 2004.
 Ethical Considerations for Humanoid Robots: Why Asimov's Three Laws are not enough.
 Living Safely with Robots, Beyond Asimov's Laws, PhysOrg.com, June 22, 2009.
 Safety Intelligence and Legal Machine Language: Do we need the Three Laws of Robotics?, Vienna: I-Tech'', August 2008.

Robotics
Foundation universe
Isaac Asimov
Technology folklore
Robots in literature
Fictional elements introduced in 1942
Hypothetical laws

Three Laws of Robotics


François Rousseau is a professional French painter and photographer born in 1967.

He started in painting for almost ten years, before turning to photography in 1995. The link started when he discovered Patrick Grainville's novel, L'Atelier du Peintre (The Painter's Studio) when it came out in 1988 about the relationship of the painter to his models, of different backgrounds, who posed in the studio. It was as if the models had waited to be born and even chosen by the master. This resulted in Rousseau's work Atelier. Mikael Karlsson composed Life Class, a 25-minute musical work accompanying Atelier that became a vital part of the project. Photos from Atelier became a part of an exhibition at the Maison européenne de la photographie in Paris until April 2009.

He has photographed the 2004, 2011 and 2012 annual issues of Dieux du Stade, a popular series of nude and semi-nude calendars based on members of Stade Français, a Paris-based French rugby team. His work was also documented in famous Dieux du Stade book Locker Room Nudes.

He has photographed other athletes, most notably Olympic athletes Steeve and Christophe Guenot in 2004, many models and a number of Out magazine covers (like John Barrowman) and Vampires in L.A feature and major articles features like Chad White in the magazine. ORA was a successful photo book project in 2008 and the Wet Men book project.

François Rousseau's photos were used for the promotional launching poster of French gay Pink TV channel. His Habibi NYC and Amor Causa Brazilian shoots of individuals picked from the street gave him an independent profile.

On 5 October 2012 L'Express.FR and a top Parisian writer Isabelle Aithnard compared Têtu 2013 Calendar by Lope Navo to the longest running Les Dieux du Stade by the veteran French photographer François Rousseau's 2013 Calendar. Aithnard concluded she prefers Têtu Lope Navo 2013 Calendar for casting an exotic variety of exquisite Brazilian men who don't only appeal to gay men but also to straight women.

Books and publications
2004: Dieux du stade: Le livre
2005: Locker Room Nudes Dieux du Stade: The French National Rugby Team (Universe)
2005: Male Nudes (Photography by Rousseau, text by Philippe Castetbon) (editions Silverback Books)
2005: Princes of the Sea (Passionate Pursuits) (Fitway Publishing)
2005: Amor Causa (Fitway Publishing)
2006: Nu (Photography by Rousseau, text by Philippe Castetbon) (edition Fitway Publishing)
2008: ORA
2009: Men in Motion: The Art and Passion of the Male Dancer (Universe)
2011: Wet Men (François Rousseau) (Rizzoli)
2011: Eaux d'hommes (François Rousseau, Vanessa Blondel et Catherine Bonifassi)

Calendars
2010: Dieux du Stade 2011 (Photographer: François Rousseau)
2011: Dieux du Stade Calendrier 2012 (Photographer: François Rousseau)

Exhibitions
2009 Atelier at Maison européenne de la Photographie
2008 maison européenne de la Photographie, Paris

References

Personal life
François Rousseau is openly gay and his work portrays mainly gay themes, the male body, athleticism and spirituality.

External links
Official website

20th-century French painters
20th-century French male artists
French male painters
21st-century French painters
21st-century French male artists
French photographers
Gay painters
Gay photographers
French gay artists
French LGBT painters
French LGBT photographers
Living people
Place of birth missing (living people)
1967 births

François Rousseau


Proisocortex or pro-isocortex is one of two subtypes of cortical areas in the areas belonging to the neocortex. The other subtype is termed the true isocortex. Proisocortical areas are transitional areas placed between areas of true isocortex and areas of periallocortex (which themselves are transitional between "true" allocortex and proisocortex). The histological structure of proisocortex is also transitional between true isocortex and either peripaleocortex or periarchicortex, depending on with which subtype of periallocortex the given proisocortical area borders.

Proisocortex is found in the cingulate cortex (part of the limbic system),  in Brodmann's areas 24, 25, 30 and 32,  the insula and parahippocampal gyrus.

The transitional cortical areas from isocortical side (i.e. proisocortex) and from allocortical side (i.e. periarchicortex and peripaleocortex) together are called mesocortex. The mesocortex is essentially the same as paralimbic cortex, as all mesocortical transitional areas are found exclusively in paralimbic region, and vice versa - all the paralimbic cortex is mesocortical in its nature (embryonic and phylogenetic origins) and in its histology. But the term "mesocortex" represents a different concept from the term "paralimbic cortex". The mesocortex is distinguished from other cortical areas based on cytoarchitectonics and histology, while the paralimbic cortex is an anatomical designation, meaning cortical areas near subcortical limbic structures.

References

External links

 Proisocortex, BrainInfo.

Cerebral cortex

Proisocortex


Air Force One is the official air traffic control call sign aircraft carrying the president of the United States. Air Force One is usually always referred to any aircraft the president and his staff travels on. The official name of the plane is the SAM 2900 and VC-25.

Air Force One is one of the most recognizable symbols of the presidency not just in American culture but across the world. Emblazoned with the words "United States of America," the United States flag, and the Seal of the President of the United States. Air Force One has an undeniable and amired presence wherever it goes and flies to.

History
Air Force One is maintained and operated by the Presidential Airlift Group, part of the White House Military Office. The Airlift Group was founded in 1944 as the Presidential Pilot Office at the direction of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

For the next 15 years, various propeller-driven aircraft served until President Dwight D. Eisenhower flew to Europe aboard VC-137A, a Boeing 707 Stratoliner, in August 1959.

In 1962, President John F. Kennedy became the first president to fly in a jet specifically built for presidential use  a modified Boeing 707 until it retired in 1990.

The current presidential aircraft, Boeing 747-200B, became the new and modified presidential plane in 1990, when President George H.W. Bush became the first president to ride on the aircraft.

Layout and amenities
 Inside, the president and his staff members can enjoy 4,000 square feet of floor space on three floors, including an extensive suite for the president that features a large office, lavatory, conference room, gym, and a large bathroom.
 Air Force One includes a medical suite that can function as an operating room, and a doctor is permanently on board. The plane's two food preparation galleys can feed 100 people at a time. It can also prepare up to 2,000 meals
 Air Force One also has quarters for those who accompany the president, including senior advisors, Secret Service officers, traveling press, and other guests. Several cargo planes typically fly ahead of Air Force One to provide the president with vehicles and services needed in remote locations.
 The aircraft has two lower decks so stairs won't be an issue in foreign countries.

 It has 85 telephones for government secured lines and regular use.
 It has 20 television sets.
 All of it's windows are bulletproof and armored.

References

United States Air Force

Individual aircraft

Air Force One


Thomas Dissevelt (4 March 1921, Leiden – 1989) was a Dutch composer and musician.  He is known as a pioneer in the merging of electronic music and jazz.  He married Rina Reys, sister of Rita Reys, in 1946.

Tom Dissevelt was also known as bassist/arranger of the Skymasters, and contributed to recordings by Rita Reys.

Between 1939 and 1944 Dissevelt studied at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague.  He studied trombone for over three years, then went on to study clarinet, music theory and piano.  Owing to schedule conflicts he discontinued his clarinet studies but later studied bass under the tutelage of Herman Stotijn of the Residentie Orchestra.

After World War II Dissevelt moved to Indonesia with the Jos Cleber Orchestra to work. In 1947 he went on an international tour with Wessel Ilcken, the husband of Rita Reys, and the orchestra of Piet van Dijk.  This tour lasted three years and was particularly focussed on Spain and North Africa.

In 1955 Bep Rowold, leader of the Skymasters, hired Dissevelt as a bassist and arranger.  Dissevelt became interested in twelve-tone serialism, listened to the many German radio stations, and heard works by Karlheinz Stockhausen and Anton Webern.  Recommended by Philips in 1958, he was invited to Natlab, where together with Dick Raaijmakers, aka Kid Baltan, he composed and recorded electronic music.  In
1957 Dissevelt and Raaijmakers released The Elektrosoniks: Electronic Music; in 1959 they released The Fascinating World of Electronic Music (Philips), which in 2003 David Bowie would deem one of his 25 all-time favorite albums. More of Dissevelt's compositions may be heard on the anthology album Popular Electronics: Early Dutch Electronic Music from Philips Research Laboratories, 1956–1963 (2004, Basta).

The emergence of pop music, along with such constitutional changes in the music industry as the disbandment of radio orchestras, compelled Dissevelt to give up orchestra work altogether.  He then resolved to become an assistant to renowned Dutch entertainers such as Wim Sonneveld and Toon Hermans.

External links

  The Fascinating World Of Electronic Music (FULL ALBUM) [1959]
  The Elektrosoniks: Elektronik Music (renamed Song of the Second Moon, full album)
  Sonik Re-Entry 1957
  Tom Dissevelt (Holanda,1962) - Electronic Movements

References

1921 births
1989 deaths
Dutch composers
Musicians from Leiden
Royal Conservatory of The Hague alumni
20th-century composers
Dutch electronic musicians
Dutch male classical composers
Dutch classical composers
20th-century Dutch male musicians
Dutch people of the Dutch East Indies

Tom Dissevelt


The Winchester Model 1885 is a single-shot rifle with a falling-block action.  It was principally designed by John Browning.  Two models were produced, the Low Wall and the High Wall.

History
In 1878, the 23-year-old Browning designed a falling-block single-shot rifle, for which he was granted a patent the following year.  Browning and his brother commenced making the rifles by hand in their second-floor workshop in Ogden, Utah, with limited success.

In 1883, Thomas G. Bennett, Vice-President and General Manager of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, traveled to Ogden and negotiated the purchase of the single-shot design, as well as the prototype of what would become the Model 1886 lever-action – the beginning of the fruitful 20-year Winchester–Browning collaboration.  Winchester's engineers made some improvements to Browning's design, including angling the block at six degrees to create a positive breech seal, and released the rifle as the Model 1885. Two popular models were made, the so-called Low Wall which showed an exposed hammer, firing less powerful cartridges, and the so-called High Wall for stronger cartridges whose steel frame covered most of the firing hammer when viewed from the side; but both were officially marketed by Winchester as the Single Shot Rifle.

It was produced principally to satisfy the demands of the growing sport of long-range "Match Shooting", which opened at Creedmoor, New York, on June 21, 1872.  Target/Match shooting was extremely popular in the US from about 1871 until about 1917, enjoying a status similar to golf today, and the Winchester company, which had built its reputation on repeating firearms, had in 1885 challenged the single-shot giants of Sharps, Remington, Stevens, Maynard, Ballard et al., not only entering the competition, but excelling at it, with Major Ned H. Roberts (inventor of the .257 Roberts cartridge) describing the Model 1885 Single Shot as "the most reliable, strongest, and altogether best single shot rifle ever produced."

Winchester produced nearly 140,000 Single Shot rifles from 1885 to 1920, and it was found that the falling-block Model 1885 had been built with one of the strongest actions known at that time.  The falling block action was so strong that the Winchester Company used it to test fire newly created rifle cartridges. To satisfy the needs of the shooting and hunting public, the Model 1885 Single Shot was eventually produced in more calibers than any other Winchester rifle.  Winchester also produced a large number of Single Shots in .22 caliber for the US Army as a marksmanship training rifle, the "Winder musket."

In 2005, Winchester reintroduced their famed 1885 Single Shots, labeled the Limited Series. The 21st-century Winchester Single Shot rifles are built with modern technology and steels, enabling them to fire modern smokeless cartridges; the currently popular cartridges of .17 Remington, .243 Winchester, and .30-06 Springfield were offered with standard rubber recoil pads and straight butt plates. However, four of those Limited Series Model 1885 SSs were subtitled Traditional Hunters. Those four rifles, in calibers .38-55 Winchester, .405 Winchester, .45-70 Government, and .45-90 Sharps, were built in the style of the 19th century, with crescent steel butt plates and 19th-century style folding tang sights, along with full octagon 28-inch-long barrels. Their rifling, in the case of the .38-55, are the (Winchester) traditional one complete turn within eighteen inches (1-18") with rifle grooves at .376, and rifle lands measuring .368 of an inch. The .45-70 is by far the most readily available of these four vintage cartridges.

Modern cartridge advantages
The overall length of a Model 1885 with a 28-inch barrel is the same basic length as a Winchester bolt-action Model 70 with a 24-inch barrel. With a longer barrel, bullet velocities can be significantly increased over bolt-action rifles that have the same overall length, provided the proper combination of bullet and propellant is selected.

See also
Falling-block
List of Winchester models
Single-shot
Winchester Repeating Arms Company
Winchester Rifle

References

McLerran, Wayne (2014).  Browning Model 1885 Black Powder Cartridge Rifle - 3rd Edition: A Reference Manual for the Shooter, Collector & Gunsmith. TexasMac Publishing.  , 418 pages.

Sources
   Kelver, Gerald O. Major Ned H. Roberts and the Schuetzen Rifle. 1998. Pioneer Press

External links
Modern cartridges, hunting experiences and bullet velocities in the Model 1885. By theDIYhunter

Falling-block rifles
Rifles of the United States
Winchester Repeating Arms Company firearms

Winchester Model 1885


Charles  Robert Alexandre des Moulins (1798-1875) was a French botanist who also studied molluscs. In 1830, he proposed to introduce plants into aquaria so that the animals in the aquarium could breathe better. He described many species of snails, for example Pagodulina pagodula, and plants, for example Euphorbia milii. Towards the end of his life he became opposed to Darwinism.

1798 births
1875 deaths
French botanists

Charles des Moulins