A pressurized water reactor (PWR) is a type of light-water nuclear reactor. PWRs constitute the large majority of the world's nuclear power plants (with notable exceptions being the UK, Japan and Canada). In a PWR, the primary coolant (water) is pumped under high pressure to the reactor core where it is heated by the energy released by the fission of atoms. The heated, high pressure water then flows to a steam generator, where it transfers its thermal energy to lower pressure water of a secondary system where steam is generated. The steam then drives turbines, which spin an electric generator. In contrast to a boiling water reactor (BWR), pressure in the primary coolant loop prevents the water from boiling within the reactor. All light-water reactors use ordinary water as both coolant and neutron moderator. Most use anywhere from two to four vertically mounted steam generators; VVER reactors use horizontal steam generators.

PWRs were originally designed to serve as nuclear marine propulsion for nuclear submarines and were used in the original design of the second commercial power plant at Shippingport Atomic Power Station.

PWRs currently operating in the United States are considered Generation II reactors. Russia's VVER reactors are similar to US PWRs, but the VVER-1200 is not considered Generation II (see below). France operates many PWRs to generate the bulk of its electricity.

History

Several hundred PWRs are used for marine propulsion in aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines and ice breakers. In the US, they were originally designed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory for use as a nuclear submarine power plant with a fully operational submarine power plant located at the Idaho National Laboratory. Follow-on work was conducted by Westinghouse Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory. The first purely commercial nuclear power plant at Shippingport Atomic Power Station was originally designed as a pressurized water reactor (although the first power plant connected to the grid was at Obninsk, USSR), on insistence from Admiral Hyman G. Rickover that a viable commercial plant would include none of the "crazy thermodynamic cycles that everyone else wants to build".

The United States Army Nuclear Power Program operated pressurized water reactors from 1954 to 1974. Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station initially operated two pressurized water reactor plants, TMI-1 and TMI-2. The partial meltdown of TMI-2 in 1979 essentially ended the growth in new construction of nuclear power plants in the United States for two decades. Watts Bar unit 2 (a Westinghouse 4-loop PWR) came online in 2016, becoming the first new nuclear reactor in the United States since 1996.

The pressurized water reactor has several new Generation III reactor evolutionary designs: the AP1000, VVER-1200, ACPR1000+, APR1400, Hualong One, IPWR-900 and EPR. The first AP1000 and EPR reactors were connected to the power grid in China in 2018. In 2020, NuScale Power became the first U.S. company to receive regulatory approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a small modular reactor with a modified PWR design. Also in 2020, the Energy Impact Center introduced the OPEN100 project, which published open-source blueprints for the construction of a 100 MWelectric nuclear power plant with a PWR design.

Design

Nuclear fuel in the reactor pressure vessel is engaged in a controlled fission chain reaction, which produces heat, heating the water in the primary coolant loop by thermal conduction through the fuel cladding. The hot primary coolant is pumped into a heat exchanger called the steam generator, where it flows through several thousand small tubes. Heat is transferred through the walls of these tubes to the lower pressure secondary coolant located on the shell side of the exchanger where the secondary coolant evaporates to pressurized steam. This transfer of heat is accomplished without mixing the two fluids to prevent the secondary coolant from becoming radioactive. Some common steam generator arrangements are u-tubes or single pass heat exchangers.

In a nuclear power station, the pressurized steam is fed through a steam turbine which drives an electrical generator connected to the electric grid for transmission. After passing through the turbine the secondary coolant (water-steam mixture) is cooled down and condensed in a condenser. The condenser converts the steam to a liquid so that it can be pumped back into the steam generator, and maintains a vacuum at the turbine outlet so that the pressure drop across the turbine, and hence the energy extracted from the steam, is maximized. Before being fed into the steam generator, the condensed steam (referred to as feedwater) is sometimes preheated in order to minimize thermal shock.

The steam generated has other uses besides power generation. In nuclear ships and submarines, the steam is fed through a steam turbine connected to a set of speed reduction gears to a shaft used for propulsion. Direct mechanical action by expansion of the steam can be used for a steam-powered aircraft catapult or similar applications. District heating by the steam is used in some countries and direct heating is applied to internal plant applications.

Two things are characteristic for the pressurized water reactor (PWR) when compared with other reactor types: coolant loop separation from the steam system and pressure inside the primary coolant loop. In a PWR, there are two separate coolant loops (primary and secondary), which are both filled with demineralized/deionized water. A boiling water reactor, by contrast, has only one coolant loop, while more exotic designs such as breeder reactors use substances other than water for coolant and moderator (e.g. sodium in its liquid state as coolant or graphite as a moderator). The pressure in the primary coolant loop is typically , which is notably higher than in other nuclear reactors, and nearly twice that of a boiling water reactor (BWR). As an effect of this, only localized boiling occurs and steam will recondense promptly in the bulk fluid. By contrast, in a boiling water reactor the primary coolant is designed to boil.

Reactor

Coolant

Light water is used as the primary coolant in a PWR. Water enters through the bottom of the reactor's core at about  and is heated as it flows upwards through the reactor core to a temperature of about . The water remains liquid despite the high temperature due to the high pressure in the primary coolant loop, usually around 155 bar (15.5 MPa 153 atm, 2,250 psi).
The water in a PWR cannot exceed a temperature of  or a pressure of 22.064 MPa (3200 psi or 218 atm), because those are the critical point of water. Supercritical water reactors are (as of 2022) only a proposed concept in which the coolant would never leave the supercritical state. However, as this requires even higher pressures than a PWR and can cause issues of corrosion, so far no such reactor has been built.

Pressurizer

Pressure in the primary circuit is maintained by a pressurizer, a separate vessel that is connected to the primary circuit and partially filled with water which is heated to the saturation temperature (boiling point) for the desired pressure by submerged electrical heaters. To achieve a pressure of , the pressurizer temperature is maintained at 345 °C (653 °F), which gives a subcooling margin (the difference between the pressurizer temperature and the highest temperature in the reactor core) of 30 °C (54 °F). As 345 °C is the boiling point of water at 155 bar, the liquid water is at the edge of a phase change. Thermal transients in the reactor coolant system result in large swings in pressurizer liquid/steam volume, and total pressurizer volume is designed around absorbing these transients without uncovering the heaters or emptying the pressurizer. Pressure transients in the primary coolant system manifest as temperature transients in the pressurizer and are controlled through the use of automatic heaters and water spray, which raise and lower pressurizer temperature, respectively.

Pumps

The coolant is pumped around the primary circuit by powerful pumps. These pumps have a rate of ~100,000 gallons of coolant per minute. After picking up heat as it passes through the reactor core, the primary coolant transfers heat in a steam generator to water in a lower pressure secondary circuit, evaporating the secondary coolant to saturated steam — in most designs 6.2 MPa (60 atm, 900 psia), 275 °C (530 °F) — for use in the steam turbine. The cooled primary coolant is then returned to the reactor vessel to be heated again.

Moderator

Pressurized water reactors, like all thermal reactor designs, require the fast fission neutrons to be slowed (a process called moderation or thermalizing) in order to interact with the nuclear fuel and sustain the chain reaction. In PWRs the coolant water is used as a moderator by letting the neutrons undergo multiple collisions with light hydrogen atoms in the water, losing speed in the process. This "moderating" of neutrons will happen more often when the water is more dense (more collisions will occur). The use of water as a moderator is an important safety feature of PWRs, as an increase in temperature may cause the water to expand, giving greater 'gaps' between the water molecules and reducing the probability of thermalization — thereby reducing the extent to which neutrons are slowed and hence reducing the reactivity in the reactor. Therefore, if reactivity increases beyond normal, the reduced moderation of neutrons will cause the chain reaction to slow down, producing less heat. This property, known as the negative temperature coefficient of reactivity, makes PWR reactors very stable. This process is referred to as 'Self-Regulating', i.e. the hotter the coolant becomes, the less reactive the plant becomes, shutting itself down slightly to compensate and vice versa. Thus the plant controls itself around a given temperature set by the position of the control rods.

In contrast, the Soviet RBMK reactor design used at Chernobyl, which uses graphite instead of water as the moderator and uses boiling water as the coolant, has a large positive thermal coefficient of reactivity. This means reactivity and heat generation increases when coolant and fuel temperatures increase, which makes the RBMK design less stable than pressurized water reactors at high operating temperature. In addition to its property of slowing down neutrons when serving as a moderator, water also has a property of absorbing neutrons, albeit to a lesser degree. When the coolant water temperature increases, the boiling increases, which creates voids. Thus there is less water to absorb thermal neutrons that have already been slowed by the graphite moderator, causing an increase in reactivity. This property is called the void coefficient of reactivity, and in an RBMK reactor like Chernobyl, the void coefficient is positive, and fairly large, making it very hard to regulate when the reaction begins to runaway. The RBMK reactors also have a flawed control rods design in which during rapid scrams, the graphite reaction enhancement tips of the rods would displace water at the bottom of the reactor and locally increase reactivity there. This is called the "positive scram effect" that is unique to the flawed RBMK control rods design. These design flaws, in addition to operator errors that pushed the reactor to its limits, are generally seen as the causes of the Chernobyl disaster.

The Canadian CANDU heavy water reactor design have a slight positive void coefficient, these reactors mitigate this issues with a number of built-in advanced passive safety systems not found in the Soviet RBMK design. No criticality could occur in a CANDU reactor or any other heavy water reactor when ordinary light water is supplied to the reactor as an emergency coolant. Depending on burnup, boric acid or another neutron poison will have to be added to emergency coolant to avoid a criticality accident.

PWRs are designed to be maintained in an undermoderated state, meaning that there is room for increased water volume or density to further increase moderation, because if moderation were near saturation, then a reduction in density of the moderator/coolant could reduce neutron absorption significantly while reducing moderation only slightly, making the void coefficient positive. Also, light water is actually a somewhat stronger moderator of neutrons than heavy water, though heavy water's neutron absorption is much lower. Because of these two facts, light water reactors have a relatively small moderator volume and therefore have compact cores. One next generation design, the supercritical water reactor, is even less moderated. A less moderated neutron energy spectrum does worsen the capture/fission ratio for 235U and especially 239Pu, meaning that more fissile nuclei fail to fission on neutron absorption and instead capture the neutron to become a heavier nonfissile isotope, wasting one or more neutrons and increasing accumulation of heavy transuranic actinides, some of which have long half-lives.

Fuel

After enrichment, the uranium dioxide () powder is fired in a high-temperature, sintering furnace to create hard, ceramic pellets of enriched uranium dioxide. The cylindrical pellets are then clad in a corrosion-resistant zirconium metal alloy Zircaloy which are backfilled with helium to aid heat conduction and detect leakages. Zircaloy is chosen because of its mechanical properties and its low absorption cross section. The finished fuel rods are grouped in fuel assemblies, called fuel bundles, that are then used to build the core of the reactor. A typical PWR has fuel assemblies of 200 to 300 rods each, and a large reactor would have about 150–250 such assemblies with 80–100 tons of uranium in all. Generally, the fuel bundles consist of fuel rods bundled 14 × 14 to 17 × 17. A PWR produces on the order of 900 to 1,600 MWe. PWR fuel bundles are about 4 meters in length.

Refuelings for most commercial PWRs is on an 18–24 month cycle. Approximately one third of the core is replaced each refueling, though some more modern refueling schemes may reduce refuel time to a few days and allow refueling to occur on a shorter periodicity.

Control
In PWRs reactor power can be viewed as following steam (turbine) demand due to the reactivity feedback of the temperature change caused by increased or decreased steam flow. (See: Negative temperature coefficient.) Boron and cadmium control rods are used to maintain primary system temperature at the desired point. In order to decrease power, the operator throttles shut turbine inlet valves. This would result in less steam being drawn from the steam generators. This results in the primary loop increasing in temperature. The higher temperature causes the density of the primary reactor coolant water to decrease, allowing higher neutron speeds, thus less fission and decreased power output. This decrease of power will eventually result in primary system temperature returning to its previous steady-state value. The operator can control the steady state operating temperature by addition of boric acid and/or movement of control rods.

Reactivity adjustment to maintain 100% power as the fuel is burned up in most commercial PWRs is normally achieved by varying the concentration of boric acid dissolved in the primary reactor coolant. Boron readily absorbs neutrons and increasing or decreasing its concentration in the reactor coolant will therefore affect the neutron activity correspondingly. An entire control system involving high pressure pumps (usually called the charging and letdown system) is required to remove water from the high pressure primary loop and re-inject the water back in with differing concentrations of boric acid. The reactor control rods, inserted through the reactor vessel head directly into the fuel bundles, are moved for the following reasons:
to start up the reactor,
to shut down the primary nuclear reactions in the reactor,
to accommodate short term transients, such as changes to load on the turbine,

The control rods can also be used to compensate for nuclear poison inventory and to compensate for nuclear fuel depletion. However, these effects are more usually accommodated by altering the primary coolant boric acid concentration.

In contrast, BWRs have no boron in the reactor coolant and control the reactor power by adjusting the reactor coolant flow rate.

Advantages
PWR reactors are very stable due to their tendency to produce less power as temperatures increase; this makes the reactor easier to operate from a stability standpoint.

PWR turbine cycle loop is separate from the primary loop, so the water in the secondary loop is not contaminated by radioactive materials.

PWRs can passively scram the reactor in case offsite power is lost to immediately stop the primary nuclear reaction. The control rods are held by electromagnets and fall by gravity when current is lost; full insertion safely shuts down the primary nuclear reaction.

PWR technology is favoured by nations seeking to develop a nuclear navy; the compact reactors fit well in nuclear submarines and other nuclear ships.

PWRs are the most deployed type of reactor globally, allowing for a wide range of suppliers of new plants and parts for existing plants. Due to long experience with their operation they are the closest thing to mature technology that exists in nuclear energy.

PWRs - depending on type - can be fueled with MOX-fuel and/or the Russian Remix Fuel (which has a lower  and a higher  content than "regular" U/Pu MOX-fuel) allowing for a (partially) closed nuclear fuel cycle.

Water is a nontoxic, transparent, chemically unreactive (by comparison with e.g. NaK) coolant that is liquid at room temperature which makes visual inspection and maintenance easier. It is also easy and cheap to obtain unlike heavy water or even nuclear graphite.

Compared to reactors operating on natural uranium, PWRs can achieve a relatively high burnup. A typical PWR will exchange a quarter to a third of its fuel load every 18-24 months and have maintenance and inspection, that requires the reactor to be shut down, scheduled for this window. While more uranium ore is consumed per unit of electricity produced than in a natural uranium fueled reactor, the amount of spent fuel is less with the balance being depleted uranium whose radiological danger is lower than that of natural uranium.

Disadvantages
The coolant water must be highly pressurized to remain liquid at high temperatures. This requires high strength piping and a heavy pressure vessel and hence increases construction costs. The higher pressure can increase the consequences of a loss-of-coolant accident. The reactor pressure vessel is manufactured from ductile steel but, as the plant is operated, neutron flux from the reactor causes this steel to become less ductile. Eventually the ductility of the steel will reach limits determined by the applicable boiler and pressure vessel standards, and the pressure vessel must be repaired or replaced. This might not be practical or economic, and so determines the life of the plant.

Additional high pressure components such as reactor coolant pumps, pressurizer, and steam generators are also needed. This also increases the capital cost and complexity of a PWR power plant.

The high temperature water coolant with boric acid dissolved in it is corrosive to carbon steel (but not stainless steel); this can cause radioactive corrosion products to circulate in the primary coolant loop. This not only limits the lifetime of the reactor, but the systems that filter out the corrosion products and adjust the boric acid concentration add significantly to the overall cost of the reactor and to radiation exposure. In one instance, this has resulted in severe corrosion to control rod drive mechanisms when the boric acid solution leaked through the seal between the mechanism itself and the primary system.

Due to the requirement to load a pressurized water reactor's primary coolant loop with boron, undesirable radioactive secondary tritium production in the water is over 25 times greater than in boiling water reactors of similar power, owing to the latter's absence of the neutron moderating element in its coolant loop. The tritium is created by the absorption of a fast neutron in the nucleus of a boron-10 atom which subsequently splits into a lithium-7 and tritium atom. Pressurized water reactors annually emit several hundred curies of tritium to the environment as part of normal operation.

Natural uranium is only 0.7% uranium-235, the isotope necessary for thermal reactors. This makes it necessary to enrich the uranium fuel, which significantly increases the costs of fuel production. Compared to reactors operating on natural uranium, less energy is generated per unit of uranium ore even though a higher burnup can be achieved. Nuclear reprocessing can "stretch" the fuel supply of both natural uranium and enriched uranium reactors but is virtually only practiced for light water reactors operating with lightly enriched fuel as spent fuel from e.g. CANDU reactors is very low in fissile material.

Because water acts as a neutron moderator, it is not possible to build a fast-neutron reactor with a PWR design. A reduced moderation water reactor may however achieve a breeding ratio greater than unity, though this reactor design has disadvantages of its own.

Spent fuel from a PWR usually has a higher content of fissile material than natural uranium. Without nuclear reprocessing, this fissile material cannot be used as fuel in a PWR. It can, however, be used in a CANDU with only minimal reprocessing in a process called "DUPIC" - Direct Use of spent PWR fuel in CANDU.

Thermal efficiency, while better than for boiling water reactors, cannot achieve the values of reactors with higher operating temperatures such as those cooled with high temperature gases, liquid metals or molten salts. Similarly process heat drawn from a PWR is not suitable for most industrial applications as those require temperatures in excess of .

Radiolysis and certain accident scenarios which involve interactions between hot steam and zircalloy cladding can produce hydrogen from the cooling water leading to hydrogen explosions as a potential accident scenario. During the Fukushima nuclear accident a hydrogen explosion damaging the containment building was a major concern. Some reactors contain catalytic recombiners which let the hydrogen react with ambient oxygen in a non-explosive fashion.

See also

Boiling water reactor
List of PWR reactors
Nuclear safety systems
KEPCO Advanced Power Reactor 1400 (APR-1400)
Rosatom VVER-1200 (or AES-2006)
Areva EPR
Westinghouse Advanced Passive 1000 (AP1000)
Chinese Hualong One (or HPR1000)
Indian IPWR-900

Notes

References

External links

Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT OpenCourseWare.
Document archives at the website of the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Operating Principles of a Pressurized Water Reactor (YouTube video).
Fuel Consumption of a Pressurized Water Reactor.

Light water reactors
Nuclear power reactor types
Articles containing video clips

Pressurized water reactor


was the pseudonym of a major figure in Taishō and early Shōwa period Japanese painting, and is regarded as one of the founders of the Japanese painting technique of nihonga. His real name was Yasuda Shinzaburō.

Biography
He was born in Nihonbashi, Tokyo, as the fourth son of a Japanese restaurant owner. He initially studied Tosa school painting at the Tōkyō Bijutsu Gakkō (the predecessor to the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music), under Kobori Tomoto. While in school, his talent was recognized by Okakura Kakuzō who sent him to Nara to study classical paintings in the Yamato-e style. While in Nara, he first viewed the ancient murals on the walls of the Kondo chapel of the Buddhist temple of Hōryū-ji, and this was to have a deep impact on his future style of painting.

From 1914, Yasuda assisted Yokoyama Taikan in re-establishing the Japan Fine Arts Academy (Nihon Bijutsuin).  From 1944 to 1951, he taught as a professor at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. In 1948, he was awarded the Order of Culture by the Japanese government, and was appointed a member of the Japan Art Academy. In the post-war period, he assisted Maeda Seison on restoration and preservation work on the murals of Hōryū-ji.

Yasuda was known primarily for his paintings on historical themes, and occasionally for portraiture or bird-and-flower paintings. One of his principal disciples was noted Nihonga painter Yuki Ogura.

Important works
Yasuda's works have been selected as the subject of commemorative postage stamps three times by the Japanese post office:

 1981: Spring in Asuka with Nukada Okimi, as part of the Modern Art series.
 1986: Mount Fuji, to commemorate the 1986 Tokyo Summit
 1996: Window, to commemorate the 1996 Philatelic Week

References

1884 births
1978 deaths
Nihonga painters
Painters from Tokyo
20th-century Japanese painters
Buddhist artists
Imperial household artists

Yukihiko Yasuda


Sao Shwe Thaik (, Tsaw³ Kham⁴soek³; , ; 16 October 1895 – 21 November 1962) was a Burmese politician who served as the first president of the Union of Burma and the last Saopha of Yawnghwe. His full royal title was Kambawsarahta Thiri Pawaramahawuntha Thudamaraza. He was a well-respected Shan political figure in Burma. His residence in Nyaung Shwe (Yawnghwe), the Haw, is now the "Buddha Museum" and is open to the public.

Early life
Born on 16 October 1895 of the British Raj, Shwe Thaik was educated at the Shan Chiefs School in Taunggyi. He then entered British military service during World War I, and also served in the Northeast Frontier Service from 1920–1923. In September 1927, he was chosen as successor to his uncle as saopha of Yawnghwe by the Federated Shan States' Council of Ministers. He officially assumed office on 8 March 1929. He again served in the military service from 1939 to 1942. He was married five times; his best-known wife was the first, Sao Nang Hearn Hkam, sister of the Saopha of North Hsenwi Sao Hom Hpa. He had a total of three children.

President
Sao Shwe Thaik became the president of the Union of Burma on 4 January 1948 at its independence, served as the head of state until 16 March 1952. The following is his first presidential address to the nation on the day of independence, 4 January 1948.

Let us rejoice at the independence which has come to us today, the result of sacrifices undergone by us and those who preceded us in the years that have passed. Let us rejoice also that the independence has come not as a result of armed conflict but as the fruit of friendly negotiations with that great nation whose political bonds we replace by mutual consent to-day with the stronger bonds of friendship and goodwill.

Today is for us not only a day of freedom but also a day of reunion. For a long time, the principal races of Burma, the Kachins and the Chins have tended to look upon themselves as separate national units. Of late, a nobler vision, the vision of a Union of Burma, has moved our hearts, and we stand united to-day as one nation determined to work in unity and concord for the advancement of Burma's interests and for the speedy attainment of her due position as one of the great nations of the world. It is unity which has brought our struggle for independence to this early fruition and may unity continue to be the watchword for every member of the Sovereign Independent Republic to be henceforth known as the Union of Burma.

Excerpt from "the White Umbrella" by Patricia Elliot (Pg. 206–207)
On 4 January 1949, a mass rally was held outside City Hall to mark the first anniversary of Independence Day. As head of state, (he) addressed the crowd. To his credit, he didn't serve up the previous year's menu of brave words and high purpose. Instead he issued a warning.

Co-operation and understanding cannot come about so long as the element of violence or threat of violence exists, for violence has no counterpart in freedom, and liberty ends where violence begins. The progressive retreat of democracy in the world today is mainly due to the worship by nations of the cult of physical force. The deterioration in this direction has been such that the much-vaunted democracies are nowadays hardly distinguishable from totalitarian states.

He made a direct stab at his own country's deteriorating political situation with insurgencies and armed conflicts.

Speaker of the Chamber of Nationalities
After this term as president, he was the speaker of the Chamber of Nationalities, the upper house, from 1950 to 1962. In the military coup of March 1962 he was arrested by the Union Revolutionary Council headed by General Ne Win and died in prison in November 1962. One of his sons, 17 at that time, was killed in the March 1962 military coup, apparently the only casualty on the day of the coup.

Notes

References

 The Union of Burma: A Study of the First Years of Independence By Hugh Tickner. New York: Oxford University Press, 1957. xiv, 424. Maps, Bibliography at page 24

Bibliography

External links
 Leaders of Myanmar (Burma)
 Sao Shwe Thaik's speech on Burmese independence, 4 January 1948

1895 births
1962 deaths
Presidents of Myanmar
Burmese people who died in prison custody
Prisoners who died in Burmese detention
Anti-Fascist People's Freedom League politicians
People from Shan State
Recipients of the Order of the Union of Myanmar
Burmese people of Shan descent
Yawnghwe
Burmese military personnel of World War II

Sao Shwe Thaik


Craig Morris is an orchestral trumpeter known for serving as the Principal Trumpet of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.  He is also known as a soloist and chamber musician.  He is an endorsing artist for Yamaha Instruments, and is currently Professor of Trumpet for the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami.

History
Craig Morris was born in 1968 in Texas.  He received much musical influence from his father, a local band director and tuba player.  After high school he attended the University of Texas at Austin and received his Bachelor of Music.  In 1991 he received a Master of Music from the San Francisco Conservatory.

Career
Craig Morris was a member of the Pinnacle Brass Quintet from 1991–1994, as well as a member of Dallas Brass.  He obtained the position of Principal Trumpet in the Sacramento Symphony Orchestra, Opera, and Ballet from 1994-1996.  From 1999-2001 he was Associate Principal Trumpet for the San Francisco Symphony.  With the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Morris served as substitute Fourth/Utility Trumpet from March 1998 until April 1999, and from April 2001 until August 2003, he was Principal Trumpet. Morris also has appeared as a solo artist with the Austin Handel-Haydn Society, Diablo Symphony Orchestra, and the San Francisco Old & New Music Ensemble.

Morris is currently the Professor of Trumpet at the University of Miami, Frost School of Music. Morris spends each August performing as Principal Trumpet at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, having been appointed by Music Director Marin Alsop in 2007. In 2011, Morris was awarded a trial for principal trumpet with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra.

Major performances
Soloist with the Chicago Symphony, playing Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 and Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat.
Solo artist at the Ravinia Festival.
Performed the world premier of Thom Sleeper's Concerto for Trumpet.

References

External links

1968 births
Living people
University of Miami faculty
American classical trumpeters
American male trumpeters
University of Texas at Austin College of Fine Arts alumni
San Francisco Conservatory of Music alumni
21st-century trumpeters
Classical musicians from Texas
Classical musicians from California
21st-century American male musicians

Craig Morris


In physics, a quantum (: quanta) is the minimum amount of any physical entity (physical property) involved in an interaction.

The fundamental notion that a physical property can be "quantized" is referred to as "the hypothesis of quantization". This means that the magnitude of the physical property can take on only discrete values consisting of integer multiples of one quantum. For example, a photon is a single quantum of light of a specific frequency (or of any other form of electromagnetic radiation). Similarly, the energy of an electron bound within an atom is quantized and can exist only in certain discrete values. (Atoms and matter in general are stable because electrons can exist only at discrete energy levels within an atom.) Quantization is one of the foundations of the much broader physics of quantum mechanics. Quantization of energy and its influence on how energy and matter interact (quantum electrodynamics) is part of the fundamental framework for understanding and describing nature.

Etymology and discovery
The word quantum is the neuter singular of the Latin interrogative adjective quantus, meaning "how much". "Quanta", the neuter plural, short for "quanta of electricity" (electrons), was used in a 1902 article on the photoelectric effect by Philipp Lenard, who credited Hermann von Helmholtz for using the word in the area of electricity. However, the word quantum in general was well known before 1900, e.g. quantum was used in E. A. Poe's Loss of Breath. It was often used by physicians, such as in the term quantum satis, "the amount which is enough". Both Helmholtz and Julius von Mayer were physicians as well as physicists. Helmholtz used quantum with reference to heat in his article on Mayer's work, and the word quantum can be found in the formulation of the first law of thermodynamics by Mayer in his letter dated July 24, 1841.

In 1901, Max Planck used quanta to mean "quanta of matter and electricity", gas, and heat. In 1905, in response to Planck's work and the experimental work of Lenard (who explained his results by using the term quanta of electricity), Albert Einstein suggested that radiation existed in spatially localized packets which he called "quanta of light" ("Lichtquanta").

The concept of quantization of radiation was discovered in 1900 by Max Planck, who had been trying to understand the emission of radiation from heated objects, known as black-body radiation. By assuming that energy can be absorbed or released only in tiny, differential, discrete packets (which he called "bundles", or "energy elements"), Planck accounted for certain objects changing color when heated. On December 14, 1900, Planck reported his findings to the German Physical Society, and introduced the idea of quantization for the first time as a part of his research on black-body radiation. As a result of his experiments, Planck deduced the numerical value of h, known as the Planck constant, and reported more precise values for the unit of electrical charge and the Avogadro–Loschmidt number, the number of real molecules in a mole, to the German Physical Society. After his theory was validated, Planck was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery in 1918.

Quantization

While quantization was first discovered in electromagnetic radiation, it describes a fundamental aspect of energy not just restricted to photons.
In the attempt to bring theory into agreement with experiment, Max Planck postulated that electromagnetic energy is absorbed or emitted in discrete packets, or quanta.

See also

 Graviton
 Introduction to quantum mechanics
 Magnetic flux quantum
 Particle
 Elementary particle
 Subatomic particle
 Photon polarization
 Qubit
 Quantum cellular automata
 Quantum channel
 Quantum chromodynamics
 Quantum cognition
 Quantum coherence
 Quantum computer
 Quantum cryptography
 Quantum dot
 Quantum electronics
 Quantum entanglement
 Quantum fiction
 Quantum field theory
 Quantum lithography
 Quantum mechanics
 Quantum mind
 Quantum mysticism
 Quantum number
 Quantum optics
 Quantum sensor
 Quantum state
 Quantum suicide and immortality
 Quantum teleportation

References

Further reading
B. Hoffmann, The Strange Story of the Quantum, Pelican 1963.
Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe, transl. from the Latin by R.E. Latham, Penguin Books Limited., Harmondsworth 1951.
J. Mehra and H. Rechenberg, The Historical Development of Quantum Theory, Vol.1, Part 1, Springer-Verlag, New York 1982.
M. Planck, A Survey of Physical Theory, transl. by R. Jones and D.H. Williams, Methuen & Co., Limited., London 1925 (Dover editions 1960 and 1993) including the Nobel lecture.
Rodney, Brooks (2011) Fields of Color: The theory that escaped Einstein. Allegra Print & Imaging.

Quantum mechanics

Quantum


Michael Jones McKean (born 1976) is an American artist and educator.

McKean's work explores the nature of objects in relation to folklore, technology, anthropology, and mysticism. His complex installations and sculptures merge expansive but highly specific orderings of materials, processes and substances.

McKean's work engages an interest in deep time, timescales and their collapse, in the process decentering historically anthropocentric registrations of events, distances and meaning. McKean often presents seemingly incongruous objects in careful arrangement, at times quoting vernacular museological display techniques. Through his working process he questions stable definitions such as real and replica, natural and synthetic, fact and fiction, past and future by employing diverse media such as ancient meteorites, primitive textiles, obsolete technologies, raw clay, psychotropic medicines, and prismatic rainbows.

Biography
McKean was born on Chuuk Island (formally Truk Island) in Micronesia in 1976. McKean's family moved to the United States in the late 1970s settling in Arden, Delaware, a village founded in 1900 as a radical Georgist single-tax community. McKean attended Marywood University on a basketball scholarship, also studying art. He later attended The New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University receiving his MFA in 2002.

McKean has been the recipient of many awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Nancy Graves Foundation Award and an Artadia Award. Additionally he has received fellowships and residencies at The Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The MacDowell Colony, The International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York City, The Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, The Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts and the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program in New York City among others.

McKean's work has been exhibited extensively nationally and internationally. Recent exhibitions include the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Parc Saint Leger Centre d'art Contemporain, Nevers, France; Horton Gallery, New York, NY; Manifestation Internatiationle d'art de Quebec Biennale, Quebec City, Canada; Gentili Apri, Berlin, Germany; The Art Foundation, Athens, Greece; Inman Gallery, Houston, TX; Parisian Laundry, Montreal, Canada; Project Gentili, Prato, Italy; Shenkar University, Tel Aviv, Israel; The Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, NC and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX among many others.

McKean has lectured and taught widely, currently holding a professorship in the Sculpture and Extended Media Department at Virginia Commonwealth University since 2006. Mckean has been a Stephen Barstow Endowed Visiting Professor at Central Michigan University, the Myers Visiting Professor at University of Akron. Additionally McKean lectures widely, with talks at Columbia University, Yale University, New York University, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Southern California, The Royal College of Art, Goldsmiths College, Maryland Institute College of Art, San Francisco Institute of Art among many others. McKean is also the Co-Director of ASMBLY, based in New york city.

Artwork
McKean is interested in sculpture's capacities and limitations for meaning transmission. Concerning this and the narrative potential of his work, McKean states:

"I realized, perhaps counterintuitively, that a sculpture is actually missing the tools to communicate a true narrative arc, lacking the most basic elements required in storytelling: a beginning and end. Without an originating point and a totalizing conclusion, a sculpture exists as an inherently unstable device for narration, forever swirling around in medias res. This was an important realization for me, that within sculpture's genetic makeup I couldn't create the meanings contained in our most culturally popular forms: think the novel, the essay, film, TV shows, YouTube videos, theater, music. Sculpture is a strange communication outlier, almost mystical by design. Yet for me realizing this limitation created some generative conditions to not only think about the nature sculpture, but to think through the process of how one could make a sculpture."

McKean's discursive practice often involves creating projects within projects. As part of his large scale installation Riverboat Lovesongs for the Ghost Whale Regatta, presented at Grand Arts in Kansas City, McKean researched in the linkage circumnavigation and failure. McKean set out to discover the longest possible straight-line route an individual could use to circumnavigate the Earth, naming the route the Great Circuit. The route takes into consideration the literally millions of minute shifts in elevation encountered while actually traveling to ultimately arrive at the longest path around the Earth.  McKean commissioned the University of Kansas Department of Geography and Cartography to help engineer an algorithm using their computer array to sift and arrange billions of geographic data points. In late spring of 2006 the route was discovered.

Writing about Mckean's work, Stacy Switzer states: "The Great Circuit is a conceptual artwork and a counterintuitive test of limits based on a hypothetical journey that may or may not be physically possible. As the catalyst for an extraordinary body of information—one born of hard science but which hovers unfixed to the realm of common utility—McKean performs a kind of radical, interdisciplinary sleight-of-hand. The Great Circuit project remains profoundly elusive even as it directly engages realms as diverse as phenomenology, mathematics, economics, ecology and spirituality."

McKean is known for spending many years to complete projects. Notably, he worked for 10 years developing The Rainbow: Certain Principles of Light and Shapes between Forms  a project that created a fully self-sufficient urban rainwater harvesting system used to create real prismatic rainbows. In 2012 the project was realized at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts.

Speaking of the resonance of the rainbow image McKean states: "through all of time there has been only one rainbow. Coded within the image there is a consistency, an extreme fidelity in the essential form of a rainbow. The image doesn't evolve or degrade in the same way a piece of fruit does, or an iPod does, or even more stoically the way a mountain does — it is a constant. When we see a rainbow we are communing with our ancestors — seeing exactly the same shape they saw just as we astral project into the future witnessing the same event our children's children will see. It races out to the edges of time. But this image is also fully absorbed in the here-and-now and in all its fleeting fragility, at the moment we witness a rainbow it reminds us that we are also here, and right now. As someone that thinks a lot about objects and time, the rainbow became an interesting starting point to build a series of metaphors about objects, time and people...."

McKean is interested in giving new and expanded agency to materials and objects. Mckean's work is often aligned with speculative realism and object oriented philosophies.  Speaking with Clayton Sean Horton in 2013 in advance of his solo show at Horton Gallery in New York City, McKean states:

"The sculptures embrace a double-reality where materials and objects travel between their lives 'with us;' a reality that supports their associative meanings, poetics, functions, references, mythologies, politics, and ordering systems that we construct for them, and their inward, private lives as pure material 'without us;' a parallel, more speculative reality where objects float in psychic voids, ambivalent to our desires and needs for them….

I'm curious if somewhere in-between this object-oriented shadow world freed from human associations, and the mind-dependent, literate world we create for objects, there might be a fucked-up, but totally generative 'third thing.' Maybe an animistic plane of spirited forms evading us, escaping the gravitational pull of our poems and our metaphors. A place where objects, when they choose to visit us, do so with all their unknowable intelligence and perverse strangeness intact.
Your question about 'backstory' - this invisible, unobservable reality existing around objects - could help access this 'third thing.' Generationally, we seem increasingly skilled at parsing tiny, even alchemical details that exist, or we believe to exist within objects…."

Twelve Earths
In 2017 McKean began work on a planetary sculpture titled Twelve Earths. The project, currently in development, launched as an extended collaboration with L.A. based group Fathomers—a creative research institute interested in producing long-term artworks. With the assistance of an interdisciplinary team of scientists, geographers, designers, technologists and more, the project will connect twelve invocatory sites around the earth along a perfect ring - a great circle. Over the next ten years, with the project scheduled to conclude in 2028, Twelve Earths will reveal a complex portrait of the earth.

Speaking on behalf of McKean's project Stacy Switzer, director of Fathomers, discloses: "Twelve Earths is a project born of deep, abiding curiosity about the full range of possible experience on this planet. It insists that we think beyond ourselves and outside the myopia of the present to consider the past and future as tangible, affecting frames of reference."

The Teignmouth Electron
McKean is the owner of the Teignmouth Electron, an infamous 40 foot trimaran yacht helmed by the late Donald Crowhurst, who failed in his attempt to become the first person to circumnavigate the earth solo, without stopping. Crowhurst's voyage, mental collapse and alleged suicide are well documented in the 1970 book "The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst" by Nicholas Tomalin. After years of researching the boat and its history, in 2007 McKean purchased the vessel, currently beached on Cayman Brac, as a means of fundamentally altering the relationship with the object.

Speaking of the Teignmouth Electron, McKean states: "I think the Electron is quite easy to appreciate as an elegant metaphor about life, yearning, failure. But these concepts seem overly available. In this sense, it's vital to not let our relationships with objects default into passive, ugly connoisseurship. That's like tourism. As I've grown to understand it, the Electron resists; it will not be sculpture, it will not be an artwork. It wouldn't even be a boat. I can think about the Electron as a set of dimensions with a certain width and length and girth that displaces a specific amount of volume on the planet. After that it flows over what's available to me…"

External links
 artist website - www.michaeljonesmckean.com
 Inman Gallery - artist page
 Fathomers Twelve Earths page
 Virginia Commonwealth University | Sculpture and Extended Media - faculty page
 The Rainbow - project website
 International Sculpture Center/Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, lecture, summer 2012

Interviews
 "An Evolving Turn: A conversation with Timur Si-Qin, Michael Jones McKean and Pablo Larios," DIS, April 2013.
 Q & A with Clayton Sean Horton and Michael Jones McKean
 "Priscilla Frank, "Michael Jones McKean To Build Rainbow Over Bemis Center For Contemporary Arts," Huffington Post, May 2012.
 Eric Zimmerman, Interview: "The Historian and the Astronomer,"  might be good, issue #98.
 , "In Conversation," interview for the wake the saint the sound the branch, Project Gentili, Prato, Italy.
 "Dark Psychedelia: A conversation between Gean Moreno and Michael Jones McKean," DIS, 2014

Bibliography
 Michael Jones McKean: The Religion, text: Hannah Walsh; forward, preface: Sharon McConnell; editor: Walter McConnell; photography: Lydia Anne McCarthy, published 2014,
 the wake the saint the sound the branch, text: Matthew Edgeworth, Stephen Lichty, images: Jacopo Menzani, published 2009, ISSN 1973-2163
 ''Michael Jones McKean: Selected Projects 2003–2008", foreword by Brian Gillis, essay by Stacy Switzer, published 2009
 "The Possibility of Men and the River Shallows", foreword by Diane Barber, interview with Christopher Cook, published 2007

References

1976 births
21st-century sculptors
American installation artists
Living people

Michael Jones McKean


Tsveta Valcheva Karayancheva (born 25 February 1968) is a Bulgarian engineer and politician who was Chair of the country's National Assembly from November 2017 to March 2021.

Early life, education and early career
Tsveta Valcheva Karayancheva was born on 25 February 1968 in Bolyarovo in Yambol Province. She attended a mechanical engineering college in Kardzhali before graduating from the Technical University, Sofia in engineering and from the New Bulgarian University in management.

Karayancheva worked at a plastic goods factory called Formplast in Kardzhali, moving up to become chief designer and factory manager. She also worked in industry in Kyrgyzstan.

Political career
Karayancheva is a member of the GERB party, and became regional coordinator in Kardzhali in 2007. While working as an engineer she "transformed GERB-Kardzhali into a well-oiled machine that managed to liquidate the BSP as the second political force in the district and even depersonalize the MRF, which has always ruled there." She was elected as a member of the National Assembly representing the Kardzhail constituency at the 2009 parliamentary election. She was re-elected in 2013, 2014 and 2017. She was one of five Vice presidents of the Assembly from May to November 2017,

Karayancheva was elected Chair of the Assembly on 17 November 2017, with 138 votes for, 3 against, and 71 abstentions. She replaced Dimitar Glachev, who resigned to avoid "political upheaval" as Bulgaria took over the rotating Presidency of the Council of the European Union.

In November 2018, Karayancheva sponsored an amendment to the Penal Code to address domestic violence. In June 2019, she made an official visit to Moscow. On 9 March 2020, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Karayancheva banned foreign trips by all MPs. On 26 March, she proposed that the Assembly suspend regular sittings and convene only for urgent or emergency reasons, with questions to Cabinet ministers to be solely in written form.

In response to September 2020 protests against the government, Karayancheva said, "Of course we are legitimate. We won this power in 2017, when the elections were organized by the caretaker government of Rumen Radev." She said the protests had been funded by the mafia and that access to parliament for journalists would not be restored. Karayancheva had previously said the decision to only allow representatives of state institutions in parliament was part of the measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19. When a young protestor with a disability was denied access to the parliament's lobby bathroom, protestors left toilet seats on the stairs of the building demeaning Karayancheva's resignation. In response to a resolution of the European Parliament critical of the Bulgarian government, Karayancheva said, "The resolution is a political act that has neither legal nor legislative value."

In October 2020, the Assembly debated a request submitted by 96 members of the Bulgarian Socialist Party and Movement for Rights and Freedoms for her removal, arguing she had violated the rules of the legislative process and was ignorant of the Constitution. Deputy chair of the GERB parliamentary group, Krassimir Tsipov, rejected the request saying, "Ms. Karayancheva, you have not lost the trust of the majority that elected you." She was also supported by the United Patriots, with Slavcho Atanasov saying, "I claim that this politician has not stolen a penny from the state since she became a politician – unlike other leaders of other parties in the village of Krushovitsa." GERB Chair Daniela Daritkova said the opposition had no right to request the resignation after they had boycotted sittings of the Assembly in solidarity with protestors. After three hours of debate, she retained her position with 127 votes in favour and 97 against.

Karayancheva has extended an invitation to the European Commission, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the European Commission for Democracy through Law and the Group of States against Corruption to send observers to the 2021 election after speculation about fairness. In January 2021, Karayancheva criticised President Rumen Radev for engaging in talk that undermined trust in the 2021 election process. She is a close confidante of Prime Minister Boyko Borisov and when news broke that he was being investigated for money laundering in Spain, she initially dismissed it as "fake news".

Personal life
Karayancheva has been married to Iliya Karayanchev, whom she met as a student, for over thirty years. She is a grandmother of two. On 15 September 2019, the car Karayancheva was driving was hit by another driver who lost control near Hitrino. Karayancheva was taken to hospital with a broken collarbone and injured vertebrae. The driver was charged, but the case was dismissed after Karayancheva expressed a desire that they not be punished.

References

Living people
1968 births
People from Yambol Province
Technical University, Sofia alumni
New Bulgarian University alumni
Bulgarian women engineers
21st-century Bulgarian women politicians
21st-century Bulgarian politicians
Chairpersons of the National Assembly of Bulgaria
Women legislative speakers
GERB politicians

Tsveta Karayancheva


Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences Into Democracy (2004, ) is a book by the French theorist and philosopher of science Bruno Latour. The book is an English translation by Catherine Porter of the French book, Politiques de la nature. It is published by Harvard University Press.

Overview
In the book, Latour argues for a new and better take on political ecology (not the discipline but the ecological political movements, e.g. greens) that embraces his feeling that, "political ecology has nothing to do with nature". In fact, Latour argues that the idea of nature is unfair because it unfairly allows those engaged in political discourse to "short-circuit" discussions. Latour uses Plato's metaphor of "the cave" to describe the current role of nature and science in separating facts from values which is the role of politics and non-scientists. Building on the arguments levelled in his previous works, Latour argues that this distinction between facts and values is rarely useful and in many situations dangerous. He claims that it leads to a system that ignores nature's socially constructed status and creates a political order without "due process of individual will".

Instead, he calls for a "new Constitution" where different individuals can assemble democratically without the definitions of facts and values influenced by current attitudes towards nature and scientific knowledge. Latour describes an alternate set of rules by which this assembly, or collective as he calls it, might come together and be constituted. He also describes the way that entities will be allowed in or out in the future. In describing this collective, Latour draws attention to the role of the spokesperson, who must be doubted but who must speak for otherwise mute things in order to ensure that the collective involves both "humans and non-humans". This is also an important aspect of Actor-network theory (ANT) that can be found in his main sociological works.

The book includes a short summary at the end and a glossary of terms.

Reviews of the book
Sal Restivo emphasises that the book is reproducing the insights from Science Studies, which Bruno Latour himself has greatly contributed to. However, Sal Restivo questions whether Latour understood social constructivism and what sociologists actually do.

See also
 Laboratory life (with Steve Woolgar)
 Science in Action (book)
 Aramis, or the Love of Technology
 We Have Never Been Modern

References

External links
 Introduction on Latour's website

2004 non-fiction books
Political books
Sociology of scientific knowledge
Science and technology studies works
Works by Bruno Latour

Politics of Nature


Adoph F. Germer (15 January 1881 – 26 May 1966) was an American socialist political functionary and union organizer. He is best remembered as National Executive Secretary of the Socialist Party of America from 1916 to 1919. It was during this period that the Left Wing Section of the Socialist Party emerged as an organized faction. Germer was instrumental as one of the leaders of the SPA's "Regular" faction in orchestrating a series of suspensions, expulsions, and "reorganizations" of various Left Wing states, branches, and locals and thereby controlling the pivotal 1919 Emergency National Convention of the SPA, and thus forcing the Left Wing to establish new organizations of their own, the Communist Labor Party of America and the Communist Party of America.

Biography

Early years

Adolph F. Germer was born January 15, 1881, in Welan, East Prussia, Germany the son of a miner. Germer emigrated to the United States with his family in December 1888 and attended public school in Braceville, Illinois. He also attended a Lutheran parochial school and completed his high school coursework via correspondence school. Germer also did course work at LaSalle Extension University.

Germer went to work in the mines like his father at a very early age, first working as a trapper at a coal mine near Staunton, Illinois, at age 11. He was a member of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) from 1894.

Germer escaped a life in the mines by working as a union official. He was elected Secretary of UMWA Local 728 in 1906 and its state legislative committeeman in 1907. That same year he was elected a sub-district vice president of the union. The next year he was elected secretary-treasurer of the sub-district of the UMWA, a position which he retained until 1912. That final year he was also elected representative of the United Mine Workers to the World Miners' Congress in Amsterdam.

Political career

Germer joined the Social Democratic Party of America, forerunner of the Socialist Party of America (SPA) in 1900.

In 1912 Germer was a candidate of the Socialist Party of Illinois for the Illinois legislature.

In 1913, Germer was elected to the governing National Executive Committee of the Socialist Party. At that same time, he worked as an organizer for the UMWA. In December of that year, Germer was arrested while getting off a train at Walsenburg, Colorado, the site of an ongoing mine strike. Germer was held incommunicado in the local jail for nearly a week in solitary confinement and his papers searched. His wife, Mabel Germer, was also briefly arrested. Upon his release, Germer continued to work as a UMWA organizer in the bitterly fought Colorado coal strike.

In 1914 Germer was elected Vice President of the Illinois Mine Workers, the state affiliate of the UMWA. He also ran for United States Senate from Illinois as a Socialist in the election held in fall of that year.

From 1916 through 1919, Germer served as National Executive Secretary of the Socialist Party of America, being twice elected by referendum votes of the party membership. His 1916 victory over Carl D. Thompson was made possible by staunch support from the SPA's language federations, many branches of which voted for Germer en bloc, enabling him to defeat the more conservative Thompson.

A staunch antimilitarist and unflinching adherent of the party's anti-World War policies established at its 1917 Emergency National Convention held in St. Louis, Germer was indicted in Chicago by a grand jury under the Espionage Act on Feb. 2, 1918. This secret indictment was made public on March 9 and a trial of Germer and 4 other top members of the Socialist Party began before Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis on Dec. 6, 1918. The trial ended Jan. 4, 1919, and on the 9th day of that same month the jury found Germer and his associates (Victor L. Berger, J. Louis Engdahl, Irwin St. John Tucker, and William F. Kruse) guilty. Landis sentenced each to 20 years in the Federal penitentiary, a sentence which was appealed and later overturned on the basis of judicial bias.

Germer was freed on $25,000 bail pending appeal, a sum put up by a man who was soon to be a political nemesis, the millionaire left wing socialist William Bross Lloyd.

Germer was instrumental in guiding the National Executive Committee in 1919, a group which invalidated the party elections of that year on charges of electoral fraud, and which suspended a number of language federations and reorganized state organizations for purported violations of the SPA's national constitution. It was Germer who organized a caucus of loyal SPA Regulars prior to the opening of the convention on Aug. 30, 1919, and Germer who gaveled that gathering open.

After the bitter 1919 convention, Germer resigned his post as Executive Secretary of the SPA and was replaced by his friend Otto Branstetter. Germer continued to draw a salary from the SPA, working as a National Organizer for the party from October 1919 through 1920. In that year he left the nearly bankrupt national party to work for the relatively more prosperous Local New York as an organizer, a position which he retained through 1922. Germer was also Assistant Secretary of Local New York, working under his friend and ally Julius Gerber from August 1921.

In November 1921, Germer stood as a Socialist candidate for the New York State Assembly in the 16th A.D.

After the 1921 election, Germer moved to Massachusetts, where he served as State Secretary of the Socialist Party of Massachusetts, starting in December. He remained in that position until some time the next year.

Return to union organizing

Thereafter, he left the employment of the Socialist Party, obtaining a job as a worker in the oil industry in California in 1923, where he was a member of the Oil Field, Gas Well and Refinery Workers Union. He later worked as an organizer for that union.

Germer was active in the 1924 Presidential campaign of Robert M. La Follette.

In 1926, Germer returned to Chicago, where he worked for a large real estate firm, remaining in that occupation until the onset of the depression in 1930.

In 1930, Germer was elected a vice president of the reorganized United Mine Workers of America. The following year, he returned to his hometown of Mt. Olive, Illinois and went to work again as a miner until the mine was closed due to the economic downturn.

In June 1931, Germer took a position as editor of the Rockford Labor News, remaining in that role until the end of 1933.

In November 1935, Germer was appointed by John L. Lewis as the first field representative for the Congress of Industrial Organizations. It this capacity, Germer was a participant in the organizing campaigns and strike activities of the auto and rubber workers of the upper Midwest. Germer was particularly important as a key organizer in the 1937 United Auto Workers strike against General Motors.

Germer officially retired from the AFL-CIO on April 1, 1955, but he continued to serve the organization on special assignments.

Death and legacy

After retirement, Germer moved back home to Illinois, dying in Rockford, IL in May 1966.

The main part of Germer's papers are held by the State Historical Society of Wisconsin located at Madison and are available on microfilm. Another smaller assortment, relating to his activity from 1945 to 1947 with the World Federation of Trade Unions, reposes at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

An oral history interview was conducted with Germer on his experience as a United Auto Workers organizer in 1959. That material rests at the Reuther Library of Wayne State University, located in Detroit, Michigan.

Footnotes

Works
 "Report to the National Executive Committee," The American Socialist, Special Business Supplement, circa January 1, 1917.
 Organize or Pay!, Organizational leaflet no. 1. Chicago: National Office of the Socialist Party, Jan. 1917.
 Report of Executive Secretary [to the] Emergency National Convention, St. Louis, April 7, 1917. St. Louis: n.p., 1917.
 Not Guilty: Charge of Federal Judge Clarence W. Sessions in the Conspiracy Case against Adolph Germer et al. in the District Court of the United States for the Western District of Michigan, Southern Division, Grand Rapids, Michigan, October 9, 1917, to October 18, 1917. Chicago: National Office of the Socialist Party, 1917.
 Defeated? Organizational leaflet no. 13. Chicago: National Office of the Socialist Party, 1918.
 "Report of Executive Secretary to National Executive Committee," August 8, 1918. Published by 1000 Flowers Publishing, Corvallis, OR, 2007.
 In the United States Circuit Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. October term, A.D. 1918. Victor L. Berger, Adolph Germer, William F. Kruse, Irwin St. John Tucker and J. Louis Engdahl, plaintiffs in error, vs. United States of America, defendant in error. Error to the District Court of the United States for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division, K.M. Landis, Judge ... Brief for the plaintiffs in error. With Messrs. Berger, Kruse, Tucker, and Engdahl. Chicago: The Court, 1919.
 100 years — For What? Being the Addresses of Victor L. Berger, Adolph Germer, J. Louis Engdahl, William F. Kruse and Irwin St. John Tucker to the Court that Sentenced Them to Serve 100 years in Prison. With Messrs. Berger, Kruse, Tucker, and Engdahl. Chicago: National Office, Socialist Party, n.d. [1919].
 "Letter to Morris Hillquit in Upstate New York from Adolph Germer in Chicago," March 22, 1919. Corvallis, OR: 1000 Flowers Publishing, 2005.
 "A Report to NEC," The Socialist, June 4, 1919. Corvallis, OR: 1000 Flowers Publishing, 2005.
 "National Secretary Germer's Letter of Resignation," New York Call, vol. 12, no. 261 (Sept. 18, 1919).

Further reading

 Randolph Boehm and Martin Paul Schipper, A Guide to the Microfilm Edition of the Adolph Germer Papers. Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1987.
 John H.M. Laslett (ed.), "End of an Alliance: Selected Correspondence Between Socialist Party Secretary Adolph Germer, and UMW of A Leaders in World War One," Labor History, vol. 12, no. 4 (Fall 1971), pp. 570–595.
 Lorin Lee Cary, Adolph Germer: From Labor Agitator to Labor Professional. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1968.
 Lorin Lee Cary, "Adolph Germer and the 1890s Depression," Illinois State Historical Society Journal, vol. 68 (1975), pp. 337–343. In JSTOR
 Lorin Lee Cary, "Institutionalized Conservatism in the Early CIO: Adolph Germer, a Case Study," Labor History, Vol. 13, no. 4 (Fall 1972), pp. 475–504.

External links

 "Socialist Party of America (1897-1946): Party History," Early American Marxism website. Retrieved February 25, 2010.
 "Finding Aid for the Adolph Germer Papers," University of Wisconsin. Retrieved February 25, 2010.
Guide to the Adolph Germer. Papers, 1945-1947. 5256. Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives, Martin P. Catherwood Library, Cornell University.

1881 births
1964 deaths
American Marxists
American trade union leaders
Emigrants from the German Empire to the United States
Activists from Chicago
Socialist Party of America politicians from Illinois
United Mine Workers of America people
People acquitted under the Espionage Act of 1917
Socialist Party of America politicians from Massachusetts
Executive Secretaries of the Socialist Party of America
Progressive Era in the United States
Trade unionists from Massachusetts
Trade unionists from Illinois

Adolph Germer


Elizabeth & The Catapult is a Brooklyn-based project by the American singer-songwriter Elizabeth Ziman. She is best known for her 2009 album Taller Children, produced by Mike Mogis and Dan Molad and released on Verve Forecast.

History
Ziman, who grew up in Greenwich Village, trained from youth as a classical pianist, writing her first songs on an upright piano at age 6.  She attended the Berklee College of Music on a scholarship to study classical composition, and was awarded the 2001 ASCAP Leiber and Stoller scholarship for her song "Like Water is to Sand." Her original plans to pursue film scoring were changed in 2002 when Patti Austin came to Berklee to recruit background vocalists for an Ella Fitzgerald tribute tour. Ziman toured with Austin for 18 months, causing her subsequent compositional style to draw heavily from jazz vocalists such as Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan.  She met Esperanza Spalding through the Patti Austin band and Spalding eventually played bass in Ziman's first band while still attending Berklee.

Ziman met Lucius drummer and fellow student Dan Molad and Esperanza Spalding at a party during their final semester at Berklee, and they began performing together shortly afterward. Esperanza Spalding left the band soon after and Guitarist Pete Lalish (Lucius), another Berklee student, later joined the band after Ziman saw him performing at a Boston bar and invited him to collaborate. After Ziman and Molad completed their studies, the band moved to Brooklyn in early 2005. Using Molad's home studio, the band financed, recorded and produced an EP, Elizabeth & The Catapult in 2006. The band was the featured Billboard Underground Artist for October 2006, and signed with Verve Records in 2008.

Taller Children
Having been popular on New York's Lower East Side, the band achieved a measure of national notoriety in the spring of 2009 with their first album under Verve, Taller Children. The band chose to travel to Omaha, Nebraska to record the album in the studio of Mike Mogis. Elizabeth wrote all the songs on the album with the exception of the Leonard Cohen cover "Everybody Knows," and several of the tracks were derived from demos recorded previously in Molad's home studio. The album was recorded quickly, and the band returned to New York shortly thereafter and released the album in June 2009.

The Other Side of Zero
In 2009, Ziman was commissioned by John Schaefer of NPR's Soundcheck to write a song cycle for a Lincoln Center show. Having gone through a band breakup, Ziman turned to Leonard Cohen's poetry collection Book of Longing. Ziman and Molad, now working as a duo, recorded demos for much of the new album, The Other Side of Zero, at Molad's father's home in Austin, Texas, before following their record label's suggestion of working with a producer. Molad suggested Tony Berg, and the band moved into the studio to complete the album.
With the departure of Pete Lalish, guitar parts on the new album were covered by Berg and by Blake Mills. The title track features Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, who had visited the studio during recording and chose to participate after Ziman encouraged them to listen to the track. The album was released in October 2010.

Like It Never Happened
In 2014 she performed at Madison Square Garden opening for Sara Bareilles and wrote music with Ben Folds. In 2014, Like it Never Happened was released by 30 Tigers and produced by Dan Molad, Peter Lalish and Paul Loren with string arrangements by Rob Moose. In 2015, Like it Never Happened was nominated for best album, best song, and best video by The 14th Annual Independent Music Awards and "Someday Soon" won the award in the "Folk/Singer-Songwriter Song" category.

Keepsake
Keepsake, the fourth album from Elizabeth & the Catapult and the first on Compass Records, was released on October 20, 2017. It was produced by Dan Molad, Richard Swift and Elizabeth Ziman.

sincerely, e
On December 8, 2020, Elizabeth and the Catapult announced their fifth studio album sincerely, e on Flood Magazine,
as well as sharing an early preview of the first single "pop the placebo". The album was entirely recorded and inspired during the ongoing quarantine of the COVID-19 pandemic, and was released on March 5, 2021 via Compass Records.

References

External links

Elizabeth and the Catapult's Official Website
Elizabeth and the Catapult make an appearance on Radio Happy Hour

Musical groups established in 2004
Indie pop groups from New York (state)
Thirty Tigers artists

Elizabeth & the Catapult


John Zysman (born 1946) is a professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley and co-founder of the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy (BRIE).  Professor Zysman received his B.A at Harvard and his Ph.D. at MIT. He has written extensively on European and Japanese policy and corporate strategy; his interests also include comparative politics, Western European politics, political economy and energy policy.

Zysman's 1987 publication, Manufacturing Matters: The Myth of the Post-Industrial Economy (with Stephen S. Cohen), was identified by Business Week as one of the year's top ten books. Since his book Manufacturing Matters, Zysman has significantly redefined the understanding of how different sectors interact in the global division of labor, and how technology dynamics and political economy link. This has made him a key advisor and frequent speaker to governments, non-governmental organizations and corporations in Europe, Asia and the US on how to deal with globalization and how to enhance competitiveness.

Zysman has been a member of the Steering Committee, University of California Industry-University Cooperative Research Program.  He has been on the Editorial Boards: The New Political Economy; Industrial and Corporate Change; Industry and Innovation.  He was a member of the Faculty Executive Board, Clausen Center for International Business and Policy, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley.  He is also Council Member, Council on Foreign Relations and Council Member, Pacific Council on International Policy.  Previously, Zysman has served on the Director's Advisory Board, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Industrial Advisory Board, Los Alamos National Laboratories and Scientific Board, Centre d'Etudes Prospectives et d'Informations Internationales.

Published books include
Governments, Markets, and Growth: Finance and the Politics of Industrial Change (Cornell University Press, 1983)
American Industry in International Competition: Government Policies And Corporate Strategies (Cornell University Press, 1984)
Manufacturing Matters: The Myth of the Post-Industrial Economy (Basic Books, 1987)
The Highest Stakes: The Economic Foundations of the Next Security System (Oxford University Press, 1992)
The Tunnel at the End of the Light: Business Networks and Market Development in Russia (Copenhagen Business School Press, 1998)
Enlarging Europe: The Industrial Foundations of a New Political Reality (Copenhagen Business School Press, 1998)
Tracking a Transformation: E-Commerce and the Terms of Competition in Industries (Brookings Press, June 2001)
The Politics of Greed: How Privatization Structured Politics in Central and Eastern Europe  (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006)
How Revolutionary Was the Digital Revolution? National Responses, Market Transitions, and Global Technology (Stanford Business Books), (2006)
For a full list of publications, see Zysman's CV on the Berkeley Faculty website.

Notes

American political scientists
Harvard University alumni
Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni
University of California, Berkeley College of Letters and Science faculty
1946 births
Living people

John Zysman


In chemistry, the burn rate (or burning rate) is a measure of the linear combustion rate of a compound or substance such as a candle or a solid propellant. It is measured in length over time, such as millimeters per second or inches per second. Among the variables affecting burn rate are pressure and temperature. Burn rate is an important parameter, especially in propellants, because it determines the rate at which exhaust gases are generated from the burning propellant, which decides the flow rate through the nozzle. The thrust generated in the rocket of a missile depends on this flow rate. Thus, knowing the burn rate of a propellant and how it changes under various conditions is of fundamental importance in the successful design of a solid rocket motor. The concept of burn rate is also relevant in case of liquid propellants.

Measurement
One device for measuring the burning rate is a V-shaped metal channel about 1–2 feet long wherein a sample is placed, with a cross-sectional dimension of approximately 6  mm or 1/4in. The sample is ignited on one end, and time is measured until the flame front reaches the other. Burn rate (typically expressed in mm/s or in/s) is the sample length over time at a given pressure and temperature. For solid fuel propellant, the most common method of measuring burn rate is the Crawford Type Strand Burning Rate Bomb System (also known as the Crawford Burner or Strand Burner), as described in MIL-STD-286C.

Characterization
A substance is characterized by a burn rate vs. pressure chart and burn rate vs temperature chart.
 Higher burn rate than the speed of sound in the material (usually several km/s): "detonation"
 A few meters per second: "deflagration"
 A few centimeters per second: "burn" or "smolder"
 0.01 mm/s to 100 mm/s: "decomposing rapidly" to characterise it.

However, there is a difference in opinion in differentiating the three in the absence of firm numbers at a given pressure or temperature.

See also
 Detonation velocity

References

Combustion
Temporal rates

Burn rate (chemistry)


Stratēlatēs (, "driver/leader of the army") was a Greek term designating a general, which also became an honorary dignity in the Byzantine Empire. In the former sense, it was often applied to military saints, such as Theodore Stratelates.

In the late Roman/early Byzantine Empire, the title was used, along with the old-established stratēgos, to translate into Greek the office of magister militum ("master of the soldiers"). In the 6th century, however, Novel 90 of Emperor Justinian I () attests the existence of a middle-ranking honorific title of stratēlatēs, which ranked alongside the apo eparchōn ("former prefect"). A prōtostratēlatēs ("first stratēlatēs") Theopemptos is attested in a 7th-century seal, likely indicating the senior-most dignitary among the entire class of the stratēlatai. This stratēlasia was a purely honorary dignity, attached to no office, and declined measurably in prestige during the 7th and 8th centuries: sigillographic evidence shows that it came to be held by the lower rung of the imperial bureaucracy, such as kommerkiarioi (customs supervisors), kouratores (supervisors of imperial establishments) and notarioi (imperial secretaries). By the late 9th century, it ranked at the bottom of the hierarchy of imperial dignities (along with the apo eparchōn), as attested in the 899 Klētorologion of Philotheos. The Klētorologion also records that the dignity was conferred by the award of a codicil or diploma (Greek: χάρτης), retaining 6th-century practice. In the 10th-11th centuries, the term returned to its original military meaning, being used for senior generals, including the commanders-in-chief (the Domestics of the Schools) of East and West.

At the same time, however, the presence of a tagma (professional standing regiment) called the Stratēlatai is attested in Asia Minor in the late 10th century, formed by Emperor John I Tzimiskes ().

See also

References

Sources

Byzantine court titles
Byzantine army
Byzantine military offices
Greek words and phrases

Stratelates


Domenico Maria Ferrabosco (14 February 1513 – February 1574) was an Italian composer and singer of the Renaissance, and the eldest musician in a large prominent family from Bologna.  He spent his career both in Bologna and Rome.  His surviving music is all vocal, consisting of madrigals and motets, although he is principally known for his madrigals, which musicologist Alfred Einstein compared favorably to those of his renowned contemporary Cipriano de Rore.

Life

Born in Bologna, Domenico was one of four sons of Annibale Ferrabosco, members of a distinguished Bolognese family whose genealogical records date back to the middle of the 15th century.  Domenico is the first of the family known to be a musician.  Little is known about his early life.  He was a singer at the cathedral of San Petronio, and by 1540 had established a high enough reputation for his various musical activities that the city officials gave him a lifetime stipend to oversee the palace musicians.

Sometime in the 1540s he went to Rome, and he became magister puerorum (director of the boy's choir) for the Julian Chapel in 1546.  However, due to family obligations he returned to Bologna in 1547, and became maestro di cappella (choir director) at San Petronio, the church where he had previously been a singer, in 1548.  The Bolognese Senate also granted him a non-musical position, Regulator et scriba campionis creditorum Montis portarum.  He moved back to Rome in 1550, where he was appointed to be cantore pontificio (singer in the papal chapel) on 27 November, although he did not begin performing the duties of this position until April 1551.  Palestrina was one of the other composers and singers working in the principal Roman chapels at that time, and the two of them, along with all the other married singers, were removed from their posts, on pension, in September 1555 under an edict by the new Pope Paul IV, who decided to more rigidly enforce the rule on celibacy for his musicians than had his predecessors. Ferrabosco probably did not go back to Bologna after this, but instead went to Paris with his family, where three of his sons – including Alfonso, who was to become a renowned musician in England much later – enjoyed the patronage of the influential Cardinal of Lorraine, Charles de Guise.

By 1570 Ferrabosco was back in Bologna taking care of his estate, arranging for succession of his Senate-granted scribal position to his eldest son, and making out his will, which was dated 1573.  He died in February 1574 in Bologna; by this time his most famous son, Alfonso, was making a name for himself in England.

Music
Ferrabosco published only one book of his works, a large collection of 45 madrigals for four voices in 1542 (by Antonio Gardano in Venice).  They were similar in style to the early madrigals by Jacques Arcadelt, Philippe Verdelot, and Costanzo Festa.  Alfred Einstein praised the book, saying of Ferrabosco's art:  "His work lasts, because he has access to a form of expression which was completely closed to Cipriano de Rore, namely the expression of the graceful and the attractive."  Regarding the music itself he adds:  "...homophony is enlivened by light polyphony and reflects a noble sentimentality which is not easily disturbed in its spiritual equilibrium."  Unlike Rore, who was the most innovative madrigalist of mid-century, as well as one of the most famous, Ferrabosco was content to write in the style of the pioneers of the 1530s, such as Verdelot, in a light and graceful manner, avoiding the chromaticism and expressive intensity that defined the mid-century madrigal.  Yet his music appears alongside Rore's, for example in that composer's second madrigal book for five voices (1544) which includes Ferrabosco's setting of the sonnet Più d'alto Pin ch'in mezz'un'orto sia.

Some of his music shows the influence of the contemporary French chanson, for example a strambotto he set prior to 1554, in the collection De diversi autori il quarto libro de Madrigali a quattro voci a note bianche indicates a possible connection with a set of chansons published in 1548 in Lyon by Dominique Phinot, both in its subject matter, rhythm, and sonority.

As texts for his madrigals, Ferrabosco preferred love lyrics, including works by Petrarch, Pietro Bembo, Ludovico Ariosto, and others; many of the poets remain anonymous.

By far Ferrabosco's most famous composition was the madrigal Io mi son giovinetta, a ballata from Boccaccio's Decameron (Neifile's song from the end of the ninth day), a madrigal which became so extraordinarily popular that it appeared in dozens of madrigal prints for the next hundred years, matching the popularity of Jacques Arcadelt's Il bianco e dolce cigno.  It appeared in the 1542 anthology Primo libro d'i Madrigali de diversi eccellentissimi autori a misura di breve, along with the works of many other composers; Palestrina used it as the basis for a mass for four voices, presumably after making Ferrabosco's acquaintance in Rome; he published the mass in 1570.  Vincenzo Galilei, father of the astronomer, arranged it for lute, and its last known reprint dates from 1654.

In addition to his madrigals, Ferrabosco wrote motets, some of which appear in anthologies.  He wrote a five-voice setting of Ascendens Christus as well as a five-voice setting of Usquequo, Domine.  Ferrabosco's complete works are available in an edition by R. Charteris in Corpus mensurabilis musicae, vol. 102 (1992).

References

Further reading
 Alfred Einstein, The Italian Madrigal.  Three volumes.  Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1949.
 Gustave Reese, Music in the Renaissance.  New York, W.W. Norton & Co., 1954.

Italian classical composers
Italian male classical composers
Renaissance composers
1513 births
1573 deaths
Madrigal composers

Domenico Ferrabosco


Arturo Guzmán Decena (13 January 1976 – 21 November 2002), also known by his code name Z-1, was a Mexican Army Special Forces officer and high-ranking member of Los Zetas, a criminal group based in Tamaulipas. He defected from the military in 1997 and formed Los Zetas, the Gulf Cartel's former paramilitary wing, under the leadership of the kingpin Osiel Cárdenas Guillén.

Guzmán Decena was born in a poor family in Puebla and joined the military as a teenager to escape from poverty. While in the military, he was a talented and bright soldier, earning a position in the Special Forces of the Mexican military by the mid-1990s. During his military career, Guzmán Decena received counter-insurgency training, acquired skills in explosives, and learned how to track down and apprehend his enemies from an elite combat group trained by the U.S. Special Forces and the Israel Defense Forces.

He began to take bribes from the Gulf Cartel while still serving in the military, but eventually defected to work full-time for the criminal organization in 1997. For years he recruited other members of the Mexican Armed Forces to form Los Zetas.

He served as the right-hand man of Cárdenas Guillén until 21 November 2002, when he was gunned down and killed by the Mexican Army Special Forces in the border city of Matamoros, Tamaulipas.

Biography

Career and military defection
Guzmán Decena was born in a poor village in Puebla, Mexico on 13 January 1976, and finished middle school and high school before joining the Mexican military to escape poverty. His talents and aggressive behavior earned him a position with an elite Mexican military group called Grupo Aeromóvil de Fuerzas Especiales (GAFE), originally trained in counter-insurgency tactics for the Zapatista uprising in 1994 and for locating and apprehending members of Mexico's drug trafficking organizations. Guzmán Decena reportedly received military training from the Israeli special forces. His training came into practice after more than 3,000 Zapatista rebels seized several towns across the southern state of Chiapas in 1994. The rebellion was a symbolic rising against poverty and the single-party rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), and many rebels took arms; the Mexican government, however, sent in the GAFE to put down the Zapatistas. Within hours, 34 rebels were killed and three others were captured by Guzmán Decena's counter-insurgency group. Their bodies were then disposed on a riverbank – with their ears and noses sliced off.

Now one of the brightest, highly trained, and bloodiest members in the GAFE, Guzmán Decena was sent to the northern state of Tamaulipas. While operating as the security chief in the city of Miguel Alemán, Tamaulipas, he was recruited by Cárdenas Guillén's cartel. Investigators say that Guzmán Decena first worked with the Gulf Cartel by taking bribes from Osiel Cárdenas Guillén and turning a blind eye on the drug shipments of the cartel. Such payments were typical among military commanders, but while soldiers had often accepted bribes from the drug lords, it was not common for them to defect from the army and join their ranks. Bribes were seen by soldiers as "benefits" to their job, and officers stood firm to the idea that they were protectors of the Mexican people. Guzmán Decena, however, shattered that model and left the military in 1997 to work full-time with a drug trafficking organization. According to the British journalist, Ioan Grillo, it is still unclear why Guzmán Decena defected from the army to become a "narco-mercenary." A common explanation is that Guzmán Decena left the military in search of a higher payment, seeing that many cartel members lived ostentatiously and earned more in a year than a GAFE member earned in a lifetime. Nonetheless, he would have also lived comfortably as a successful GAFE member in the army. And by joining the Gulf cartel, he was becoming a fugitive and increasing his chances of being arrested or killed. Hence, a crucial factor in his defection may have been the seismic change of Mexico's transition to democracy and the tearing rule of the PRI. The "new Mexico" and the democracy that came with it was feared by many soldiers who had made abuses during the old regime. Mounting pressures arose from the families of the "disappeared" who made marches in Mexico City, and many military officers were found guilty in courts-martial for human right abuses and corruption. For years, some military generals took bribes from the cartels; amid the turmoil, Guzmán Decena acknowledged that he was better off outside the system and as a leader of Los Zetas.

Cárdenas Guillén then asked Guzmán Decena to help him recruit and set up the most ferocious hit squad possible for his cartel. Mexican federal agents later released the conversation between the two after an informant passed on the information of the new unit:

Following the orders, Guzmán Decena recruited dozens of soldiers from the Mexican military. Some media outlets report that the formation of Los Zetas was the result of a "mass defection" of a single army unit. But military records show that this claim is false and inaccurate. Soldiers left their ranks and joined Los Zetas over some months and were from a number of different military units, but a number of GAFE soldiers made up a large part of the deserters. The members were given a codename with the letter Z, starting with Guzmán Decena with Z-1. Within some months, Guzmán Decena commanded a mercenary army of 38 defected soldiers enticed by salaries substantially higher than those paid by the Mexican government. The GAFE soldiers that went to work with the Gulf cartel took with them a number of the Mexican Army's most sophisticated machine guns, assault rifles, pistols, bazookas, grenades, and telecommunications and surveillance equipment. The role of Los Zetas was soon expanded by "collecting debts, securing cocaine supply and trafficking routes known as 'plazas,' and executing its foes – often with grotesque savagery."

Gómez Herrera's execution
Once Juan García Ábrego, the founder of the Gulf cartel, was imprisoned in 1996, Ángel Salvador Gómez Herrera (a.k.a. El Chava) sought to take over the assets of the criminal organization along with Cárdenas Guillén. At first, both of them functioned well together: they bought off police officers, bribed politicians and soldiers, and managed to take control of major drug shipments coming in from Guatemala. Although supposedly Cárdenas Guillén's equal, Gómez Herrera's manipulative personality annoyed Guillén, especially after Herrera's constant requests for money loans. Such behavior offended Cárdenas Guillén, who assembled his own faction within the Gulf Cartel. But in mid-1999, Osiel Cárdenas Guillén, after his daughter's baptism ceremony, ordered Guzmán Decena to execute Gómez Herrera, the godfather of Cárdenas Guillén's baby. Gómez Herrera was cordially invited to ride in Cárdenas Guillén's Dodge Durango after the ceremony. They exchanged laughs and talked for a few minutes. Guzmán Decena, who was riding in the back seat of the truck, fired a bullet into Gómez Herrera's head. Investigators later found Herrera's decaying dead body at the outskirts of the city of Matamoros, Tamaulipas. For killing Gómez Herrera, Cárdenas Guillén earned his nickname, the Mata Amigos ("Friend Killer"), and Guzmán Decena, the trust of his boss.

Death
Guzmán Decena was shot dead by Mexican soldiers inside a restaurant on 22 November 2002 in Matamoros, Tamaulipas after being spotted by the Mexican military. Another account written by Jesús Blancornelas indicates that Guzmán Decena went to a restaurant, had a few strong drinks, snorted a line of cocaine, and then decided to visit his mistress Ana Bertha González Lagunes, who lived a few blocks away. In order to not be interrupted, Guzmán Decena reportedly ordered his henchmen to block the street and direct traffic. Nonetheless, one of the neighbors called an anti-organized crime agency which called on the Mexican Army. When the soldiers arrived, Guzmán Decena was unable to defend himself and was shot to death.

After his death, flowers in his honor were placed on the sidewalk outside the restaurant and at his gravesite. According to the photos published by the local newspapers in Matamoros, a note accompanied the flowers and read the following:

Similarly, memorials were placed in the state of Oaxaca to venerate Guzmán Decena.

In an apparent revenge for Guzmán Decena's assassination, four members of the Office of the General Prosecutor were abducted and murdered near Reynosa, Tamaulipas in early 2003, allegedly by Cárdenas Guillén's men. Less than four months after Guzmán Decena's death, the Mexican military captured the Gulf cartel's kingpin, Osiel Cárdenas Guillén, on 14 March 2003. The second-in-command in Los Zetas, Rogelio González Pizaña (a.k.a.: Z2), was captured in October 2004 and so Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano (a.k.a.: Z3) ascended to the leadership of the paramilitary gang, and who will become the infamous ruthless leader of the, now independent, Zetas Drug Cartel.

The death of Guzmán Decena marked the first significant success of the Mexican government against Los Zetas, but unconfirmed reports from within the organization claim that Guzmán Decena was killed by "his own men" on orders by Cárdenas Guillén, who feared Guzmán Decena's hegemony.

See also
Mexican Drug War

References

Bibliography

People of the Mexican Drug War
Deaths by firearm in Mexico
Los Zetas
Gulf Cartel members
1976 births
2002 deaths
Mexican drug traffickers
People from Puebla
Founding members of Los Zetas

Arturo Guzmán Decena


Colesbukta is a bay at the southern side of Isfjorden, in Nordenskiöld Land at  Spitsbergen, Svalbard. The bay is about 4.5 kilometer wide. A railway for coal transport was earlier operated between Grumantbyen and shipment facilities in Colesbukta. The valley Colesdalen debouches into Colesbukta.

The cabin built by the Russian geologist Vladimir Rusanov in 1912 at the entrance to Colesbukta has been turned into a small self-guided museum. Other buildings and facilities in the old Soviet settlement remain abandoned.

References

Bays of Spitsbergen

Colesbukta