Mahila Milan (Hindi: 'women together') is a self-organised, decentralised collective of female pavement dwellers in Bombay. The group works with issues such as housing, sanitation, and grassroots lending schemes. It aims at gaining women equal recognition for improvement of their communities, while indulging in important decision making activities. The loans granted by the group to its members in times of need, are sanctioned in the name of the woman of the house.

Mahila Milan call the 2% interest charged levied, a two rupees 'service charge' on every hundred rupees. For their recovery process, the women visit the house of the loan defaulter. If it looks like they really are in no position to return the loan, they give them another loan to get them back on their feet and ensure that with the second loan the family stays afloat. If the man of the house dies or is suddenly bedridden with sickness, they write off the loan. These women, who have seen more than enough of their share of grief, are quick to empathise and act.

History
Mahila Milan was formed in the 1980s, when the National Slum Dwellers Federation (NSDF) agreed to help create a sister organisation complementary to its own, to encourage more women to enter leadership roles in slum development and poverty alleviation, with the assistance of Sheela Patel and her group SPARC. Community-based organizations, Mahila Milan and the NSDF, alongside the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centers (SPARC), have been working together since the mid-1980s to improve the housing situation of pavement dwellers in Byculla, an area in central Mumbai. When these three organizations came together to form what is known as the Alliance, pavement dwellers were amongst the worst of inhabitants in the city. Although physically quite visible on the streets, pavement dwellers were entirely invisible in public policy. They could not obtain ration cards, which are identity cards that grant citizens the right to schooling and access to subsidized food, nor could they gain access to basic services like water, sanitation, and electricity. Pavement dwellers, unlike slum dwellers, were also excluded from electoral rolls and any official census taken in the city and throughout the country.

Mahila Milan was formed largely in response to a 1985 Supreme Court ruling that granted the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai authority to demolish household structures on the sidewalks of Mumbai.  These were the homes of those known popularly as "pavement dwellers".  Many NGOs and community-based organizations planned mass action to confront these demolitions, however SPARC activists found that women from pavement settlements did not want confrontation and preferred to work out a way to coexist with the rest of the people in the city.

A survey carried out by SPARC between July and October 1985 found that pavement dwellers were not transient populations, but people who had lived for over two decades in the city.  This was documented and published in We The Invisible, which detailed the background of these people from the poorest districts of India – victims of underdevelopment, communal violence, floods, famines and other crises.  There were no evictions, and by March 1987 Mahila Milan was established to help poor illiterate women in each settlement understand the politics of why they cannot get land in the city for their house, and to develop a strategy to present to the city.

In 1992, leaders of the emerging South African Homeless People's Federation went to Mumbai to participate in a survey and housing exhibition. This fuelled the participation of Mahila Milan and NSDF leaders to visit Durban. There, they conducted the first training for community leaders from five settlements in Piesang River. What started with a survey, ended with a housing exhibition.

The alliance formed by the South African Federation and Mahila Milan, along with federations having similar goals, from more than 30 countries, are now united under the umbrella organisation of Shack/Slum Dwellers International (SDI). Among their many shared practices and objectives, these central hands-on housing design and development processes continue to explore and promise a sector house in the city. SDI gained much more exposure than ever before in the year 2001 when it took a 36-member international team to New York. at the United Nations governing council meetings, the team built a full-size house model and a community toilet block in the UN building. Although merely five or six years old, the SDI was on its path to pave a way for the urban poor to gain recognition globally and stake their claim in the global habitat-linked discussions. Members of SDI, were however disappointed as only a few cared about what the urban poor had to say in the formal proceedings. Kofi Annan, then the head of the UN, spent over half an hour with the SDI delegation and, before SDI really understood branding and imagery, the house model exhibition in the UN made it known throughout the global community, as delegation after delegation had its pictures taken in front of the SDI house or toilet model.

Programs
Assisted by the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres (SPARC), Mahila Milan runs a number of programs.  These include:

 Milan Nagar, a cooperative designed to seek alternative siting for their housing;
 Opening bank accounts establishing saving schemes to assist women towards purchasing new homes
 Providing each family with essential food and clothing
 Dealing with crises, such as the provision of emergency loans, or assisting with police-related problems.

Crisis credit scheme
When six pavement dweller groups completed a project in 1987 building shelter for themselves, they realised they needed more than housing. Therefore they created a crisis credit scheme, in which every person contributes 1 or 2 rupees and anyone can borrow a sum when they need it. One year later Mahila Milan was instructing groups across India on how to set up such a scheme and in 1989 the groups were lending to each other. By 2001, there were 25,000 households in the scheme and 5,000 borrowers.

Since most of the women were illiterate, Mahila Milan teaches a system where everyone has a pouch in which different coloured pieces of paper represent their savings. The smallest unit is 15 households, all of which know and trust each other. Each group makes its own decisions about lending.

Housing
Mahila Milan have been active in advocating the earmarking of vacant land for the homeless, and designing strategy to help the poor into their own homes.  The organisation became a model for other NSDF-affiliated organisations between 1985 and 1995, providing principles and frameworks to form the basis of discussions between informal settlements and cities.  In 1995, the government of Maharashtra integrated pavement dwellers for the first time into the classifications of households entitled to land for relocation in the Slum Rehabilitation Act.

In Dharavi, Mumbai's biggest slum, women joined Mahila Milan and asked for land to build permanent homes on. They designed and built the houses to suit their budget.

Sanitation
Mahila Milan negotiates with local administrations for women to be able to build their own sanitation units in their own local area. As of 2016, the group has facilitated the construction of 100 toilet blocks.

References

Further reading
 "Mahila Milan article in Crossover India Magazine"

Organisations based in Mumbai
Slums in India
Women's organisations based in India
1980s establishments in Maharashtra

Mahila Milan


Balderic of Cleves (Oldenzaal, 897 – Utrecht, 27 December 975) was a long-reigning and influential Bishop of Utrecht from 918 to 975.

Although his father is only known from one document associating him with Betuwe, and his grave in his son's bishopric in Utrecht, the necrologium of Egmond in Utrecht calls his father count of Cleves (comes clivensis) and the necrologium of the Plechelmusbasilica in Oldenzaal, founded by Balderic, calls Balderic himself "Balderic of Cleves", "de clivis". Jongbloed (2006) argues that although the style of the title seems to be from a later generation, it should not be ignored. He also points to other evidence that the family had associations with the area, which was then referred to as the Duffelgau or Tubelgau.

Balderic was a cousin of Duke Gilbert of Lorraine and the uncle of Bishop Balderic of Liège. He was the son of Count Ricfried in the Betuwe, who expelled the Vikings from Utrecht, after which Balderic, who like his immediate predecessors had resided in Deventer, was able to move the bishopric back to Utrecht.

In Utrecht, Balderic repaired the forerunner of the Cathedral of Utrecht, St. Martin, and rebuilt the St. Salvator Church, which had been destroyed by the Normans, as well as the convent school that was attached to the Cathedral Chapter. Under his influence, Utrecht became the most important city in the northern Netherlands and he expanded the power of the local diocese so that it could maintain itself between the surrounding counties. This was achieved through his support of the German king, who granted him possessions in return.

Balderic was very successful in this policy: in 923 he formed close relations with the German King Henry I (919-936), who in return entrusted Balderic with the education of his four-year-old son Bruno, future archbishop of Cologne.

Because of this, Balderic also kept close contact with Henry's other son and successor, King Otto I (936-973). He belonged to the Lorrainian lords that sided with Otto in his struggle with his sons in 953. In exchange, Otto granted Balderic the right of coinage in Utrecht, as well as the trade settlement Muiden including the important toll. Furthermore, he acquired hunting rights in Drenthe, and several possessions in the Gau (country subdivision) Lek and IJssel.

Balderic collected relic for the churches in Utrecht. These included the relics of saint Odulf for the St. Salvator Church and relics of saints Agnes and Pontian for the St. Martin's Church. In 954 he had the relics of Plechelm transferred Church that he had rebuilt in Oldenzaal.

Balderic was the first bishop of Utrecht to be buried in the Cathedral of Saint-Martin. In 1481, an important part of his remains from Utrecht were moved to the St. Plechelmusbasilica in Oldenzaal and buried there, probably as a tribute to the founder of its chapter. The tombstone of that year is preserved and built into the west wall of the south aisle of the St. Plechelmusbasiliek.

References

Jongbloed, Hein H., (2006), "Immed "von Kleve" (um 950) – Das erste Klevische Grafenhaus (ca. 885-ca. 1015) als Vorstufe des geldrischen Fürstentums", Annalen des Historischen Vereins für den Niederrhein, Heft 209

897 births
975 deaths
Bishops of Utrecht
10th-century bishops in Lotharingia
People from Oldenzaal
Burials at St. Martin's Cathedral, Utrecht
Medieval Dutch nobility

Balderic of Utrecht


The black sea bass (Centropristis striata) is a species of marine ray-finned fish, a sea bass from the subfamily Serraninae which is part of the family Serranidae, which also includes the groupers and anthias. It is found in the western Atlantic Ocean, where it is an important species for commercial and recreational fisheries.

Description
The black sea bass has an oblong, laterally compressed body. It has a large mouth, armed with bands of teeth on the jaw and with a triangular patch of teeth in the front part roof of the mouth and more teeth along the sides of that area, the mouth extending as far as below the middle of the eye. The preopercle has fine serrations on its margin and is evenly rounded, while the gill cover bears three flat spines. The dorsal fin has ten spines, the front spines being longer than the rearmost, and 11 soft rays. The membranes between the spines of the dorsal fin are deeply notched. The anal fin has three spines and seven soft rays. The caudal fin has three lobes created by the long and pointed upper, middle and lower rays. The colour pattern is normally smoky grey, dusky brown or blue-black on the back and upper body, fading towards the underside. In the middle of each scale there is a pale blue to white spot and these form longitudinal stripes along the back and flanks. The dorsal fin has a series of white spots and bands along its length. The flanks can frequently appear mottled or have dark and light vertical barring. In the breeding season the males develop bright fluorescent blue and green around the eyes and nape and a hump on the head contrasting with the paler and duller females which are brownish or blue-grey in colour. The juveniles are found in four colour phases; the first is an overall light grey phase which has small dark spots, there is a dark phase which has pale white spots, a striped phase with a longitudinal dark stripe and a barred phase which has six vertical bars. This species attains a maximum total length of , however they are normally found at a total length of around , and a maximum published weight of .

Distribution
The black sea bass is found in the western Atlantic Ocean from Nova Scotia south along the eastern coast of North America as far as the Florida Keys and into the Gulf of Mexico as far as Louisiana where the western limit is just to the west of the Mississippi Delta.

Habitat and biology
The black sea bass is commonly found in the vicinity of rock jetties and over rocky substrates in shallow water, although they have also been recorded in deeper, offshore waters to depths of . They spend most of their time near the bottom where they frequently aggregate around features on the bottom such as piles of rocks, wrecks and man-made structures. It is often encountered resting in either a head-down or head-up position. Normally the dorsal fin is folded down but will be raised and spread out as an aggressive signal to other members of its own species. The juveniles remain in the protected estuarine waters where they are found around man-made structures, wrecks and over shell substrates. This species is a slow growing fish and they reach sexual maturity at between one and three years old. They are protogynous hermaphrodites, the majority of them begin life as females and then change to males. The stimulus for the change is not known but it is thought that the largest females change sex in response to a shortage of males within a spawning group. These fishes spawn from January to July with the smaller females producing as few as 30,000 eggs while the larger females can produce 500,000 eggs. Their eggs are pelagic and have a diameter of 0.9-1.0mm. They hatch 75 hours after laying, in water temperatures of . The larvae are pelagic until they grow to around  in length when they change to a demersal or estuarine habit. They are a predatory species with a rather catholic diet which includes crabs, shrimps, barnacles, worms, tunicates, small fish and bivalves. They are also preyed on by larger fish and their known predators include monkfish (Lophius americanus), spotted hake (Urophycis regia), summer flounder (Paralichthys dentatus), striped bass (Morone saxatilis), bluefish (Pomatomus saltatrix), weakfish (Cynoscion regalis), little skate (Leucoraja erinacea), spiny dogfish (Squalus acanthias), bignose shark (Carcharhinus altimus) and dusky shark (Carcharhinus obscurus). Females live to around 8 years of age while males can live to 12 years old.

Taxonomy
The black sea bass was first formally described as Labrus striatus by Carolus Linnaeus in the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae published in 1758, Linnaeus gave the type locality as America. When the French anatomist and zoologist Georges Cuvier created the genus Centropristis he used Bloch and Schneider's 1801 Coryphaenus nigrescens as the type species for the new genus, this is a synonym of Linnaeus's Labrus striatus so the black sea bass is the type species of the genus Centropristis. The generic name is a compound of the Greek words kentron meaning "a saw" and pristis which means "sting".

Utilisation
Black sea bass are highly sought after by recreational and commercial fisherman, There are two populations identified for fisheries management. NOAA Fisheries, the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council, and the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission cooperate in the management of the black sea bass fishery in the seas north of Cape Hatteras in North Carolina while NOAA Fisheries and the  South Atlantic Fishery Management Council manage the fishery south of Cape Hatteras. Management includes catch limits, permits and a close season. This species has lean, white flesh which has a relatively firm texture, breaks into small flakes and has a delicate flavour. These small size of most of the fish available means that they are often cooked whole. They are caught using otter trawls, hook and line and in pots or traps. They have shown some promise in aquaculture but have not been farmed commercially yet. In sheltered environments the black sea bass can attain a high growth rate but this does not lead to long-term survival of their populations.

References

 McClane, A. J. (1978). McClane's Field Guide to Saltwater Fishes of North America.

External links
 Black Sea Bass – South Carolina Department of Natural Resources
 Black Sea Bass – North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries
 Black Sea Bass – South Atlantic Fishery Management Council
 Black Sea Bass – Chefs of Carolina
 Black Sea Bass – Chefs Resources
 Black Sea Bass – Food Choice

black sea bass
Commercial fish
Fauna of the Southeastern United States
Fish of the Eastern United States
black sea bass
black sea bass

Black sea bass


A quasi-satellite is an astronomical object that crosses a planet's orbit during its own orbit.

A quasi-satellite's orbit around the Sun takes exactly the same time as the planet's orbit. Its eccentricity is different from the eccentricity of the planet. The orbits of quasi-satellites are unstable and over time they will break free from the planet's gravity.

Astronomical objects

Quasi-satellite


Atmospheric noise is radio noise caused by natural atmospheric processes, primarily lightning discharges in thunderstorms. On a worldwide scale, there are about 40 lightning flashes per second – ≈3.5 million lightning discharges per day.

History

In 1925, AT&T Bell Laboratories started investigating the sources of noise in its transatlantic radio telephone service.

Karl Jansky, a 22-year-old researcher, undertook the task. By 1930, a radio antenna for a wavelength of 14.6 meters was constructed in Holmdel, NJ, to measure the noise in all directions. Jansky recognized three sources of radio noise. The first (and strongest) source was local thunderstorms. The second source was weaker noise from more distant thunderstorms. The third source was a still weaker hiss that turned out to be galactic noise from the center of the Milky Way. Jansky's research made him the father of radio astronomy.

In early 1950s, a mathematical model of the impact of lightning and thunderstorms on broadcasting was published by S. V. C. Aiya

Lightning

Atmospheric noise is radio noise caused by natural atmospheric processes, primarily lightning discharges in thunderstorms. It is mainly caused by cloud-to-ground flashes as the current is much stronger than that of cloud-to-cloud flashes. On a worldwide scale, 3.5 million lightning flashes occur daily. That means there are about 40 lightning flashes per second.

The sum of all these lightning flashes results in atmospheric noise. It can be observed, with a radio receiver, in the form of a combination of white noise (coming from distant thunderstorms) and impulse noise (coming from a near thunderstorm). The power-sum varies with seasons and nearness of thunderstorm centers.

Although lightning has a broad-spectrum emission, its noise power increases with decreasing frequency. Therefore, at very low frequency and low frequency, atmospheric noise often dominates, while at high frequency, man-made noise dominates in urban areas.

Survey
From 1960s to 1980s, a worldwide effort was made to measure the atmospheric noise and variations.  Results have been documented in CCIR Report 322.  CCIR 322 provided seasonal world maps showing the expected values of the atmospheric noise figure Fa at 1 MHz during four hour blocks of the day.  Another set of charts relates the Fa at 1 MHz to other frequencies.  CCIR Report 322 has been superseded by ITU P.372 publication.

Random number generation
Atmospheric noise and variation is also used to generate high quality random numbers. Random numbers have crucial applications in the security domain.

See also
 Radio atmospheric

Footnotes

References

Noise (electronics)

Atmospheric noise


Punchbowl Bus Company (PBC) is an Australian bus company. It operates bus services in Goulburn and Crookwell in the Southern Tablelands as PBC Goulburn and PBC Crookwell.

Prior to July 2023, it also operated bus services in Sydney Bus Region 5 servicing Hurstville, Roselands, Bankstown, Strathfield and surrounding suburbs.

History

Before 1960

Punchbowl Bus Co (PBC) started off as DeLuxe Bus Service run by PM (Pat) Geoghegan in 1943.
July 1943 Route 188 Punchbowl - Mortdale transferred from Boatwright.
29 April 1946 Route 29 Peakhurst - Hurstville commenced
May 1946 Route 28 Punchbowl - Hurstville transferred from Leach and Mallam
18 August 1947 route 33 Punchbowl - Hurstville commenced and route 36 Punchbowl - Mortdale split from route 188.
Late 1947 DeLuxe incorporated as Punchbowl Bus Co.
30 June 1952 Routes 28 and 33 transferred to Narwee Bus Co.
1956 Geoghehan died and Miss P Fitzpatrick took over.
January or February 1957 route 140 Riverwood - Lugarno separated from route 36.
October 1958 All routes transferred to owners of Narwee Bus Co / GP Bus Co.

GP Bus Co/Narwee Bus Co.
Owned by WH Griffin, CV Griffin and FS (Fred) Pobje. GP are the initial of Griffin and Pobje.
Buses owned by GP were signwritten Narwee Bus Co suggesting a close relation between these two entities.
Believed to have started 30 June 1952 when routes 28 and 33 were transferred from PBC to one of these entities.
11 May 1955 Routes 4 Greenacre - Bankstown, 189 Punchbowl - Bankstown and 190 Greenacre -  Punchbowl were transferred from XL Transport to GP Bus Co.
October 1958 Owners of Narwee Bus Co / GP Bus Co took over PBC adopting the Punchbowl Bus Co name and livery for the full operation but using the Narwee Bus Co depot. However between 1958 and 1992 various timetables were still issued in the Narwee/GP names.

Since 1960

By 1961, weekday routes 4 and 190 were combined to operate as route 4 between Bankstown and Punchbowl. Sunday route 190 trips between Punchbowl and Rookwood Cemetery finished up either at Easter or Anzac Day 1961.

In 1967, routes 4 and 28 were combined into route 244, operating between Bankstown and Hurstville via Chullora, Greenacre, Punchbowl and Roselands to give residents in the Greenacre/Chullora area direct access to the new Roselands Shopping Centre. Later when Punchbowl Bus Company took over route 37 Punchbowl - Bankstown, this route was integrated with route 33 Punchbowl - Hurstville to operate between Bankstown and Hurstville via Punchbowl and Roselands. During the late 1960s route 189 was extended from Punchbowl to Roselands, Riverwood and Lugarno replacing route 140, which initially operated between Riverwood and Lugarno. In January 1992, Revesby Bus & Coach Service's route 26 was replaced by an extension of route 188 from Punchbowl to Bankstown, and route 36 was amended to travel along the route of 26 at the Punchbowl end. In 1989 route 108 was purchased from Southtrans.

In August 1997, the routes were renumbered into the Sydney wide scheme, including minor changes to routes. The new routes were:
940 replacing 29 and 33
941 replacing 244
942 replacing 189
943 replacing 29 and 108
944 replacing 29 and 36
945 replacing 188

In April 1998, Punchbowl Bus Co purchased Canterbury Bus Lines with routes 450 Hurstville - Strathfield and 451 Roselands - Campsie. Route 451 was extended to Hurstville later that year when part of route 947 was acquired from Saints creating a direct service from Hurstville to Campsie. The remainder of route 947 to Ramsgate was taken over by Southtrans.

In December 2004, route 74/106 Hurstville - Kyle Bay and Connells Point was taken over from Harris Park Transport (renumbered 953) and 954 Hurstville - Hurstville Grove and Oatley from Moore's Tours. In July 2005 routes 446 Roselands Shopping Centre - Kogarah and 447 Belmore - Greenacre were taken over from Pleasure Tours.

In March 2010, Punchbowl Bus Company implemented another route numbering reconfiguration as part of the integrated transport network planning process. This was done in order to provide more frequent and direct services. As a result, routes 447 and 451 were discontinued and many of the other routes modified. Several new routes were established, including the 939, 946 and 955. Punchbowl Bus Company also introduced the S14, a new service between Lakemba and Mount Lewis.

Network changes from 26 November 2017 saw route 944 truncated to run between Bankstown and Mortdale, as well as route 450 now only running between Strathfield and Hurstville and route 946 now only running between Bankstown and Roselands. On 1 March 2018, Nightride service N20 was extended to continue into Town Hall via Sydney Airport instead of terminating at Rockdale.

Punchbowl Bus Company used to operate services in Sydney Bus Region 5 servicing Hurstville, Roselands, Bankstown, Strathfield and surrounding suburbs. Starting from 1 July 2023, these operations were transferred to U-Go Mobility. However, the company will continue to operate charter services.

Operations
The company operations are divided into three brands:
Punchbowl Bus Company - for Sydney services
PBC Goulburn
PBC Crookwell

Since 2005, Punchbowl's services have formed Sydney Bus Region 5. In August 2013, Punchbowl successfully tendered to operate Region 5 for another five years from July 2014. Punchbowl for many years also operated a coach charter operation in Sydney. This had ceased by 2012 but still carries on with local charters using existing city buses in the fleet.

In November 2008, Punchbowl purchased Goulburn Bus Service using the name PBC Goulburn followed in October 2009 by neighbouring Noack's Bus Service. The runs of Crookwell Bus Service were taken over on 20 November 2017, using the name PBC Crookwell.

In December 2022, Punchbowl Bus Company was unsuccessful in retaining all of its existing bus operations. Punchbowl Bus Company used to operate services in Sydney Bus Region 5 servicing the Hurstville, Roselands, Bankstown, Strathfield and surrounding suburbs. Starting from 1 July 2023, all operations were transferred to U-Go Mobility.  However, the company will continue to operate charter services.

Depots
Punchbowl Bus Company has two depots. The main depot located at 56 Hannans Road, Riverwood, was the original depot of the Narwee Bus Company. A secondary depot operates from 187-189 Bonds Road, Riverwood. The former secondary depot was located at 60 Belmore Road, Punchbowl and closed when the new Bonds Road depot opened. The Hannans Road depot can fit around 50 - 52 vehicles and the Bonds Road depot can fit around 23 -25 vehicles at maximum capacity.

Fleet
As of July 2022, the fleet consists of 74 buses.

Until the late 1980s, Punchbowl Bus Company were a loyal Leyland buyer. Following their withdrawal from the market, Hino, MAN, Scania and Volvos have been purchased.

Punchbowl Bus Company operated Denning and later Mercedes-Benz and MAN coaches in its charter division.

From its foundation in 1952, the fleet livery was red and cream. In 2010, the Transport for NSW white and blue livery began to be applied on the Sydney bus fleet. There is only one bus on route service which still wears the Punchbowl Bus Co. livery, m/o 809. All other vehicles in the Punchbowl Bus Co. livery are now used on charter work, train replacement etc. PBC Goulburn and PBC Crookwell fleet continues to bear the Punchbowl Bus Co. livery.

Ticketing
Since 16 July 2014, all buses used for Sydney services have been equipped to accept the Opal card ticketing system.

References

External links

Punchbowl Bus Company website
PBC Goulburn website
PBC Crookwell website
Bus Australia gallery
Showbus gallery

Bus transport in Sydney
Bus companies of New South Wales
Transport companies established in 1952
Australian companies established in 1952

Punchbowl Bus Company


David Dawood (born 31 December 1981), known professionally as DaWood, is an English DJ/producer and songwriter. He is best known for producing and co-writing the song "Good Times" by Roll Deep, which was a number one on the UK Singles Chart for 3 weeks, making it the longest reigning number one of 2010.

Career
Since the early nineties, when Dawood began making beats on his school music computers, his main passion and priority has been creating music, leading to his decision to leave college in order to raise enough funds to buy studio equipment. 2001 brought Dawood his first cut; his track "Flexin" was used on the UK boy band Blue's album 'One Love' – the album selling over 2 million copies worldwide. Dawood has worked closely with Tinchy Stryder and on his 2012 album entitled 'Full Tank', as well as having two cuts on the album, 'Bad Intentions' by Dappy.

2010-present
David Dawood is the musical architect behind 2010's dance hit "Good Times" by Roll Deep featuring Jodie Connor. The single went to Number 1 in the UK Singles Chart and held this position for 3 weeks making it the longest reigning Number 1 of 2010.

In 2011, Dawood produced two singles for recording artist Jodie Connor; "Now or Never" which was released in January 2011 and charted at Number 14 on the UK Singles Chart and was soon followed by another UK Top 40, "Bring It" featuring Tinchy Stryder.

In 2012, Dawood produced the track "Take You There" by Jodie Connor featuring Busta Rhymes and it was released on 29 July 2012. Dawood has produced the track "Come with Me" by Dappy, which will feature on his debut studio album entitled Bad Intentions, and the track will be released worldwide on 12 August 2012. Other artists DaWood has worked with, written and produced for include Kelly Rowland, Wiley, Roll Deep, Jodie connor, Dappy, Tinchy Stryder, Maxta, Alex Hepburn, Little Nikki, Namie Amuro, Lawson, Cover Drive, Cheryl Cole, Zara Larsson, Vita Chambers, Christina Millian, Blue, Nathan Sykes, 99 Souls, Stylo G, Karen Harding, f(x) (K-POP girl group), M-22, Bakermat, Alex Clare, Fluer East, Klingande

Discography

Songwriting and producing discography

Remixography

References

1981 births
Living people
Takeover Entertainment artists
Club DJs
English house musicians
English DJs
DJs from Manchester
People from Bury, Greater Manchester
Musicians from Greater Manchester
English record producers
Electronic dance music DJs

DaWood


Bride burning is a form of domestic violence practiced in countries located on or around the Indian subcontinent. A form of dowry death, bride-burning occurs when a woman is murdered by her husband or his family for her family's refusal to pay additional dowry. The wife is typically doused with kerosene, gasoline, or other flammable liquid, and set alight, leading to death by burning. Kerosene is often used as the cooking fuel for small petrol stoves, some of which are dangerous, so it allows the claim that the crime was an accident. It is most common in India and has been a major problem there since at least 1993.

Bride burning has been recognized as an important problem in India, accounting for around  deaths per year in the country. In 1995, Time magazine reported that dowry deaths in India increased from around 400 a year in the early 1980s to around 5,800 a year by the middle of the 1990s. A year later, CNN ran a story saying that police receive more than 2,500 reports of bride burning every year. According to Indian National Crime Record Bureau, there were 1,948 convictions and 3,876 acquittals in dowry death cases in 2008.

History

Dowry deaths
A dowry death is the death of a young woman in South Asian countries, primarily India, who is murdered or driven to suicide by her husband. This results from the husband or his family continually attempting to extract more dowry from the bride or her family. Bride burning is just one form of dowry death; acid throwing, poisoning and other forms of fatal violence also occur. Because dowry typically depends on class or socioeconomic status, women are often subjected to the dowry pressures of their future husband or his relatives.

Origins of bride burning
There are at least four perspectives on why bride burning came to be and how its existence has prevailed in South Asian nations, as detailed by Avnita Lakhani in her report on bride burning titled "The Elephant in the Room Is Out of Control". These theories describe practices that contributed to the rise of dowry as a whole, thus ultimately contributing to bride burning.

One of the more culturally-founded theories suggests that in a highly patriarchal society such as India, a woman's role is defined from before she is born, which ultimately places her as lesser than men. Because she is seen as a burden and an "extra mouth to feed", her status as an economic liability promotes the idea that men, who are considered physical assets, can treat women as subservient. Once a woman marries, she is bound to her husband and his will because "society mandates obedience to her husband".

Another theory claims that consumerism has caused countries like India to become greedy. Because of this, dowry is used as a means to gain a higher socioeconomic status. As status is continually gained, the demand for bridal dowry increases in order to keep moving up the social ladder.

Lakhani also suggests that historically speaking, the dowry system may have been conceived as a way to distinguish Muslim from Hindu culture, creating a further divide within castes. A higher dowry would indicate a higher status and distinction from Islam, thus providing an incentive to demand a larger dowry.

Finally, some scholars argue that the dowry practice came out of British rule and influence in India to distinguish "different forms of marriage" between castes. When the dowry system was established within the higher castes, the British government sought to reinforce it in the lower castes as a means to eradicate their more ritualised marriages. Such forms of union were discredited until only upper-caste marriage systems were recognised.

In South Asia

According to an estimate from 2011, between 4,000 and 25,000 deaths occur from bride burning every year in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.

In India

Ashley K. Jutla and David Heimbach describe bride burning by saying that "the husband and/or in-laws have determined that the dowry, a gift given from the daughter's parents to the husband, was inadequate and therefore attempt to murder the new bride to make the husband available to remarry or to punish the bride and her family." In India, dowry size is a reflection of wealth. The Indian author Rajesh Talwar has written a play on dowry deaths titled The Bride Who Would Not Burn.

In 1961, the government of India passed the Dowry Prohibition Act, making the dowry demands in wedding arrangements illegal.

In 1986, the Indian Parliament added dowry deaths as a new domestic violence crime. According to the new section 304-B of the Indian Penal Code, where a bride "within 7 years of her marriage is killed and it is shown that soon before her death, she was subjected to cruelty or harassment by her husband, or any relative of her husband, or in connection with any demand for dowry, such death shall be called 'dowry death' and such husband or relative shall be deemed to have caused her death."

The offenders can be sentenced for any period, from a minimum of seven years in prison to a maximum of life. Many cases of dowry-related domestic violence, suicides, and murders have been reported. A 1997 report claimed that at least 5000 women die each year because of dowry deaths and at least a dozen die each day in 'kitchen fires' thought to be intentional. About 30 percent of reported dowry deaths result in convictions in courts.

In Pakistan
In Pakistan, the Progressive Women's Association says that 300 women are burned to death each year by their husband's families and that bride burning incidents are sometimes disguised as accidents, such as an 'exploding stove'. According to the Association, doctors say that victims presenting from these accidents have injuries inconsistent with stove burns. According to an Amnesty International report in 1999, although 1600 bride burning incidents were reported, only 60 were prosecuted and, of those, only two resulted in convictions.

In Pakistan, women including Shahnaz Bukhari have been campaigning for protective legislation against the practice, for established women's shelters and for hospitals with specialised burn wards. Amnesty International has said that pressure from within, as well as from international human rights groups, may be increasing the level of awareness within the Pakistani government. The BBC estimated that roughly 300 Pakistani brides were burnt to death in 1999.

In 1988, a survey showed that 800 women were killed in this manner; in 1989, the number rose to 1100, and in 1990 it stood at 1800 estimated killings. Newspapers in Lahore in a six-month period (1997) reported on average 15 attacks a month. According to an estimate by Human Development in South Asia, on average there are 16 cases of bride burnings a month. Women's eNews reported 4000 women attacked in this manner in Islamabad's surroundings over an eight-year period and that the average age range of victims is between 18 and 35 with an estimated 30 percent being pregnant at the time of death. Shahnaz Bukhari has said of such attacks: Either Pakistan is home to possessed stoves which burn only young housewives, and are particularly fond of genitalia, or looking at the frequency with which these incidences occur there is a grim pattern that these women are victims of deliberate murder. According to the Progressive Women's Association such attacks are a growing problem and in 1994 on International Women's Day announced that various NGOs would join to raise awareness of the issue. One woman is killed every hour in Pakistan as a form of domestic violence, a practice known as bride burning, a category of dowry murder, resulting in possibly one of the most gruesome deaths, burning alive.

In other nations
Occasionally, bride burning happens among resettled Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities in other parts of the world, including the United States.

In the United States
Aleyamma Mathew was a registered nurse at a hospital in Carrollton, Texas, who died of burn wounds on 5 April 1992. She and her husband, Mathew Varughese, had immigrated from India two decades before and had three daughters in the United States. The couple had been having marital problems since the late 1980s, which culminated in a fight that led to Aleyamma's death. She was found by her children, doused in gasoline and covered in flames, dying soon after.

Brief articles were run in The Dallas Morning News and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution after the incident, while the Dallas Observer ran a detailed, nine-page article covering Aleyamma's death. The article faced some criticism for its portrayal of non-Western countries as backward or inappropriate: "Battered by her husband, Aleyamma Mathew remained true to her culture. In the end she became its victim."

Controlling bride burning
There are current governmental initiatives to criminalize bride burning and grassroots organizations working to combat the practice, as well as international laws working against human rights violations. Finally, there are many proposed initiatives in place to end bride burning globally.

Governmental efforts
In 1961, India enacted the Dowry Prohibition Act, to halt dowry murders. It was amended in the early 1980s to "rectify several inherent weaknesses and loopholes" in order to make it a criminal offense if the husband or his relatives causes a woman to "die of burns or bodily injury or unnatural circumstances within seven years of the marriage and where there is evidence that she suffered cruelty and harassment in connection with the dowry." Unfortunately, this particular law does not provide a comprehensive definition of dowry, which can change the way it is demanded and delivered. Ultimately, this allowed perpetrators more flexibility in the court of dowry death. The seven-year clause is equally problematic, as it simply allowed husbands to wait until that period ended to burn or otherwise cause the death of their bride.

Another major Indian law, the 1983 "Anti-Cruelty Statute", prohibits cruelty towards a wife and subjects the husband and/or in-laws to fines or imprisonment if they inflict cruelty upon the wife. However, the law is equally ambiguous, which results in inadequate enforcement of bride burning and dowry murders.

Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights declares the following: "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood". Article 5 proclaims: "No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment."

Non-governmental efforts

In India, where most cases of bride burning are seen, domestic legislation is typically inadequately enforced. Because of this, grassroots organizations "have taken up the cause to halt bride burning". One example of this is government-funded family counseling center cells, in which the intended goal is to strengthen family ties and reduce legal intervention. However, often such cells only reinforce the stereotype of "women's sharp tongues" and men's power to "hit and beat". Other similar counseling-style NGOs have been developed in order to resolve such issues with similar consequences.

Potential efforts
Primarily, alternative initiatives resolve around reform of current flawed, failing laws. One proposal calls for the expansion of the protection for women under the international refugee law in order to provide asylum to victims of gender discrimination or gendercide. One way this could be achieved would be by including women in the definition of a "persecuted social group", which would allow their gender to seek international asylum under fear of dowry-related persecution globally.

In April 1984, European Parliament introduced a proposal that would "protect women from persecution on the basis of gender" by reforming international refugee laws. However, the proposal was rejected.

Another solution is to increase economic interest for women by establishing their property rights. Even when married, the bride has no rights over the property belonging to the husband while he is living. In giving women the right to own property, women would not need to marry for economic or legal purposes, thus disregarding the dowry practice.

See also

 Acid throwing
 Caste system
 Domestic violence in India
 Dowry
 Dowry death
 Female infanticide
 Femicide
 Fire, a Canadian-Indian movie with bride-burning as one of the themes
 Gendercide
 Sati
 Sexism in India
 Violence against women
 Watta satta
 Women in India and Women in Pakistan and Women in Bangladesh

References

Further reading

  Pdf.
  Lexis Nexis. Suffolk University Law Review.
  Pdf.
 A bride-burning victim in Nepal says her counselors are helping her heal and look to the future

External links
India's National Crime Records Bureau
India's dowry deaths, BBC

Death of women
Domestic violence
Fire
Traditions involving fire
Marriage, unions and partnerships in India
Violence against women in Asia
Violence against women in India
Violence against women in Pakistan
Women's rights in Asia

Bride burning


Sean Edward Coyle (born January 17, 1992) is an American former professional baseball second baseman. Listed at 5' 8" (1.70 m), 175 lb. (79 k), Coyle batted and threw right handed. He was born in Chalfont, Pennsylvania.

High school
Coyle hit .562 with 55 runs batted in and a school-record 13 home runs as a senior at Germantown Academy, to claim 2009–2010 Pennsylvania Gatorade Player of the Year honors and a selection to the 2010 Baseball America All-America High School First Team. Previously, he had batted .296 in eight games for USA Baseball's 18-and-under team at the 2009 Pan American Junior Championships (COPABE) held in Barquisimeto, Venezuela.

Professional career

Boston Red Sox
The Red Sox selected Coyle in the third round of the 2010 MLB draft out of Germantown Academy in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, signing him for a bonus of $1,300,000. He then played from 2010 through 2013 for the Gulf Coast League Red Sox, Greenville Drive and Salem Red Sox, before joining the Portland Sea Dogs in 2014. He was added to the 40-man roster in November 2014.

Coyle was named the Red Sox's No. 17 prospect by MLB.com entering the 2012 season, after leading Class-A Greenville and sharing the lead among Red Sox minor leaguers with seven triples in 2011. He also topped Greenville in walks (60), while ranking second both in doubles (27) and runs (77) as well as third in RBI (64) and stolen bases (14). In addition, Coyle collected a career-high seven RBI in Greenville's season finale against the Hickory Crawdads on September 5, 2011 and was named a MiLB Organizational All-Star in that season, repeating that honor in 2012.

In 2013, Coyle was a member of the Salem champion team and was named the Carolina League Championship Series MVP after hitting two two-run doubles for a total of seven RBI in the three-game series. Unfortunately, he did not play in the Division Series due to an injury.

Coyle was added to the US roster for the 2014 All-Star Futures Game in late June, 2014. He was named as a replacement for Mookie Betts, who was no longer eligible after his promotion to the Boston Red Sox. The announcement highlighted a resurgence for Coyle, who appeared in only 60 games in an injury-plagued 2013 season. Along with missing time with injuries to his thumb, knee, and elbow, he hit only .241 while repeating the Carolina League.

After a solid start in 2014 with Double-A Portland, Coyle then missed four weeks with a hamstring injury. Nevertheless, he was dominant after his activation in May, and excelled in June. In one particularly impressive stretch, he went 8-for-15 (.533) with five walks, four extra-base hits, and 11 RBI in a four-game series against the Reading Fightin Phils, winning a Player of the Week distinction (June 23–29). The month was capped when he posted a slash line of .348/.450/.652 with an organization-leading six home runs to earn Player of the Month honors, as well as his Futures Games and Eastern League All-Star Game selections on the same day. He hit .295/.371/.512 in 384 plate appearances in 2014, driving in 61 runs and scoring 60 times, while mashing 16 homers and stealing 13 bases. After that, he joined the Surprise Saguaros of the Arizona Fall League in the month of November. Coyle credited much of his success to the influence of former Red Sox catcher Rich Gedman, who served as his hitting instructor at Salem and coached him at Portland.

In 2015 Coyle gained a promotion to the Triple-A Pawtucket Red Sox. He was rated as the Red Sox's No. 17 prospect in 2015, according to MLB.com.

Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim
In mid-July 2016, Coyle was designated for assignment by the Red Sox. On July 18, he was claimed off waivers by the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.

Baltimore Orioles
On December 13, 2016, Coyle signed a minor league contract with the Baltimore Orioles organization. He was released on June 5, 2017.

References

External links

Minor League Baseball

1992 births
Living people
Arkansas Travelers players
Baseball infielders
Baseball players from Pennsylvania
Greenville Drive players
Gulf Coast Red Sox players
Lowell Spinners players
Pawtucket Red Sox players
Portland Sea Dogs players
Salem Red Sox players
Surprise Saguaros players
People from Chalfont, Pennsylvania

Sean Coyle (baseball)


ASCII art is a graphic design technique that uses computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable (from a total of 128) characters defined by the ASCII Standard from 1963 and ASCII compliant character sets with proprietary extended characters (beyond the 128 characters of standard 7-bit ASCII). The term is also loosely used to refer to text-based visual art in general. ASCII art can be created with any text editor, and is often used with free-form languages. Most examples of ASCII art require a fixed-width font (non-proportional fonts, as on a traditional typewriter) such as Courier for presentation.

Among the oldest known examples of ASCII art are the
creations by computer-art pioneer Kenneth Knowlton from around 1966, who was working for Bell Labs at the time. "Studies in Perception I" by Knowlton and Leon Harmon from 1966 shows some examples of their early ASCII art.

ASCII art was invented, in large part, because early printers often lacked graphics ability and thus, characters were used in place of graphic marks. Also, to mark divisions between different print jobs from different users, bulk printers often used ASCII art to print large banner pages, making the division easier to spot so that the results could be more easily separated by a computer operator or clerk. ASCII art was also used in early e-mail when images could not be embedded.

History

Typewriter art

Since 1867, typewriters have been used for creating visual art.

TTY and RTTY
TTY stands for "TeleTYpe" or "TeleTYpewriter", and is also known as Teleprinter or Teletype.
RTTY stands for Radioteletype; character sets such as Baudot code, which predated ASCII, were used. According to a chapter in the "RTTY Handbook", text images have been sent via teletypewriter as early as 1923. However, none of the "old" RTTY art has been discovered yet. What is known is that text images appeared frequently on radioteletype in the 1960s and the 1970s.

Line-printer art
In the 1960s, Andries van Dam published a representation of an electronic circuit produced on an IBM 1403 line printer. At the same time, Kenneth Knowlton was producing realistic images, also on line printers, by overprinting several characters on top of one another.
Note that it was not ASCII art in a sense that the 1403 was driven by an EBCDIC-coded platform and the character sets and trains available on the 1403 were derived from EBCDIC rather than ASCII, despite some glyphs commonalities.

ASCII art
The widespread usage of ASCII art can be traced to the computer bulletin board systems of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The limitations of computers of that time period necessitated the use of text characters to represent images. Along with ASCII's use in communication, however, it also began to appear in the underground online art groups of the period. An ASCII comic is a form of webcomic which uses ASCII text to create images. In place of images in a regular comic, ASCII art is used, with the text or dialog usually placed underneath.

During the 1990s, graphical browsing and variable-width fonts became increasingly popular, leading to a decline in ASCII art. Despite this, ASCII art continued to survive through online MUDs, an acronym for "Multi-User Dungeon", (which are textual multiplayer role-playing video games), Internet Relay Chat, Email, message boards, and other forms of online communication which commonly employ the needed fixed-width.

It is seen to this day on the CLI app Neofetch, which displays the logo of the OS on which it is invoked.

ANSI
ASCII and more importantly, ANSI were staples of the early technological era; terminal systems relied on coherent presentation using color and control signals standard in the terminal protocols.

Over the years, warez groups began to enter the ASCII art scene. Warez groups usually release .nfo files with their software, cracks or other general software reverse-engineering releases. The ASCII art will usually include the warez group's name and maybe some ASCII borders on the outsides of the release notes, etc.

BBS systems were based on ASCII and ANSI art, as were most DOS and similar console applications, and the precursor to AOL.

Uses

ASCII art is used wherever text can be more readily printed or transmitted than graphics, or in some cases, where the transmission of pictures is not possible. This includes typewriters, teleprinters, non-graphic computer terminals, printer separators, in early computer networking (e.g., BBSes), email, and Usenet news messages. ASCII art is also used within the source code of computer programs for representation of company or product logos, and flow control or other diagrams. In some cases, the entire source code of a program is a piece of ASCII art – for instance, an entry to one of the earlier International Obfuscated C Code Contest is a program that adds numbers, but visually looks like a binary adder drawn in logic ports.

Some electronic schematic archives represent the circuits using ASCII art.

Examples of ASCII-style art predating the modern computer era can be found in the June 1939, July 1948 and October 1948 editions of Popular Mechanics.

Early computer games played on terminals frequently used ASCII art to simulate graphics, most notably the roguelike genre using ASCII art to visually represent dungeons and monsters within them. "0verkill" is a 2D platform multiplayer shooter game designed entirely in color ASCII art. MPlayer and VLC media player can display videos as ASCII art through the AAlib library. ASCII art is used in the making of DOS-based ZZT games.

Many game walkthrough guides come as part of a basic .txt file; this file often contains the name of the game in ASCII art. Such as below, word art is created using backslashes and other ASCII values in order to create the illusion of 3D.

Types and styles
Different techniques could be used in ASCII art to obtain different artistic effects.

"Typewriter-style" lettering, made from individual letter characters:
Line art, for creating shapes:
 .--.     /\
 '--'    /__\    (^._.^)~ <(o.o )>

Solid art, for creating filled objects:
 .g@8g.  db
 'Y8@P' d88b

Shading, using symbols with various intensities for creating gradients or contrasts:
 :$#$: "4b. ':.
 :$#$:   "4b. ':.

Combinations of the above, often used as signatures, for example, at the end of an email:
   |\_/|        ****************************    (\_/)
  / @ @ \       *  "Purrrfectly pleasant"  *   (='.'=)
 ( > º < )      *       Poppy Prinz        *   (")_(")
  `>>x<<´       *   (email@example.com)   *
  /  O  \       ****************************

As-pixel characters use combinations of ░ , █ , ▄, ▀ (Block Elements), and/or ⣿, ⣴, ⢁, etc (Braille ASCII) to make pictures:
 ⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⠿⠿⠿⠿⢿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿
 ⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⠟⢁⣴⣾⣿⣷⣦⣌⠙⢿⣿⣿⣿
 ⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⠟⢁⣴⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣷⡈⢻⣿⣿
 ⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⠟⢁⣴⣿⣿⠟⠋⣉⠙⢻⣿⣿⣿⣷⠀⣿⣿
 ⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⠟⢁⣴⣿⣿⠟⢁⣴⣿⣿⡷⢀⣿⣿⣿⡿⠀⣿⣿
 ⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⠟⢁⣴⣿⣿⠟⢁⣴⣿⣿⡿⠋⣠⣾⣿⣿⠟⢁⣼⣿⣿
 ⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⠟⢁⣴⣿⣿⠟⢁⣴⣿⣿⡿⠋⣠⣾⣿⣿⠟⢁⣴⣿⣿⣿⣿
 ⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⠟⢁⣴⣿⣿⠟⢁⣴⣿⣿⡿⠋⣠⣾⣿⣿⠟⢁⣴⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿
 ⣿⣿⣿⠟⢁⣴⣿⣿⣿⣿⣶⣿⣿⡿⠋⣠⣾⣿⣿⠟⢁⣴⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿
 ⣿⣿⠁⣴⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⡿⠋⣠⣾⣿⣿⠟⢁⣴⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿
 ⣿⣿⠀⢿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⡿⠋⣠⣾⣿⣿⠟⢁⣴⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿
 ⣿⣿⣧⡈⠻⢿⣿⡿⠋⣠⣾⣿⣿⡟⢁⣴⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿
 ⣿⣿⣿⣿⣷⣶⣶⣶⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿

Emoticons and verticons

The simplest forms of ASCII art are combinations of two or three characters for expressing emotion in text. They are commonly referred to as 'emoticon', 'smilie', or 'smiley'. There is another type of one-line ASCII art that does not require the mental rotation of pictures, which is widely known in Japan as kaomoji (literally "face characters".)

More complex examples use several lines of text to draw large symbols or more complex figures. Hundreds of different text smileys have developed over time, but only a few are generally accepted, used and understood.

ASCII comic
An ASCII comic is a form of webcomic.

The Adventures of Nerd Boy
The Adventures of Nerd Boy, or just Nerd Boy, was an ASCII comic, published by Joaquim Gândara between 5 August 2001 and 17 July 2007, and consisting of 600 strips. They were posted to ASCII art newsgroup alt.ascii-art and on the website. Some strips have been translated to Polish and French.

Styles of the computer underground text art scene

Atari 400/800 ATASCII
The Atari 400/800, which were released in 1979, did not follow the ASCII standard and had their own character set, called ATASCII. The emergence of ATASCII art coincided with the growing popularity of BBS Systems caused by availability of the acoustic couplers that were compatible with the 8-bit home computers. ATASCII text animations are also referred to as "break animations" by the Atari sceners.

C-64 PETSCII
The Commodore 64, which was released in 1982, also did not follow the ASCII standard. The C-64 character set is called PETSCII, an extended form of ASCII-1963. As with the Atari's ATASCII art, C-64 fans developed a similar scene that used PETSCII for their creations.

"Block ASCII" / "High ASCII" style ASCII art on the IBM PC

So-called "block ASCII" or "high ASCII" uses the extended characters of the 8-bit code page 437, which is a proprietary standard introduced by IBM in 1979 (ANSI Standard x3.16) for the IBM PC DOS and MS-DOS operating systems. "Block ASCIIs" were widely used on the PC during the 1990s until the Internet replaced BBSes as the main communication platform. Until then, "block ASCIIs" dominated the PC Text Art Scene.

The first art scene group that focused on the extended character set of the PC in their art work was called "Aces of ANSI Art" (). Some members left in 1990, and formed a group called "ANSI Creators in Demand" (ACiD). In that same year the second major underground art scene group was founded, ICE, "Insane Creators Enterprise".

There is some debate between ASCII and block ASCII artists, with "Hardcore" ASCII artists maintaining that block ASCII art is in fact not ASCII art, because it does not use the 128 characters of the original ASCII standard. On the other hand, block ASCII artists argue that if their art uses only characters of the computers character set, then it is to be called ASCII, regardless if the character set is proprietary or not.

Microsoft Windows does not support the ANSI Standard x3.16. One can view block ASCIIs with a text editor using the font "Terminal", but it will not look exactly as it was intended by the artist. With a special ASCII/ANSI viewer, such as ACiDView for Windows (see ASCII and ANSI art viewers), one can see block ASCII and ANSI files properly. An example that illustrates the difference in appearance is part of this article. Alternatively, one could look at the file using the TYPE command in the command prompt.

"Amiga"/"Oldskool" style ASCII art

In the art scene one popular ASCII style that used the 7-bit standard ASCII character set was the so-called "Oldskool" style. It is also called "Amiga style", due to its origin and widespread use on the Commodore Amiga computers. The style uses primarily the characters: _/\-+=.()<>:. The "oldskool" art looks more like the outlined drawings of shapes than real pictures.
This is an example of "Amiga style" (also referred to as "old school" or "oldskool" style) scene ASCII art.

The Amiga ASCII scene surfaced in 1992, seven years after the introduction of the Commodore Amiga 1000. The Commodore 64 PETSCII scene did not make the transition to the Commodore Amiga as the C64 demo and warez scenes did. Among the first Amiga ASCII art groups were ART, Epsilon Design, Upper Class, Unreal (later known as "DeZign"). This means that the text art scene on the Amiga was actually younger than the text art scene on the PC. The Amiga artists also did not call their ASCII art style "Oldskool". That term was introduced on the PC. When and by whom is unknown and lost in history.

The Amiga style ASCII artwork was most often released in the form of a single text file, which included all the artwork (usually requested), with some design parts in between, as opposed to the PC art scene where the art work was released as a ZIP archive with separate text files for each piece. Furthermore, the releases were usually called "ASCII collections" and not "art packs" like on the IBM PC.

In text editors
 _ ___  _      _
|  ___|_ _/ ___| | ___| |_
| |_   | | |  _| |/ _ \ __|
|  _|  | | |_| | |  __/ |_
|_|   |___\|_|\___|\__|
This kind of ASCII art is handmade in a text editor. Popular editors used to make this kind of ASCII art include Microsoft Notepad, CygnusEditor aka. CED (Amiga), and EditPlus2 (PC).

Oldskool font example from the PC, which was taken from the ASCII editor FIGlet.

Newskool style ASCII art

"Newskool" is a popular form of ASCII art which capitalizes on character strings like "$#Xxo". In spite of its name, the style is not "new"; on the contrary, it was very old but fell out of favor and was replaced by "Oldskool" and "Block" style ASCII art. It was dubbed "Newskool" upon its comeback and renewed popularity at the end of the 1990s.

Newskool changed significantly as the result of the introduction of extended proprietary characters. The classic 7-bit standard ASCII characters remain predominant, but the extended characters are often used for "fine tuning" and "tweaking". The style developed further after the introduction and adaptation of Unicode.

Methods for generating ASCII art

While some prefer to use a simple text editor to produce ASCII art, specialized programs, such as JavE have been developed that often simulate the features and tools in bitmap image editors. For Block ASCII art and ANSI art the artist almost always uses a special text editor, because to generate the required characters on a standard keyboard, one needs to know the Alt code for each character. For example, + will produce ▓, + will produce ▒, and + will produce ◘.

The special text editors have sets of special characters assigned to existing keys on the keyboard. Popular DOS-based editors, such as TheDraw and ACiDDraw had multiple sets of different special characters mapped to the function keys to make the use of those characters easier for the artist who can switch between individual sets of characters via basic keyboard shortcuts. PabloDraw is one of the very few special ASCII/ANSI art editors that were developed for Windows.

Image to text conversion
Other programs allow one to automatically convert an image to text characters, which is a special case of vector quantization. A method is to sample the image down to grayscale with less than 8-bit precision, and then assign a character for each value. Such ASCII art generators often allow users to choose the intensity and contrast of the generated image.

Three factors limit the fidelity of the conversion, especially of photographs:

 depth (solutions: reduced line spacing; bold style; block elements; colored background; good shading);
 sharpness (solutions: a longer text, with a smaller font; a greater set of characters; variable width fonts);
 ratio (solutions with compatibility issues: font with a square grid; stylized without extra line spacing).

Examples of converted images are given below.

This is one of the earliest forms of ASCII art, dating back to the early days of the 1960s minicomputers and teletypes. During the 1970s, it was popular in US malls to get a t-shirt with a photograph printed in ASCII art on it from an automated kiosk containing a computer, and London's Science Museum had a similar service to produce printed portraits. With the advent of the web, HTML and CSS, many ASCII conversion programs will now quantize to a full RGB colorspace, enabling colorized ASCII images.

Still images or movies can also be converted to ASCII on various UNIX and UNIX-like systems using the AAlib (black and white) or libcaca (colour) graphics device driver, or the VLC media player or mpv under Windows, Linux or macOS; all of which render the screen using ASCII symbols instead of pixels.

There are also a number of smartphone applications, such as ASCII cam for Android, that generate ASCII art in real-time using input from the phone's camera. These applications typically allow the ASCII art to be saved as either a text file or as an image made up of ASCII text.

Non fixed-width ASCII
Most ASCII art is created using a monospaced font, such as Courier, where all characters are identical in width. Early computers in use when ASCII art came into vogue had monospaced fonts for screen and printer displays. Today, most of the more commonly used fonts in word processors, web browsers and other programs are proportional fonts, such as Helvetica or Times Roman, where different widths are used for different characters. ASCII art drawn for a fixed width font will usually appear distorted, or even unrecognizable when displayed in a proportional font.

Some ASCII artists have produced art for display in proportional fonts. These ASCIIs, rather than using a purely shade-based correspondence, use characters for slopes and borders and use block shading. These ASCIIs generally offer greater precision and attention to detail than fixed-width ASCIIs for a lower character count, although they are not as universally accessible since they are usually relatively font-specific.

Animated ASCII art
Animated ASCII art started in 1970 from so-called VT100 animations produced on VT100 terminals. These animations were simply text with cursor movement instructions, deleting and erasing the characters necessary to appear animated. Usually, they represented a long hand-crafted process undertaken by a single person to tell a story.

Contemporary web browser revitalized animated ASCII art again. It became possible to display animated ASCII art via JavaScript or Java applets. Static ASCII art pictures are loaded and displayed one after another, creating the animation, very similar to how movie projectors unreel film reel and project the individual pictures on the big screen at movie theaters. A new term was born: "ASCIImation" – another name of animated ASCII art. A seminal work in this arena is the Star Wars ASCIImation. More complicated routines in JavaScript generate more elaborate ASCIImations showing effects like Morphing effects, star field emulations, fading effects and calculated images, such as mandelbrot fractal animations.

There are now many tools and programs that can transform raster images into text symbols; some of these tools can operate on streaming video. For example, the music video for American singer Beck's song "Black Tambourine" is made up entirely of ASCII characters that approximate the original footage. VLC, a media player software, can render any video in colored ASCII through the libcaca module.

Other text-based visual art
There are a variety of other types of art using text symbols from character sets other than ASCII and/or some form of color coding. Despite not being pure ASCII, these are still often referred to as "ASCII art". The character set portion designed specifically for drawing is known as the line drawing characters or pseudo-graphics.

ANSI art

The IBM PC graphics hardware in text mode uses 16 bits per character. It supports a variety of configurations, but in its default mode under DOS they are used to give 256 glyphs from one of the IBM PC code pages (Code page 437 by default), 16 foreground colors, eight background colors, and a flash option. Such art can be loaded into screen memory directly. ANSI.SYS, if loaded, also allows such art to be placed on screen by outputting escape sequences that indicate movements of the screen cursor and color/flash changes. If this method is used then the art becomes known as ANSI art. The IBM PC code pages also include characters intended for simple drawing which often made this art appear much cleaner than that made with more traditional character sets. Plain text files are also seen with these characters, though they have become far less common since Windows GUI text editors (using the Windows ANSI code page) have largely replaced DOS-based ones.

Shift_JIS and Japan

In Japan, ASCII art (AA) is mainly known as Shift_JIS art. Shift JIS offers a larger selection of characters than plain ASCII (including characters from Japanese scripts and fullwidth forms of ASCII characters), and may be used for text-based art on Japanese websites.

Often, such artwork is designed to be viewed with the default Japanese font on a platform, such as the proportional MS P Gothic.

Kaomoji

Users on ASCII-NET, in which the word ASCII refers to the ASCII Corporation rather than the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, popularised a style of  in which the face appears upright rather than rotated.

Unicode

Unicode would seem to offer the ultimate flexibility in producing text based art with its huge variety of characters. However, finding a suitable fixed-width font is likely to be difficult if a significant subset of Unicode is desired. (Modern UNIX-style operating systems do provide complete fixed-width Unicode fonts, e.g. for xterm. Windows has the Courier New font, which includes characters like ┌╥─╨┐♥☺Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ). Also, the common practice of rendering Unicode with a mixture of variable width fonts is likely to make predictable display hard, if more than a tiny subset of Unicode is used. ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ is an adequate representation of a cat's face in a font with varying character widths.

Control and combining characters

The combining characters mechanism of Unicode provides considerable ways of customizing the style, even obfuscating the text (e.g. via an online generator like Obfuscator, which focuses on the filters). Glitcher is one example of Unicode art, initiated in 2012: These symbols, intruding up and down, are made by combining lots of diacritical marks. It's a kind of art. There's quite a lot of artists who use the Internet or specific social networks as their canvas. The corresponding creations are favored in web browsers (thanks to their always better support), as geekily stylized usernames for social networks. With a fair compatibility, and among different online tools, [Facebook symbols] showcases various types of Unicode art, mainly for aesthetic purpose (Ɯıḳĭƥḙȡḯả Wîkipêȡıẚ Ẉǐḳîṗȅḍȉā Ẃįḵįṗẻḑìẵ Ẉĭḵɪṕḗdïą Ẇïƙỉpểɗĭà Ẅȉḱïṕȩđĩẵ etc.). Besides, the creations can be hand-crafted (by programming), or pasted from mobile applications (e.g. the category of 'fancy text' tools on Android). The underlying technique dates back to the old systems that incorporated control characters, though. E.g. the German composite ö would be imitated on ZX Spectrum by overwriting " after backspace and o.

Overprinting (surprint)
In the 1970s and early 1980s it was popular to produce a kind of text art that relied on overprinting. This could be produced either on a screen or on a printer by typing a character, backing up, and then typing another character, just as on a typewriter. This developed into sophisticated graphics in some cases, such as the PLATO system (circa 1973), where superscript and subscript allowed a wide variety of graphic effects. A common use was for emoticons, with WOBTAX and VICTORY both producing convincing smiley faces. Overprinting had previously been used on typewriters, but the low-resolution pixelation of characters on video terminals meant that overprinting here produced seamless pixel graphics, rather than visibly overstruck combinations of letters on paper.

Beyond pixel graphics, this was also used for printing photographs, as the overall darkness of a particular character space dependent on how many characters, as well as the choice of character, were printed in a particular place. Thanks to the increased granularity of tone, photographs were often converted to this type of printout. Even manual typewriters or daisy wheel printers could be used. The technique has fallen from popularity since all cheap printers can easily print photographs, and a normal text file (or an e-mail message or Usenet posting) cannot represent overprinted text. However, something similar has emerged to replace it: shaded or colored ASCII art, using ANSI video terminal markup or color codes (such as those found in HTML, IRC, and many internet message boards) to add a bit more tone variation. In this way, it is possible to create ASCII art where the characters only differ in color.

See also
 Micrography
 Types and styles: Alt code, ASCII stereogram, box-drawing characters, emoticon, FILE ID.DIZ, .nfo (release info file)
 Pre-ASCII history: Calligram, Concrete poetry, Typewriter, Typewriter mystery game, Teleprinter, Radioteletype
 Related art: ANSI art, ASCII porn, ATASCII, Fax art, PETSCII, Shift JIS art, Text semigraphics
 Related context: Bulletin board system (BBS), Computer art scene, :Category:Artscene groups
 Software: AAlib, cowsay
 Unicode: Homoglyph, Duplicate characters in Unicode

References

Further reading

  (Polish translators: Ania Górecka [ag], Asia Mazur [as], Błażej Kozłowski [bug], Janusz [jp], Łukasz Dąbrowski [luk], Łukasz Tyrała [lt.], Łukasz Wilk [wilu], Marcin Gliński [fsc])

External links

 media4u.ch - ASCII Art (ASCII Art Movie. The Matrix in ASCII Art)
 TexArt.io ASCII Art collection
 Textfiles.com archive
 Sixteen Colors ANSI Art and ASCII Art Archive
 Defacto2.net Scene NFO Files Archive
 Chris.com ASCII art collection
 "As-Pixel Characters" ASCII art collection
 ASCII Art Animation of Star Wars, "ASCIIMATION"
 ASCII Keyboard Art Collection
 Animasci
 Video to ASCII Demonstration in 4 stages

Computer art
Digital art
New media art
Internet art
Multimedia
Wikipedia articles with ASCII art

ASCII art


Iain Nicolson (born 13 October 1976) is a Scottish former professional footballer who plays as a midfielder for SJF Central Division 1 side Renfrew.

Career
Born in Glasgow, Nicolson began his career as a youth at Rangers. However, having failed to break into the Ibrox side's first-team after four years, Nicolson joined local side Partick Thistle in 1997. He made a good impression at the Firhill club, and subsequently joined Scottish First Division side St Mirren the following year. Over the next four years, Nicolson became a key player at the Paisley side, and helped them win the 1999–2000 Scottish First Division and achieve promotion to the Scottish Premier League. Overall, Nicolson made 105 appearances for the Buddies.

In 2003, he left St Mirren and joined First Division side Ayr United, before moving on to Alloa Athletic the following year. He spent three years and made over 77 appearances with Alloa, before leaving professional football. He subsequently spent time at junior team Bathgate Thistle, and joined Renfrew in July 2010, where he currently plays.

Personal life
In April 2015, Nicolson suffered a stroke and was taken to the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Paisley. He spent two days in hospital before being moved to his home. He is believed to be recovering well. St Mirren chief executive Brian Caldwell said: "Iain remains a popular player with the club and its supporters and we are all hoping that he makes a full and speedy recovery."

External links

References

1976 births
Living people
Footballers from Glasgow
Scottish men's footballers
Men's association football defenders
Scottish Junior Football Association players
Scottish Football League players
Rangers F.C. players
St Mirren F.C. players
Partick Thistle F.C. players
Alloa Athletic F.C. players
Ayr United F.C. players
Bathgate Thistle F.C. players
Renfrew F.C. players

Iain Nicolson


Donald Frederick Smerek (born December 20, 1957) is a former professional American football defensive lineman in the National Football League for the Dallas Cowboys. He played college football at the University of Nevada.

Early years
Smerek attended Basic High School, where he was an All-state player in football. He also practiced basketball.

He accepted a football scholarship from the University of Nevada, which was an NCAA Division II school. In 1978, the program moved up to Division I-AA. As a senior, he helped his team finish undefeated (11-0) in the regular season and was named All-Big Sky at defensive end.

Professional career
Smerek was signed as an undrafted free agent by the Dallas Cowboys after the 1980 NFL Draft. In training camp, he fractured his ribs and was placed on the injured reserve list.

In 1981, he was moved to defensive tackle, but suffered a knee injury in the second game of the regular season and was placed on the injured reserve list. While being inactive, he had a traffic related argument and was shot in the chest. His physical fitness helped him survive the injury and return to play football the next season.

In 1982, he was a starter for the Cowboys in the playoffs, replacing the injured John Dutton at left defensive tackle. He made his first career start in the playoffs against the Green Bay Packers, posting 10 tackles and one sack.

In 1983, he began to substitute Dutton on passing downs, finishing with 6 sacks (fourth on the team) and 17 tackles.

In 1984, although he played defensive tackle, head coach Tom Landry gave him the first shot at retired Harvey Martin's right defensive end position. But due to the holdout of Randy White, the team was forced to play him at right defensive tackle during the 4 preseason games, and he never received the opportunity to compete with Jim Jeffcoat for the starting position, nor was he able to catch up.
He remained in his role of a pass rush specialist at left defensive tackle, registering 10 tackles and one sack.

In 1985, he was competing for the left defensive tackle position, but suffered a right shoulder injury that forced him to miss training camp. He tried to play in the season opener against the Washington Redskins, but his shoulder wasn't strong enough and was placed on the injured reserve list on September 10. He returned after 6 games, making 2 sacks (came in his first game against the Atlanta Falcons) and would also match his career-high 17 tackles.

In 1986, he missed the first 5 games of the season because of a sprained knee, registering 17 tackles and 4.5 sacks.

In 1987, he was placed on the injured reserve list with a sprained knee, before being activated in October after the NFL players went on a strike, so he would start the 3 replacement games at defensive end. He saw most of his playing time in passing situations during the remainder of the season. He finished with 14 tackles (9 in the fifth game against the Washington Redskins).

Smerek retired after being waived on August 23, 1988. He was one of the strongest players on the team and a productive backup as a pass rushing specialist. During his career he had a chance to earn a starting position on different occasions, but untimely injuries were his downfall.

References

1957 births
Living people
Sportspeople from Henderson, Nevada
Players of American football from Nevada
American football defensive linemen
Nevada Wolf Pack football players
Dallas Cowboys players
National Football League replacement players

Don Smerek


Johan Magnus Glans (born 9 April 1974 in Eslöv, Sweden) is a Swedish stand up comedian and actor. He started doing stand up comedy in 1994, and has worked on Swedish TV with David Batra. Since 2016, Johan Glans has starred as Axel in Swedish Dicks on Pop. In the spring of 2016, Johan Glans participated as team leader in SVT's new comedy program "Tror du jag ljuger?" together with Anna Mannheimer as program manager and Fredrik Lindström as team manager for the opposing team. All three have appeared in the same roles in later seasons. In 2018, he was awarded the Pirate Prize. He has a role in the 2020, Christmas calendar Mirakel, which is broadcast on SVT.

Glans is married to Sara Young and together they have two children. Glan's uncle is the author and culture writer Kay Glans. Glans is a cousin of the track and field athlete Dan Glans.

In 2021, Glans is starring in Home Invasion on Netflix.

References

External links
Official website

1974 births
Living people
People from Eslöv Municipality
Swedish male television actors
Swedish male film actors
Swedish male comedians
Swedish stand-up comedians
20th-century Swedish comedians
21st-century Swedish comedians

Johan Glans


Northrup Rand Knox (December 24, 1928 – July 23, 1998), was a Buffalo banker, sportsman, and community leader who, along with his brother Seymour, brought the National Hockey League to Buffalo, New York, as founders of the Buffalo Sabres. Knox was the third generation of the Knox family to serve as chairman of Marine Midland Bank and its predecessors.  His father Seymour H. Knox II and grandfather Seymour H. Knox I also served as chairmen.  He was also a past chairman of the Buffalo Sabres. He was chairman and governor of the United States Polo Association.

Early life
He was born on December 24, 1928, in Buffalo, New York. He was the second son of Seymour H. Knox II and Helen Northrup.  His elder brother, and only sibling, was Seymour H. Knox III.

Knox attended the Aiken Preparatory School in Aiken, South Carolina and St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire. He was a 1950 graduate of Yale University.  At Yale, Norty starred in squash and won two Y's as a hockey goaltender. He was also a member of the Scroll and Key society.

Career
The only amateur polo player in the postwar era to reach an eight-goal rating, he captained the US team in the challenge for the Cup of the Americas in 1966 and 1969 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, distinguishing himself as one of America's finest offensive players. With his legendary group of mares, known as the "4 Rs" (Ragamuffin, Rotallen, Ravanelle and Roulette), Norty was generally recognized as the best mounted player in the US at that time. After playing those ponies in the 1969 Cup of the Americas he was also considered the best mounted player in Argentina as well. He was inducted into the Polo Hall of Fame in 1994.

A protégé of the Basque master Pierre Etchebaster, Knox learned the sport at a young age at the Aiken Tennis Club and was a formidable opponent on the court tennis court. He became World Champion when he defeated Albert "Jack" Johnson at the Racquet and Tennis Club in New York in 1959. He held the title until 1969, when he retired, undefeated.

Buffalo Sabres
With his brother Seymour H. Knox III, he presented an application October 19, 1965 to obtain a National Hockey League expansion team in 1967, but was rebuffed. In 1968, the NHL Board of Governors rejected their agreement to move the Oakland Seals to Buffalo pending league approval.  Finally, on December 2, 1969, the league announced its decision to expand to Buffalo and Vancouver for the 1970-71 season. Knox was a principal owner of the Buffalo Sabres from their foundation as a National Hockey League franchise in 1970 until a few months before his death.

Buffalo Sports
The Knox Brothers were the impetus behind the establishment of the Buffalo Bandits of the Major Indoor Lacrosse League in 1991 and the Buffalo Blizzard of the National Professional Soccer League in 1992.

The brothers also brought their vision of a state of the art sports and entertainment complex originally named the Marine Midland Arena and now called the KeyBank Center to life. The 20,000 seat complex was completed in 1996 and is located at 1 Seymour H. Knox, III Plaza on the waterfront in downtown Buffalo. It is the home of the Buffalo Sabres and the Buffalo Bandits as well as the former home of the Buffalo Blizzard and Buffalo Destroyers of the Arena Football League.

Personal life
In 1950, Knox was married to Lucetta Gilbert Crisp, whom he met while wintering in Aiken, South Carolina. She was the daughter of Van Devanter Crisp and Martha Crisp (née Ottley), of 33 East 77th Street in New York City, and the granddaughter of James H. Ottley of New York City and Glen Cove, Long Island. was educated at the Garrison Forest School in Owings Mills, Maryland and Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York.  Together, they had two children:

 Linda Knox McLean (b. 1951), who was married Arthur Albert Schmon II of Vancouver, British Columbia until their divorce.
 Northrup Rand Knox Jr. (b. 1954), who married Victoria A. Beers in 1992.

He died on July 23, 1998, in East Aurora, New York. Northrup's wife Lucetta died on October 12, 2008, after a long illness.

Legacy
The Knox brothers, who brought major league hockey to Buffalo, were inducted into the Greater Buffalo Sports Hall of Fame in 1992 and into the Buffalo Sabres Hall of Fame in 1996. Northrup Knox was survived by his daughter, Linda Knox McLean, a son, Northrup R Knox Jr and five grandchildren, Richard, Lisa, and Arthur Schmon, Charles Rigby Knox and Northrup Knox III.

See also
Buffalo Sabres
List of real tennis world champions
Knox Farm State Park
Aiken Tennis Club
Real tennis
Buffalo Memorial Auditorium

References

External links

 Sports Illustrated: School of Hard Knox
 Knox Family of Buffalo, NY
 Polo Hall of Fame
 Obituaries: Northrup R. Knox, 69, banker, sportsman, community leader
 Friends of Knox Farm State Park

1928 births
1998 deaths
Burials at Forest Lawn Cemetery (Buffalo)
St. Paul's School (New Hampshire) alumni
Yale University alumni
American polo players
Buffalo Sabres owners
Northrup R.
National Hockey League executives
National Hockey League owners
Businesspeople from Buffalo, New York
United States Polo Association
20th-century American businesspeople

Northrup R. Knox


Jianqing Fan (; born 1962) is a statistician, financial econometrician, and data scientist. He is currently the Frederick L. Moore '18 Professor of Finance, Professor of Operations Research and Financial Engineering, Professor of Statistics and Machine Learning, and a former Chairman of Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering (2012–2015) and a former director of Committee of Statistical Studies (2005–2017) at Princeton University, where he directs both statistics lab and financial econometrics lab since 2008.

Research
Fan is interested in statistical theory and methods in data science, finance, economics, risk management, machine learning, computational biology, and biostatistics, with a particular focus on high-dimensional statistics, spectral method, machine learning, nonparametric statistics,  nonlinear time series,  among other areas.

Career
Jianqing Fan is a co-editor of Journal of the American Statistical Association (2023–). He was the co-editor of The Annals of Statistics (2004–2006), a co-editor of Econometrics Journal (2007–2012), a co-editor and managing editor of Journal of Econometrics (2012-2018), co-editor of Journal of Business & Economic Statistics (2018-2021) and an editor of Probability Theory and Related Fields (2003–2005), as well as a member of the editorial boards of numerous journals including the Journal of the American Statistical Association, Annals of Statistics, Econometrica, Management Science and Journal of Financial Econometrics. He has served as President of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (2006–2009), and as President of the International Chinese Statistical Association (2008–2010).

After receiving his Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1989, he joined the statistics faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1989–2003) and the University of California at Los Angeles (professor, 1997–2000). He was then appointed Professor of Statistics and Chairman at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (2000–2003), and as a professor of Operations Research and Financial Engineering (2003–) and Frederick L. Moore '18 Professor in Finance (2006–) at Princeton University. He directed the Committee of Statistical Studies at Princeton (2005-2017) and chaired the Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering (2012-2015).

He has coauthored four well-known books (Local Polynomial Modeling (1996), Nonlinear time series: Parametric and Nonparametric Methods (2003), Elements of Financial Econometrics (2015), and Statistical Foundations of Data Science (2020)) and a monograph "Spectral Methods for Data Science: A Statistical Perspective", and authored or coauthored over 300 articles on high-dimensional statistics, machine learning, finance, economics, computational biology, semiparametric and non-parametric modeling,  nonlinear time series, survival analysis, longitudinal data analysis, and other aspects of theoretical and methodological statistics. He has been consistently ranked as a top 10 highly-cited mathematicians. He has received various awards in recognition of his work on statistics, financial econometrics, and computational biology. These include the 2000 COPSS Presidents' Award, given annually to an outstanding statistician under age 40; an invitation to speak at The 2006 International Congress of Mathematicians; the Humboldt Research Award for lifetime achievement in 2006; the Morningside Gold Medal of Applied Mathematics in 2007, honoring triennially an outstanding applied mathematician of Chinese descent; a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009; the Pao-Lu Hsu Prize (2013), presented every three years by the International Chinese Statistical Association to individuals under the age of 50 and the Guy Medal in Silver (2014), presented once a year by the Royal Statistical Society, and Noether Senior Scholar Award, presented annually by the American Statistical Association, and Le Cam Award & Lecture, presented by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics once every 3 years

Fan has many affiliations within Princeton University and worldwide. He has been on the scientific advisory boards at various institutions, including the Institute of Economics, Academia Sinica  (08–19), Academia Sinica, Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute (08–14), and Institute of Mathematical Sciences (11–16) at National University of Singapore.

Honors and awards
 COPSS Presidents' Award, 2000, Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies.
 Invited speaker at the 2006 International Congress of Mathematicians
 Humboldt Research Awards, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, 2006.
 Morningside Gold Medal of Mathematics, 2007.
 Guggenheim Fellow, 2009.
 Academician (), Academia Sinica, 2012.
 Pao-Lu Hsu Prize, 2013
 Guy Medal in Silver, 2014
 Noether Senior Scholar Award, 2018
 Le Cam Award & Lecture, 2021
 Fellow, American Association for Advancement of Science.
 Fellow, Institute of Mathematical Statistics.
 Fellow, American Statistical Association.
 Fellow, Society of Financial Econometrics.
 Elected Member, International Statistical Institute

References

External links

1962 births
Living people
20th-century Chinese mathematicians
20th-century Chinese writers
21st-century Chinese mathematicians
21st-century Chinese writers
Chinese economics writers
Chinese statisticians
Econometricians
Economics journal editors
Economists from Fujian
Educators from Fujian
Elected Members of the International Statistical Institute
Fellows of the American Statistical Association
Financial economists
Fudan University alumni
Mathematicians from Fujian
Members of Academia Sinica
People from Putian
Presidents of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics
Princeton University faculty
UC Berkeley College of Letters and Science alumni
University of California, Los Angeles faculty
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill faculty
Writers from Fujian
Annals of Statistics editors

Jianqing Fan


The Canon Court de 105 M(montagne) modèle 1909 Schneider (105 mm mle.1909) was a French mountain gun, manufactured by Schneider et Cie.  According to Kennblätter fremden Geräts, Germany used the former French gun as the 10.5 cm GebH 343(f). The gun could be towed by a horse or mule.

According to Russian sources the 105 M Mle 1909 was evaluated and found suitable for Russian use, but needed to be rebuilt to accept 107mm Russian ammunition and was never used by Russian army.  (Encyclopedia of the Soviet Artillery by Shirokorad A. B. and others).

Gallery

Notes

See also
Mountain artillery
List of mountain artillery

World War I mountain artillery of France
World War II weapons of France
World War II mountain artillery
Artillery of France
105 mm artillery
Schneider Electric

Canon Court de 105 M(montagne) modele 1909 Schneider


Route 181 is a  north–south state highway in Massachusetts starting at an intersection with U.S. Route 20 in Palmer, located in Hampden County. The route crosses the Mass Pike (Interstate 90), but does not intersect. The route crosses through the Bondsville section of Palmer, crossing into Hampshire County, where it enters Belchertown. In Belchertown, Route 181 comes to an end at a junction with the concurrent U.S. Route 202 (US 202) and Route 21.

Route description
Route 181 begins at an intersection with U.S. Route 20 (Wilbraham Street / North Main Street) in Palmer. The route proceeds north along Sykes Street, crossing through downtown Palmer. After Fletcher Street, Route 181 proceeds north under the Mass. Pike (I-90) and parallels the Quaboag River. Leaving downtown Palmer, the route crosses over some railroad tracks and the two-lane road makes a dart to the northwest before Bourne Street. After Bourne Street, Route 181 continues north on Sykes Street, crossing Main Street in the center of a commercial section.

Route 181 continues north through Palmer, dropping the Sykes Street name, which becomes Palmer Street. After crossing the Ware River, the route turns northeast and becomes South Main Street, turning north as it approaches Lilly Pond. At Pine Street, Route 181 crosses north through Bondsville, at the north end of Bondsville, the route leaves Hampden County for Hampshire County. Now in Belchertown, Route 181 turns west on Depot Street, At the junction with Franklin Street, the route turns northwest, crossing through rural sections of Belchertown, running along Franklin Street.

Route 181 passes a local community of residences, serving as the main north–south street. Passing the Mill Valley Country Club, the route turns northwest at Cold Spring Road and becomes known as Mill Valley Road. After a northwestern stretch through the town of Belchertown, Route 181 enters downtown Belchertown, retaining the Mill Valley Road name until its junction with South Main Street, where it takes the latter as a moniker, proceeding northwest another block to US 202 and Route 21 (Maple Street).

Major intersections

References

External links

181
Transportation in Hampden County, Massachusetts
Transportation in Hampshire County, Massachusetts

Massachusetts Route 181