In the 1980s, the fantasy roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons was attacked and accused of supporting Satanism, and leading people to commit suicide.

Some religious beliefs and fear of the unknown led to false accusations against things that were different from the norm. The protest against it changed the game forever and made players have to adapt to new rules. Many wanted to stop D&D completely, but in the end  compromises were made and the game is enjoyed by millions today.

Occult in the 1980s

In the 1980s, fear of the occult was a big problem. It all began when a mother believed her daughter's daycare center was teaching her to support and worship Satan. Daycare centers were very new back then and parents were afraid of the safety of their children. This one mother's accusation led an investigation as other parents started making false claims.

The interrogated children never said anything bad happened. Parents got so mad at this that many police scared the kids into saying what they wanted to hear. Accusations like this spread across the country, from rock music to card games. D&D was a big part of those accusations.

D&D was arguably the first true role-playing game. Many people feared the occult and because of all these reports with D&D, suicides and murders, people also started fearing D&D. Time magazine published an article about D&D being satanic.

Though it was satire, it still caught on to people's fear of the occult. This fear led to problems with the criminal justice system. For example the West Memphis 3, 3 teens accused of murder, were prosecuted just because of people being scared of the occult. Even a policeman changed a story about the Irving Pulling case (Suicides & Harm) because he was scared of TSR suing him.

Suicides and harm
James Dallas Egbert III disappeared in 1979 from his dorm in Michigan State University. He was found alive in the utility tunnels of the school two days later by a private investigator after James attempted suicide. His mother had found his suicide note the day before. The note referenced Egbert's character in D&D needing to die because a demon told him to kill himself.

His mother completely blamed the game. Egbert suffered from many mental illnesses that were not researched enough, including depression, schizophrenia, and anxiety. William Dear, the private investigator, suspected that the game had caused James' actions.

The media took this as a fact and started an outrage against D&D. Dear thought Egbert went into the tunnels to play a live action version of the game. A year later, Egbert died from a gunshot suicide This story was the basis of the book (and later movie) Mazes & Monsters.

In 1983 the suicide of Irving Lee Pulling II  was also associated with D&D. Patricia Pulling, Irving's mom, founded Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons as a result. Ms.Pulling found other D&D players who did harmful actions such as James Curbing, a rabid player, who killed his school principal, wounded three classmates, then shot himself. There was a view that teenagers could not see the difference between fantasy and reality, and that all these murders and suicides were building on that, especially after many suicide notes mentioned the game.

Patricia Pulling and BADD

August, 1983. Investigators found Irving Lee Pulling and his brother dead from gunshot wounds beneath a railroad trestle. Irving had a gun in hand. Police thought it was a murder suicide. Pulling saw the incident as more than a murder suicide. She blamed Irving's favorite game, Dungeons and Dragons, for his death.

Classmates say the trestle they were found under was a frequent place the boys would venture to play D&D. Investigators found that earlier that day Irving's character had a curse cast upon him. The curse was supposed to cause his character "emotional pain and damage." Pulling the curse was real, and was the cause of his suicide.

Patricia Pulling said her claims about D&D supporting Satan had to be true because no one would be able to write with so much detail (in the manuals) without vast knowledge of the occult. Some monsters from the original Advanced Dungeons & Dragons were demons, with varying degrees of power over the characters. Patricia sued Irving's school for allowing the kids to play there. The principal argued that the game was not part of the curriculum of the school, and the charges were dropped.

The CDC found no link between the game and violence. Yet, Patricia continued her fight by creating the group BADD. BADD's messages and PSA's spread across the world. Patricia released a book titled The Devil's Web- Who is Stalking Your Child for Satan?  In it she said players will become a "homosexual satanists who will sacrifice their parents, their sister, and the family cat, then commit suicide in a satanic ritual". (From Patricia's Book)

Some people still thought D&D was good. Michael Stackpole published articles like The Pulling Report and The Truth About Role-Playing Games to discredit Pulling's claims about D&D. Stackpole found that the suicide rate for people who DID play rpgs was actually lower than the suicide rate for the general population.

Eventually, due to the negativity, TSR made changes to the game. James Ward, an executive at TSR had demons and devils removed from the Monster Manual and Assassins and some spells removed from the Player's Handbook. Ward explained his actions in an article in Dragon, a magazine about fantasy role-playing games, saying that "Avoiding the Angry Mother Syndrome has become a good, basic guideline, for all of the designers and editors at TSR, Inc.". In later editions TSR re-added some of the removed features in a separate manual intended for mature readers. (From 5e monster manual)

Today, the game is played around the world, and parents can be rest assured knowing that their children are not becoming Satanists.

References

Role-playing video games

Dungeons and Dragons Satanic Panic


The Bank Of America Corporate Center is an 871 ft (265 m) high skyscraper found in Uptown Charlotte, North Carolina. It is the 31st tallest building in the United States, and was completed in 1992. It was also the tallest building in Charlotte and in North Carolina; the building is 60 stories high. It is the 174th-tallest building in the world. It was designed by Argentine architect César Pelli and HKS Architects. It is best known as the world headquarters for Bank of America.

It is among the tallest buildings on the East Coast behind buildings in New York City, Philadelphia, and Atlanta.

Sometimes locally referred to as the Taj McColl after former Bank of America CEO Hugh McColl, who was responsible for the tower's construction, on a clear day the tower is visible to the naked eye from 35 miles (56 km) away.

Buildings and structures in North Carolina

Bank of America Corporate Center


The Shining is an American opera in two acts and an epilogue, with music by composer Paul Moravec and a libretto by Mark Campbell, based on the 1977 novel by Stephen King.  The opera received its world premiere on May 7, 2016 at the Ordway Music Theater, Saint Paul, Minnesota.  It is part of the "New Works Initiative" of Minnesota Opera.

Background and composition
The idea for an opera based on the Stephen King novel originated with Eric Simonson, who directed the premiere production of the resulting work, and Minnesota Opera Artistic Director Dale Johnson.  Moravec and Campbell deliberately designed their opera to hew more closely to King's original novel, compared to the 1980 film directed by Stanley Kubrick.  They worked on the opera for three years.

In addition to Simonson as director of the premiere production, other members of the production team included Heidi Spesard-Noble (choreographer), Erhard Rom (scenery and properties designer), Kärin Kopischke (costume designer), Robert Wierzel (lighting designer), and C Andrew Mayer (sound designer).

Roles

Synopsis
The following is based on the original synopsis by librettist Mark Campbell.

In Acts I and II, the setting is the Overlook Hotel in Colorado, from late September to mid-November 1975.

Act I

On the last weekend of September 1975, Jack Torrance, his wife Wendy, and his son Danny arrive at the Overlook Hotel, in a remote location in the Colorado Rockies, as Jack has been engaged as winter caretaker at the hotel.  Wendy and Jack welcome this development in their lives, in the hope that it will bring the family closer together.  Jack, a writer, is also grateful for time to finish his play.  The hotel's general manager, Stuart Ullman, gives the Torrances a tour of the hotel and speaks of its famous guests.  The family then meets Dick Hallorann, the hotel cook, who shows Wendy and Danny around the kitchen.

Ullman privately tells Jack of concerns about his past personal history, which includes physical abuse and alcoholism.  Jack assures Ullman that he has surmounted his problems.  Bill Watson takes Jack to the basement and gives him instructions about boiler maintenance.  Watson also reveals stories about the hotel's past:  an earlier caretaker, Delbert Grady, killed his wife and two daughters, and then himself.  A guest, Mrs Massey, committed suicide in a bathtub after her young lover abandoned her.

In parallel, outside the hotel, Hallorann informs Danny of his sense that Danny possesses a second sight, the "shining", which Hallorann's grandmother detected in him as a child.  Hallorann also tells Danny that fears about the hotel can be controlled, and that Danny should call out to him if the Torrance family is in danger.  Ullman, Watson, and Hallorann say farewell to the Torrances, leaving the family alone on the hotel porch.

Several weeks later in the caretaker's quarters, Wendy reads Treasure Island to Danny as Jack works on his play.  As Danny leaves to brush his teeth before bedtime, the couple affirms their love for each other.  Danny is trapped in the bathroom, but escapes.  Traumatized, he claims that he saw dark visions.  Jack tries to shake Danny out of his trauma.  Wendy stops him and reveals that Jack once injured Danny.  She plans to bring Danny to the local doctor the next day for examination.  Wendy puts Danny to bed and sings him a lullaby.  Jack remembers his own childhood abuse at the hands of his father, Mark Torrance.  Danny utters the word "Redrum", which Wendy dismisses as a reaction to Treasure Island.

Several days later, Jack sifts through boxes of memorabilia in the basement.  He finds a scrapbook assembled by "The Manager", and from it learns more about the hotel's infamous past.  This includes Horace Derwent's sale of the hotel to the Mafia, and a subsequent Mafia killing at the hotel years later. He also reads about more about the Grady family and Mrs Massey.  An invitation to a New Year's Eve masked ball drops from the scrapbook.  This inspires Jack to tell the story of the hotel.  Wendy and Danny return from the doctor, who has examined Danny and found nothing wrong.  Wendy notes Jack's growing obsession with the Overlook Hotel, and requests that they leave immediately.  Jack dismisses the suggestion. He goes into town and calls Mr. Ullman, who gets very angry. Later that day Al Shockley calls Jack and tells him not make Ullman mad and not to write a book about the Overlook.

In the first week of November, strange noises awaken Wendy, and Danny runs into his parents' bedroom in a panic.  Jack checks the elevator and then the ballroom, where he momentarily hears people.  He sees a dog mask and a large croquet mallet. Shaken, Jack composes himself before returning to the quarters to reassure Wendy.  Wendy still believes that they should leave the hotel.

Danny has walked by Room 217 several times, and one day in mid-November, finally enters that room.  In the hotel office, a ranger on the CB radio warns Jack of an upcoming blizzard.  The ranger's voice then suddenly becomes the voice of his father Mark, who tells Jack to kill his family.  Jack smashes the radio with the croquet mallet.  Wendy comes in, and is appalled to see that Jack has destroyed their only contact with the outside world.  Danny appears with his clothes wet, bruises around his neck, and lipstick marks on his face.  Jack tries to protect his family.  The structure of the hotel suddenly collapses and reveals all of its apparitions, including Delbert Grady, Mrs Massey, Horace Derwent, and the guests of the New Year's Eve party. Danny cries out for Hallorann as snow begins to fall.

Act II
In late November, Jack goes to the basement for the boiler's daily maintenance.  Grady appears and encourages Jack to "correct the errors" of Danny and Wendy, in the same manner as Grady's treatment of his wife and daughters.  Grady then invites Jack to the masked ball. In the caretaker's quarters, Danny tells his mother that "they" have gotten to his father.  Wendy tries to mitigate Danny's fears.  Once Danny is alone, however, he again calls out for Hallorann.

Jack joins the masked ball in the ballroom, and orders drinks from Lloyd, the bartender.  Onstage, Horace Derwent, Grady, and Lloyd sing, and Mark Torrance then joins them, as eventually does Jack.  Jack collapses and the party dissolves. Finding Jack sprawled on the floor, Wendy tries to help him back to their quarters, but Jack attempts to strangle her.  Wendy smashes a bottle over Jack's head, and she and Danny lock the unconscious Jack inside the pantry.  Jack revives and demands to be released. Wendy takes a large knife from the kitchen and leaves with Danny.  Jack frees himself from the pantry, with assistance from Grady.

In the caretaker's quarters, Wendy tries to calm Danny, and then returns to the kitchen for food.  In the ballroom, Wendy sees apparitions, but convinces herself that they are not real.  Jack suddenly jumps out from behind the bar and attacks her with the mallet.  Wendy plunges the knife into Jack's back and runs back to the quarters, locking the door.  Jack follows her and almost breaks through the door, when Wendy slices Jack's hands with razors that she has earlier retrieved from the bathroom.  Grady and Derwent appear to Jack, telling him to kill Wendy later, as Hallorann is approaching the hotel on a snowmobile.

Hallorann enters the hotel.  Danny tries to warn him, but Jack attacks Hallorann with his mallet and renders him unconscious.  Jack corners Danny, but Danny confronts Jack with his first sung line in the opera:

 "You are not my father."

Jack briefly becomes lucid again, collapses on the floor, and urges Danny to escape.  Derwent, Grady, and Lloyd appear, reproach Jack, and warn him that the boiler is about to explode.  Hallorann revives, and takes Wendy and Danny away from the hotel.

In the basement, Jack resolves to let his family live.  He has snapped his father's cane, which Mark had used to beat his own wife, Jack's mother, years before.  After his family is a safe distance away, Jack allows the boiler to explode, which destroys the hotel and kills him.

Epilogue

Eight months later, at a hotel in Maine, Wendy and Danny are guests in a cabin.  On his work break, Hallorann, now a cook at this hotel, checks in on Wendy and Danny.  While Danny fishes from a pond and his mother looks on, Hallorann urges the boy to be strong and continue on with his life and to help his mother, after the family's tragedy.

Reception of premiere production
By February 2016, the scheduled Minnesota Opera performances had advance sales of 95%.  By the time of the May 2016 performances, the entire run was sold out.

Reviews of the opera's premiere were generally favourable to all aspects of the production.  The libretto and occasional incidental aspects of the music and staging received minimal criticism:

 "If the evening's chief question was, can a legitimate, engrossing opera be fashioned from an unlikely source — a popular horror-thriller tale — the answer offered in this eye-filling multimedia production with its Romantic score by Paul Moravec and deft libretto by Mark Campbell, along with a first-rate cast, was a resounding yes.

 "Moravec's score for the opera incorporates propulsive, percussion-driven sounds for what could be called the 'mad scenes' of Act Two, along with appropriately eerie moments as tension-builders, but most of the music is tonal and Romantic and yet doesn't sound old-fashioned — the soaring, exultant lyricism, for instance, in the opening scene as Jack and the family anticipate — almost too eagerly — their 'new life,' or at the very end, the beautifully written coda scene, where Dick Hallorann, the cook, consoles Danny and Wendy as the strings play delicate chamber music.

 "From Paul Moravec 's score full of discomfiting themes that clash and collide to strongly sung and disarmingly believable portrayals of characters alive and otherwise, The Shining is an unqualified success, ranking alongside 2011's Silent Night as the best works to have been launched by Minnesota Opera's New Works Initiative."

 "Paul Moravec's music sets the tone from the first moments. It's a rich, multi-layered soundscape that breathes life into the Overlook Hotel, which is both the setting and the villain of the piece.

 "Mark Campbell's libretto makes the point over and over again. Wendy assures young Danny that it's not his father trying to kill him, but the hotel. In turn, Danny uses his second sight, aka the shining, to tell his mother that the hotel has got Daddy, and wants to get them too.

 "If you're thinking of Jack and Wendy Torrance as Jack Nicholson and Shelly [sic] Duvall from the movie version, forget it. Brian Mulligan and Kelly Kaduce have created entirely new characters: He's stoic, introspective and determined to do the right thing, as homicidal maniacs go. And she's the picture of strength and fiercely protective maternal love — even if she does pick a stupid moment to go down to the kitchen and make sandwiches."

 "Mr. Moravec's witty, evocative music strikes a good balance between the sincere and the creepy. Act I, though slowed by too much exposition, gives Jack and Wendy some heartfelt arias and duets that express their bond, while groans from the orchestra and glassy violins suggest the evil that threatens them. At first, the ghosts are just implied, but from the riotous Act I finale on, they are corporeal. In Act II, the music fragments and disintegrates, and piles on the sardonic darkness with some Kurt Weill-tinged party scenes, as Jack goes over the edge."

 "This musical version of Stephen's King's novel about the remote Colorado hotel that turns a man into a homicidal maniac succeeds at nearly everything it attempts. It marries the highest of art forms with one of the most suspect in popular culture. King's story is opened up and realized in new ways, and opera actually looks fun for a change.

 That's because composer Paul Moravec comprehends the situation at hand. His music is not overly serious or, as it might have been, camp, though it has elements of both. Moravec gets that most people know this story from the iconic, 1980 film starring Jack Nicholson, so he speaks the language of movie music — the shrill violin, the pulsing tempos of rising emotions, the bent note meant to warn audiences that things aren't what they seem."

References

External links
 Minnesota Opera page on The Shining
 Official Website of The Shining, opera

Operas
2016 operas
English-language operas
Operas set in the United States
Stage shows based on works by Stephen King
Operas based on novels
The Shining (franchise)
Compositions by Paul Moravec

The Shining (opera)


Crevasse rescue is the process of retrieving a climber from a crevasse in a glacier. Because of the frequency with which climbers break through the snow over a crevasse and fall in, crevasse rescue technique is a standard part of climbing education.

The basic assumption of crevasse rescue is that two or more climbers are tied together with a climbing rope, forming a rope team; a standard number is three, one on each end and one in the middle, which means there are two available to hold a falling climber, but is not as complicated  to manage as large numbers of people attached to a single rope.

When the snow gives way under the victim, the others on the team must immediately prepare for the impending yanks, usually by flopping down and digging ice axes and knees (or boots if not wearing crampons) into the snow in a self-arrest position, facing away from the crevasse if possible, and holding tight until everything stops moving. Many crevasses are small or slanted, and the fallen climber may be able to escape by digging or wiggling out; but if the climber is hanging in midair, one of several rescue techniques will need to be used.

The first step is to stabilize the situation and free up the climbers still outside the crevasse. This can be done in several ways, typically involving one person anchoring the rope with a boot-axe belay, while the other person probes for the edge of the crevasse and attempts to communicate with the victim.

 The main force technique is plausible when there are multiple rope teams; everybody simply hauls on the rope attached to the victim, drawing it over an axe shaft or other hard object so the rope friction does not cut a deep groove at the edge of the crevasse making it harder for the climber to get out.
 The Z-pulley technique is a moderately complicated arrangement using a small moving pulley to reduce the hauling effort.
 The single-pulley technique entails dropping a pulley attached to another length of rope, which the victim clips to the climbing harness.
 If the climber in the crevasse is able to move, he or she may be able to use prusik hitches with slings, cordelette, or Jumars to ascend the rope. The related bilgeri technique involves the use of a second rope, and prusik hitches by the rescuers instead of the victim.

Once the victim reaches the lip of the crevasse, some combination of hauling and flailing will be needed to get over it, since the victim is still suspended by the waist, with feet still in the crevasse.

Although the mechanical principle of rescue is simple, the reality is far messier. The victim may be injured and/or disoriented from the fall, the rescuers on the scene may be anxious or uncertain, equipment and ropes are scattered everywhere, and everybody will likely already be exhausted and out of breath because of the climbing and altitude. It may also be that additional crevasses are nearby, and rescuers have died in unsuspected crevasses because they unroped in order to set up a rescue of the first victim.

The experience of world-class climbers Jim Wickwire and Chris Kerrebrock on Mount McKinley (since renamed Denali) in 1981 shows how much can go wrong. Only a two-person team, when Kerrebrock fell in, Wickwire was pulled in after. Wickwire managed to get out of the crevasse, but Kerrebrock was jammed in the bottom, head down. Wickwire tried to pull him out, but his shoulder had been dislocated, and he didn't have the strength; Kerrebrock eventually died of hypothermia, and Wickwire had to run the gauntlet of the remaining crevasses alone.

References
 Mountaineering: The Freedom of the Hills

Mountaineering techniques
Rescue

Crevasse rescue


"Five Gold Rings" is the second episode of the Rock & Chips trilogy and the series' only Christmas Special. It was first aired on 29 December 2010.

Plot
A few weeks following the birth of Rodney, Del Boy and the rest of his gang (Boycie, Trigger, Jumbo, Albie and Denzil) have left school. Del and Jumbo now work as market traders selling American records, while Boycie works as a cleaner for a Spanish second-hand car dealer, Alberto Balsam. Del's mother, Joan, had been fired from her job at the cinema following her pregnancy, but is now applying to get it back, and she has hired Grandad's wife, Violet, to babysit Rodney while she and Del are out, much to Grandad's chagrin. Joan, however, still misses her old lover, Freddie "The Frog" Robdal, the local gentleman villain and Rodney's real father, unknown to Reg and the rest of the family.

Robdal, meanwhile, has been detained along with his friend, Gerald "Jelly" Kelly, on the suspicion for robbing the jewellery store in Margate during the "Jolly Boys' Outing" with Del and the others, by the crooked DI Thomas and DC Stanton. Robdal and Kelly stand their ground, staunchly refusing to admit their guilt. Their lawyer arranges bail, and Thomas attempts to have it overturned, but is refused when the judge is revealed to be an old war friend of Robdal and Kelly. Robdal pays a visit to The Nag's Head and speaks with the bartender, whom he suspects of grassing him and Kelly to the police.

While in a bar with the others, Del tells them of his new plan to "break his cherry": following advice from Alberto, Del has acquired five rings made by the father of his friend, Abdul Khan, although they are merely made of gold-plated metal and glass, not gold and diamonds, and he will use them to get "engaged" to any girl he fancies. Whilst out selling records with the others, Del gets engaged to a former crush, Amita, who also appears to take a shine to Del. Not long after, Del and Jumbo are arrested by their old enemy, Roy Slater, who has now left school and become a police cadet. Although they show the receipts to Sergeant Foster, he sees through their farce by noticing "Memphis" misspelled on the receipt, meaning that they fabricated the receipts with their own printing material. Despite this, Foster lets them go on the condition that he keep the records for himself, unaware that Del has loads more stored in his garage. Around the same time, Del also gets engaged to another girl, Gwen, and she invites him to dinner.

Robdal finds Joan in a coffee shop and offers her financial help, but she declines, afraid of what Reg will do if he finds out about their affair and asks Robdal to stay away from her. One night, after Joan dyes her hair brown to resemble Elizabeth Taylor, Reg tells Joan of a job he was offered by "a certain contact" who was looking for a charlady for £30 a week. The contact happens to be Robdal, who did this as a way of getting closer to Joan. During an argument, Joan accuses Robdal of playing the same mind games as Reg, hurting Robdal greatly, and he goes on to point out the major differences between himself and Reg, including his feelings for Joan. As Freddie prepares to head out, Joan runs up and kisses him, and they resume their affair.

Del, while at Gwen's house, makes a fool of himself by telling Gwen's family a rude (but misunderstood) French phrase which Joan learned from Robdal, and the engagement is off. At the same time, Amita comes to Del's flat, looking for him, and Del arrives shortly after, with Joan secretly chastising Del for his promiscuity. Comically, Reg and Violet fail to pronounce Amita's name properly and keep calling her "Anita".

However, Del's engagement to Amita is also ended when Amita takes a trip to Pakistan with her father and learns that Del bought five glass rings from Abdul's father. Heartbroken, Amita admits that she liked Del, and returns the ring to him. Del confides to Trigger of his plans to give up on the rings and find love "the normal way", but reverts to the rings upon seeing another beautiful girl put off by Trigger's naïveté.

At the flat, with Del, Reg, and Grandad out at a New Year's party at the Nag's Head, Robdal pays Joan a visit and sees his son for the first time, holding baby Rodney in his arms.

Connections to Only Fools and Horses
 Del leaves school and becomes a market trader, setting up his image in Only Fools and Horses.
 Del's first use of two of his trademark quotes, "Cushty" and "You know it makes sense".
 Del's methods with his glass rings explain how he was able to get engaged to so many girls before the events of Only Fools and Horses, although he did not find true love until meeting Raquel Turner through a computer dating agency in "Dates". It is also revealed that this was the idea of Alberto Balsam, the predecessor to Boycie.
 Boycie is shown to be working as a car cleaner in a second hand car dealer's shop, setting up his image as a second hand car dealer himself in Only Fools and Horses.
 Roy Slater joins the police force, which leads to him becoming a major antagonist in "May The Force Be With You" and "To Hull and Back".
 Gwen asks Del if he has ever been to Holland. Del, Rodney and Uncle Albert later go to Holland to see a diamond merchant, Hendrick Van Kleefe, in "To Hull and Back".
 Del uses his first French phrase, which is obviously incorrect but which leads to him believing he is fluent in French. The episode reveals that Freddie the Frog was the source of this.
 Del bought his glass rings from the father of a fellow schoolboy named Abdul, who would also be mentioned in "Diamonds Are for Heather" and "Video Nasty", as well as appear in "To Hull and Back".
 Boycie claims that he will not fall in love and end up in an uneasy marriage so easily. This is almost exactly what he does between the events of Rock & Chips and Only Fools and Horses when he meets and marries Marlene Lane.
 Joan expresses belief that one day, Del will be a millionaire. One of Del's catchphrases in Only Fools and Horses is "This time next year, we'll be millionaires!", although it does not happen until "Time On Our Hands", and Del goes on to lose his fortune in the American Stock Market crash in "If They Could See Us Now".
 Paula Wilcox, who plays Violet Trotter, previously portrayed Pertunia, Boycie's sister-in-law, in the Only Fools and Horses spin-off The Green Green Grass.

Cast
Nicholas Lyndhurst as Frederick "The Frog" Robdal
James Buckley as Derek "Del Boy" Trotter
Kellie Bright as Joan Trotter
Shaun Dingwall as Reg Trotter
Phil Daniels as Grandad/Edward "Ted" Trotter
Paula Wilcox as Violet Trotter
Paul Putner as Gerald "Jelly" Kelly
Mel Smith as DI Thomas
Tom Brooke as DC Martin Stanton
Dave Lamb as Sergeant Foster
Daniel Cerqueira as Alberto Balsam
Stephen Lloyd as Boycie
Lewis Osborne as Trigger
Ashley Jerlach as Denzil
Lee Long as Jumbo Mills
Jonathan Readwin as Albie Littlewood
Calum McNab as Roy Slater
Robert Daws as Ernie Raynor
Joan Hodges as Gwen
Chandeep Uppal as Amita

External links

"Five Gold Rings" at the British Comedy Guide

2010 British television episodes
Television episodes about adultery
British Christmas television episodes
Only Fools and Horses
Peckham
Pregnancy-themed television episodes

Five Gold Rings


Kurt Waldemar Tank (24 February 1898 – 5 June 1983) was a German aeronautical engineer and test pilot who led the design department at Focke-Wulf from 1931 to 1945. He was responsible for the creation of several important Luftwaffe aircraft of World War II, including the Fw 190 fighter aircraft, the Ta 152 fighter-interceptor and the Fw 200 Condor airliner. After the war, Tank spent two decades designing aircraft abroad, working first in Argentina and then in India, before returning to Germany in the late 1960s to work as a consultant for Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm (MBB).

Early life

Tank was born in Bromberg (Bydgoszcz), Province of Posen in present-day Poland. His grandfather was a cavalry sergeant in the Uhlans and his father, Willi Tank, was a grenadier sergeant in the 3rd Division. When World War I broke out Tank wished to join the Deutsches Heer'''s then-named  Fliegertruppe air service, but his father insisted he instead follow the family tradition and enlist in the cavalry. He ended the war as a captain, with many decorations for bravery.

Career

After the war, Tank graduated from the Technical University of Berlin in 1923. A mentor from the university secured him his first job, in the design department of Rohrbach Metallflugzeug GmbH, where he worked on flying boats, and helped design a passenger aircraft, the Ro VIII Roland.

Tank moved to the firm Albatros Flugzeugwerke, where he worked as a test pilot. The Albatros company went bankrupt in 1929 and in 1931, under government pressure, was merged with Focke-Wulf.

Tank then started work on the design of the Fw 44 Stieglitz (Goldfinch), a two-seat civilian biplane. It was Focke-Wulf's first commercially successful design, launched in 1932. In 1934 Tank's Fw 56 advanced trainer began production. This led to burgeoning growth for the company as Hitler began to prepare the country for war.

Ludwig Roselius, chairman and 46% majority shareholder of Focke-Wulf via Kaffee HAG, and Barbara Goette - his closest confidante, met with Kurt Tank in the Marcus-Allee, Bremen on many occasions. Barbara declared Focke-Wulf to be a "war-determining" enterprise.

In 1936 Tank designed the Focke-Wulf Fw 200 Condor to a Deutsche Luft Hansa specification for air transport. The first flight, with Tank as pilot, occurred in July 1937, less than a year after work had begun. The Condor made a famous non-stop flight from Berlin to New York City in 1938, proving the concept of transatlantic air travel. The Condor would later be used as a maritime patrol bomber aircraft of some repute during the war.

World War II

The Fw 190 Würger (Shrike), first flying in 1939 and produced from 1941 to 1945, was a mainstay Luftwaffe single-seat fighter during World War II, and Tank's most-produced (over 20,000) and famous design. In January 1943, he was named honorary professor with a chair at the Technical University of Braunschweig, in recognition of his work developing aircraft.

In 1944, the Reichsluftfahrtministerium'' (German Air Ministry) decided that new fighter aircraft designations must include the chief designer's name. Kurt Tank's new designs were therefore given the prefix Ta. His most notable late-war design was the high-speed/high-altitude Ta 152 single-engine fighter, a continuation of the Fw 190 design.

Postwar
After the war, Tank negotiated for an employment position with the United Kingdom, with the Nationalist government of China, and with representatives of the Soviet Union. The British government decided not to offer him a contract on the grounds that they could not see how he could be integrated into a research project or design group.

When those negotiations proved unsuccessful, he accepted an offer from Argentina to work at its aerotechnical institute, the Instituto Aerotécnico in Córdoba under the name of Pedro Matthies.

Tank moved to Córdoba in central Argentina in late 1946, with many of his Focke-Wulf co-workers. One of these was Ronald Richter, who proposed to power airplanes with nuclear energy, to be developed in the Huemul Project, which was later proven to be a fraud according to some.

The Instituto Aerotécnico later became Argentina's military aeroplane factory, the Fábrica Militar de Aviones. While there, Tank designed the IAe Pulqui II based on the Focke-Wulf Ta 183 design that had reached mock-up stage by the end of World War II; it was a state-of-the-art design for its day, but the project was cancelled after the fall of Peron in 1955. When President Juan Perón fell from power, the ex-Focke-Wulf team dispersed, with many, including Tank, moving to India. First he worked as Director of the Madras Institute of Technology, where one of his students was future President of India Abdul Kalam, who went on to design the indigenous Satellite Launch Vehicle (SLV) and lead the Integrated Guided Missile Development Programme. Tank later joined Hindustan Aeronautics, where he designed the Hindustan Marut fighter-bomber, the first military aircraft constructed in India. The first prototype flew in 1961, and the Marut was retired from active service in 1985. Tank left Hindustan Aeronautics in 1967 and by the 1970s, he had returned to live in Berlin, basing himself in Germany for the rest of his life. He worked as a consultant for MBB.

Death
He died in Munich in 1983.

References

External links

1898 births
1983 deaths
Aircraft designers
People from Bydgoszcz
German aerospace engineers
German Army personnel of World War I
German people of World War II
German expatriates in Argentina
People from the Province of Posen
Technical University of Berlin alumni
Academic staff of the Technical University of Braunschweig
Engineers from Berlin
German expatriates in India

Kurt Tank


Rudy Rasmus is a pastor, author, and humanitarian. He co-pastors the St. John's United Methodist Church located in downtown Houston with his wife Juanita. St. John's began with nine members in 1992, and is now one of the most culturally diverse congregations in the country.

Career
Rasmus was a monthly contributor to Oprah Winfrey's O Magazine and has recently completed a doctorate at United Theological Seminary. He is a 2008 gospel music industry Stellar Award nominee for the music project "Touch" and is the author of three books, including Jesus Insurgency with coauthor Dottie Escobedo-Frank (Abingdon Publishing, Nashville), and Touch: Pressing against the wounds of a broken world (Thomas Nelson Publishers, Nashville). His latest book is entitled Love.Period – When all else fails.

Rasmus founded a nonprofit corporation, the Bread of Life, Inc. with his wife in December 1992 and began serving dinners to the homeless in the sanctuary at St. John's. The organization provides an array of services to homeless men and women seven nights a week in the Bread of Life facility on the St. John's campus. The project provides hot meals to the homeless and distributes over 9 tons of fresh food weekly to hungry families. Thanks to generous support from collaborations with local and national partners and significant donations over the years from Tina, Beyoncé, and Solange Knowles, Pastor Rudy has completed over $30 million in housing development projects for the previously homeless in Downtown Houston. The Temenos CDC portfolio includes the Knowles-Temenos Apartments, a 43-unit Single Room Occupancy development, the 80-unit Temenos II Apartments both designed to provide permanent living accommodations for formerly homeless individuals, and the Temenos III Apartments designed for chronic inebriates and the most vulnerable homeless individuals in the Houston community. Eighteen years ago Kelly Rowland teamed up with Beyoncé and Tina Knowles to build the Knowles-Rowland Center for Youth where community empowerment activities for the young and old take place every week. The facility is currently serves as a distribution center meeting the needs weekly of Houstonians in need. Most recently Pastor Rudy teamed up with Tina and Beyoncé to help 100,000 flood victims in the wake of Hurricane Harvey in Houston. Rudy's most recent project is aimed at developing a boarding school for young men who are aging out of foster care. Today, with a focus on social impact investing, the Bread of Life owns and operates the Amazing KMAZ 102.5fm radio station where Rudy can be heard throughout the week on his program "The Love Revolution."

St. John's provides HIV/AIDS testing to churchgoers on Sundays through the "Get Tested Project." After many years of service to the community, Pastor Rudy received the Jefferson Award at a ceremony in Washington, DC in 2009. For years Pastor Rudy coordinated domestic and global anti-hunger initiatives in conjunction with Beyoncé's concert tours and travels extensively developing food programs around the world for people experiencing food insufficiency.

Personal life
Rasmus and his wife Juanita have been married for 34 years. They have two daughters.

References

External links
The work of the people
 Houston area pastor works with Beyonce
 Column offers advice for ethical quandaries-NPR
 Beyoncé's pastor Rudy Rasmus talks about his new book Love.Period

21st-century Methodist ministers
American humanitarians
Year of birth missing (living people)
Living people

Rudy Rasmus


The Inter-American Defense Board (IADB) is an international committee of nationally appointed defense officials who develop collaborative approaches on common defense and security issues facing countries in North, Central, and South America.  The IADB provides technical advice and services to the Organization of American States (OAS).

The IADB was created in 1942 by foreign ministers of 21 states, in the middle of World War II. It is now the oldest existing defense organization in the world.

In March 2006, the OAS assumed formal authority over the IADB.  As of that date, 27 of the 34 members of OAS were also members of the IADB.

Inter-American Defense College

The Board is made up of three main organs, one of which is the Inter-American Defense College (IADC).  The IADC offers a twelve-month Master's of Science degree for senior military, police, and government officials that covers governmental systems, the current international environment, and the structure and function of the Inter-American system, and offers an opportunity to study broad-based defense and security issues affecting the Western Hemisphere and the world.  It is located at Fort Lesley J. McNair in Washington, D.C.

Inter-American Defense Board Medal

The Inter-American Defense Board Medal is an international military decoration.  It is awarded to any military officer, serving in a member nation of the OAS, who completes a tour of service with the IADB. The award is also presented to military personnel who serve on the staff of the IADB Chairman or Secretariat, and for those who complete instructor tours at the IADC.

External links

Official website
 IADC website
"Remarks Regarding the Inter-American Defense Board", Remarks by Ambassador John F. Maisto, U.S. Permanent Representative to the Organization of American States, to the Thirty-Second Special Session of the OAS General Assembly Considering the Juridical Link of the Inter-American Defense Board, March 15, 2006

Organization of American States
Military diplomacy

Inter-American Defense Board


The A.J. Phillips Fenton Museum and Historical Society is a museum located in a historic building in Fenton, Michigan. The building was constructed in 1900 and donated by the heirs of Andrew Jackson Phillips to the City of Fenton in 1906. The building was used as the Fenton Library, now renamed the Jack R. Winegarden Library, before the library was relocated to the old Post Office building.

The A.J. Phillips building is owned and maintained by the City of Fenton. Its holdings are owned by the Fenton Historical Society. The museum includes an extensive genealogy room cataloging residents of Fenton and the surrounding area including cemetery records for much of Genesee County. The Victorian Room is a reproduction of A.J. Phillips' personal office and includes some of his furniture. The museum also holds vintage pieces of clothing, tools, vintage televisions and old photography equipment. Military items in the museum are from the U.S. Civil War, the Spanish–American War, World War I, World War II and Vietnam War. The collection includes the sword belonging to Col. William Fenton, given to him by the City of Flint, Michigan when he took command of the 8th Michigan Volunteer Infantry Regiment.

References

External links

Museums in Genesee County, Michigan
History museums in Michigan

Fenton Museum


The Open Collaboration Services (OCS) is an open and vendor-independent REST-based API for integration of web communities and web-based services into desktop and mobile applications. It allows the exchange of relevant data from a social network between the site and clients such as other websites and applications or widgets running locally on the user's machine or mobile device.

The protocol is designed so that all applications can access multiple services providing OCS APIs.

The initial API design was done by openDesktop.org as part of the Social Desktop, especially as a cross-desktop backend provider. The API was standardised by freedesktop.org so that third-party providers are able to implement OCS API.

Non-KDE environments using the API in the past included the Maemo Downloads application store and Apps for MeeGo.

Modules

OCS consists of multiple modules, of which both servers and clients are free to choose which to implement. In the 1.6 version of the OCS specification the modules are:

 Person - user data
 Friend - social graph
 Message - in-site messaging between users
 Activity - activity streaming
 Content - downloadable content
 Fan - content favoriting
 Knowledgebase - access to FAQ items
 Event - calendaring
 Comments - content commenting
 Private data - private key-value store
 Forum - discussion topic structure
 Buildservice - application software building

References

External links
 Official Website
 Specification on freedesktop.org
 Open Collaboration Services tools and libraries

Social Desktop
KDE

Freedesktop.org

Open Collaboration Services


Mansion House is the official residence of the Lord Mayor of London. It is a Grade I listed building.  Designed by George Dance in the Palladian style, it was built primarily in the 1740s.

The Mansion House is used for some of the City of London's most formal official functions, including two annual white tie dinners. At the Easter banquet, the main speaker is the Foreign Secretary, who then receives a reply from the Dean of the Diplomatic Corps, i.e. the longest-serving ambassador. In early June, it is the turn of the Chancellor of the Exchequer to give his "Mansion House Speech" about the state of the British economy. The most famous was the Mansion House Speech of 1911 by David Lloyd George, which warned the German Empire against opposing British influence during the period leading up to the First World War.

History

Mansion House was built between the years of 1739 and 1752, in the Palladian style by the surveyor and architect George Dance the Elder. The Master Mason was John Deval.

The site, at the east end of Poultry, London, had  previously been occupied by the Stocks Market, which by the time of its closure was mostly used for the sale of herbs. The construction was prompted by a wish to put an end to the inconvenient practice of lodging the Lord Mayor in one of the City livery company halls. Dance won a competition over designs solicited from James Gibbs and Giacomo Leoni, and uninvited submissions by Batty Langley and Isaac Ware. Construction was slowed down by the discovery of springs on the site, which meant piles had to be sunk to lay adequate foundations.

The original building had two clerestory roof extensions, nicknamed the "Mayor's Nest" (a pun on "mare's nest") and "Noah's Ark".  In 1795 George Dance the Younger re-roofed the central courtyard, and had the "Noah's Ark" demolished.  In the same year, the original grand staircase was removed to make way for a further two rooms. In 1835 the entrance steps were reduced to one flight, and in 1842 the "Mayor's Nest" was demolished after the ballroom was reconstructed.  The Lord Mayor's private entrance in Walbrook was created in 1845, and in 1849 the former Swordbearer's Room was converted into the Justice Room, effectively the magistrates' court of the City, until 1999 when the court removed to a building on the opposite side of Walbrook.

From 1873, with the Lord Mayor as its president, committee meetings of the Metropolitan Hospital Sunday Fund met at Mansion House.

Funding
Mansion House was paid for in an unusual way: the City authorities, all Church of England men, found a way to tax those of other Christian denominations, particularly the Rational Dissenters. A Unitarian named Samuel Sharpe, banker by day and amateur Egyptologist by night, wrote about it in the 1830s, striking a blow against the Test and Corporate Acts. The article was republished in 1872. Sharpe argues that Mansion House "remains as a monument of the unjust manner in which Dissenters were treated in the last century" (i.e. the 18th, in contrast to his own 19th, century). William Edward Hartpole Lecky in his History of England during the Eighteenth Century (1878) describes the funding of the construction of Mansion House as "a very scandalous form of persecution".

There are over one hundred livery companies, the senior members of which form a special electorate known as Common Hall. In 1748 the City of London Corporation devised a Catch-22 situation to raise money, passing a by-law levying a heavy fine on any man who refused to stand for election, or who, once elected to office, refused to serve.  In order to serve as a Sheriff of the City of London, the individual had to have "taken the sacrament according to the Anglican rite" within the past year. This was exactly what English Dissenters could not, in conscience, do:
"It would appear almost incredible, if the facts were not widely attested, that under these circumstances the City of London systematically elected wealthy Dissenters to the office in order that they should be objected to and fined, and that in this manner it extorted no less than £15,000. The electors appointed these Dissenters with a clear knowledge that they would not serve, and with the sole purpose of extorting money. One of those whom they selected was blind; another was bedridden."  Some tried to appeal, but the process was immensely risky and costly, with the City holding all the cards. Eventually a man named Evans began a challenge which lasted ten years; in 1767, the House of Lords, drawing on the Toleration Act 1688, agreed with Lord Mansfield and ruled to curtail the City's abuse of power. In order to avoid civil disabilities such as this financially ruinous persecution, some Dissenters were known to take Communion in their parish church once a year; in the phraseology of the time, "occasional conformity" (see Occasional Conformity Act 1711). Thomas Abney rose to be Lord Mayor in this fashion.

The American author Mark Twain recounts the story in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889):

It reminded me of something I had read in my youth about the ingenious way in which the aldermen of London raised the money that built the Mansion House. A person who had not taken the Sacrament according to the Anglican rite could not stand as a candidate for sheriff of London. Thus Dissenters were ineligible; they could not run if asked, they could not serve if elected. The aldermen, who without any question were Yankees in disguise, hit upon this neat device: they passed a by-law imposing a fine of £400 upon any one who should refuse to be a candidate for sheriff, and a fine of £600 upon any person who, after being elected sheriff, refused to serve. Then they went to work and elected a lot of Dissenters, one after another, and kept it up until they had collected £15,000 in fines; and there stands the stately Mansion House to this day, to keep the blushing citizen in mind of a long past and lamented day when a band of Yankees slipped into London and played games of the sort that has given their race a unique and shady reputation among all truly good and holy peoples that be in the earth.

Architecture

Mansion House has three main storeys  over a rusticated basement. The entrance facade has a portico with six Corinthian columns, supporting a pediment with a tympanum sculpture by Sir Robert Taylor, in the centre of which is a symbolic figure of the City of London trampling on her enemies. The building originally had two prominent and unusual attic structures at either end, which were removed in 1794 and 1843. The building is on a confined site. Sir John Summerson wrote that "it leaves an impression of uneasily constricted bulk",  adding  that "on the whole, the building is a striking reminder that good taste was not a universal attribute in the eighteenth century". The main reception room, the columned  "Egyptian Hall", was so named because  Dance used an arrangement of  columns  deemed to be "Egyptian" by Vitruvius. No Egyptian motifs were employed.  It has twenty niches for sculpture. There was originally an open courtyard, later occupied by a saloon.

The residence used to have its own court of law, since the Lord Mayor is the chief magistrate of the City while in office. There were eleven holding cells (ten for men and one, nicknamed "the birdcage", for women). A famous prisoner here was the early 20th-century suffragette women's rights campaigner Sylvia Pankhurst.

Art collection
Mansion House is home to the Harold Samuel Collection of Dutch and Flemish Seventeenth Century Paintings, described as "the finest collection of such works to be formed in Britain this century". It consists of 84 paintings and includes some outstanding works by artists including Hendrick Avercamp, Gerard Ter Borch, Pieter Claesz, Aelbert Cuyp, Frans Hals, Pieter de Hooch, Jacob van Ruisdael, Jan Steen, David Teniers the Younger and Willem van de Velde. Mansion House also houses a plate collection, which includes among other treasures, the five ceremonial City of London swords.

Public access
Mansion House is not generally open to the public. However, tours can be arranged through the diary office, and there are public tours most Tuesdays.

Mansion House Street
Mansion House Street is the short street at the front of Mansion House, which connects Poultry, Queen Victoria Street and Bank Junction above Bank Underground station.

Other
Guildhall is another venue used for important City functions.

Notes

References

External links
Official website

Grade I listed buildings in the City of London
Georgian architecture in London
Greek Revival houses in the United Kingdom
Historic house museums in London
History of the City of London
Houses completed in 1752
Houses in the City of London
Mayors' mansions in the United Kingdom
Museums in the City of London
Neoclassical architecture in London
Tourist attractions in London
Scandals in England
Political scandals
Religious scandals
Financial scandals

Mansion House, London


was a Japanese scientist and academic.  He is best known as a pioneering taxonomist and malacologist specializing in Japanese marine and terrestrial Mollusca.

Early life

Kuroda was born at Fukura (now Nandan-cho in Minami-Awaji-Shi) on the island of Awaji. He graduated middle school at 15, and was recruited as a houseboy by Yoichiro Hirase, a Kyoto dealer in poultry, seeds and aviculture products who had founded a side business trading in marine and land shells. While his employment initially included cleaning Hirase's large house and looking after his children by day, Hirase paid for Kuroda to attend night school and to learn English, at which he excelled, and arranged for him to learn the basics of systematic biology. A rapid learner and diligent clerk, Kuroda was soon placed in charge of the shell business, and became Hirase's secretary. He was instrumental in the founding and operation of Hirase's Conchological Museum (1913-1919), which was situated near Kyoto Zoo, and handled most of Hirase's correspondence with foreign researchers. He also helped compile and edit Hirase's Conchological Magazine (1907-1915). In 1904, Kuroda followed Hirase in adopting Christianity, and through his church met many of the American missionaries who were active at that time in Japanese education, including Marshall Gaines and John Thomas Gulick.

Mid-career

During the period 1899–1918, a large portion of the marine and terrestrial mollusks of Japan were described by researchers in the United States and Europe, based on material sent overseas by Hirase via Kuroda. Chief among the specialists in Japanese mollusks at the time were Henry Augustus Pilsbry of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, and William Healey Dall of the Smithsonian Institution, who between them described more than a thousand marine and terrestrial species from Japan.

Upon Hirase's death in 1925, Kuroda spent two years dividing up his master's vast shell collection. One third was donated to the Smithsonian, and another third to the Natural Resources Research Institute in Tokyo. Kuroda was then hired as a curatorial assistant in the Geology Department of Kyoto University. Except for a brief stay at Taipei Imperial University from 1937 to 1940, he remained associated with Kyoto University throughout the remainder of his career, earning his PhD in 1947 at the age of 61. Kuroda was instrumental in founding the Malacological Society of Japan (1928) and its journal the Venus. During World War II, he carried out field collecting work in Taiwan and the Philippines, building on his experience in earlier expeditions to Korea and Tsushima.

Post-war activities

Though he had formally retired by 1945, Kuroda's government pension of 100 yen per month was rendered worthless with the revaluation of the Japanese currency by the Allied administration. Together with Tadashige Habe, however, he was hired as a consultant by Dr. Alvin Cahn of the Natural Resources Division at SCAP in Tokyo. Cahn drew on Kuroda's knowledge and command of English to help him compile reports on the Japanese pearl industry and other aspects of mariculture, and in return paid Kuroda a stipend and arranged for him to receive travel grants and some basic support for his research. In 1952, Kuroda and Habe published their Checklist of the Marine Mollusca of Japan through Colonel Leo Stach of SCAP.

Kuroda retired from SCAP in 1951, and became an emeritus researcher at Kyoto University. From 1966, his home was a suite of rooms at the Kaisei Hospital at Koroen in Nishinomiya City,  under the care of the hospital's director Dr. Norio Kikuchi. Kuroda attended regular meetings of the Hanshin Shell Club and the Malacological Society of Japan into his late 90s, and died a few months short of his 101st birthday.

Relationship with the Showa Emperor

Kuroda first met the Showa Emperor (Hirohito) at a soiree shortly before the opening of the Hirase Conchological Museum in 1912, while the latter was still Crown Prince. Hirohito's lifelong interest in marine invertebrates is thought to have originated with the commemorative collection of shells he received at this event. In 1971, Kuroda, Habe and Katsura Ōyama were selected to co-author a monograph of the Sea Shells of Sagami Bay, published by Maruzen in Tokyo under the auspices of the Imperial Household Biological Laboratory.

Collected works

The Japanese malacological literature has mirrored its German counterpart with commemorative articles and festschrifts published on the key birthdays of well-known malacologists.  Germany scientific community typically commemorates the 60th, 70th, 80th, and even 90th birthdays. Kuroda's colleagues recognized him upon his 60th, 77th, 88th, 99th, and 100th birthdays.

Between 1907 and 1984 Kuroda published a vast body of original research, mainly in the journals Venus and 'Yume-Hamaguri'. A full bibliography of his works, listing all his new taxa, was published by the Hanshin Shell Club in 1986. An illustrated catalog of the type specimens in his collection at the Kikuchi Shell Museum (now transferred to the Nishinomiya Shell Museum) appeared in 1996, with a supplement listing his other types published in 1997.

A biography in Japanese entitled "Kai ni madowasareta issho" (A life entranced by shells) was published by Kaoru Higashi of Nishinomiya in 1987.

Shell collection

Kuroda's own shell collection is housed in the Nishinomiya Shell Museum in Hyogo Prefecture, Japan, including many of his type specimens. The Imperial collection, on which the 1971 work "The Seashells of Sagami Bay" was based, is housed in the Showa Memorial Institute of the National Museum of Nature and Science in Tsukuba.

Honors
 Order of the Sacred Treasure, 1939.

Selected works

Articles
 Kuroda, Tokubei, 1937. "A. Adams' colour blindness." Venus 7(4): 178 [in Japanese].
 Kuroda, Tokubei and Tadashige Habe, 1954. "On some Japanese Mollusca described by A. Adams, whose specimens are deposited in the Redpath Museum of Canada (No. 1). Venus 18(1): 1-16, pls. 1, 2.
 P. Callomon, 2003. Henry A. Pilsbry and Yoichiro Hirase, with translation of Tokubei Kuroda's (1958) "In memory of Dr. H. A. Pilsbry: Pilsbry and the Mollusca of Japan." Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia 153: 1-6
 Kuroda, Tokubei and Tadashige Habe, 1958.  "On some Japanese Mollusca described by A. Adams, whose specimens are deposited in the Redpath Museum of Canada. Venus 18(1): 1-16, pls. 1-2.
 Kuroda, Tokubei, translated and with an introduction by P. Callomon, 2003. "Yoichiro Hirase, the great collector of Japanese land mollusks, and the collectors who helped him." Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia 153:7-14.

Books
 Kuroda, Tokubei and Tadashige Habe. (1952).  Check list and bibliography of the recent marine Mollusca of Japan (edited, Leo. W. Stach). Tokyo: Hosokawa.
 Tokubei Kuroda; Tadashige Habe and Katsura Oyama. (1971).  The sea shells of Sagami Bay. Tokyo  : Maruzen.
 Higashi, K. (1987). Kai ni madowasareta issho. Kuroda Tokubei monogatari ''(A life entranced by shells - the Tokubei Kuroda story) 272 pp. Nishinomiya, Tokubei-Kuroda-monogatari-kai. No ISBN number.
 Hanshin Shell Club (1986). Bibliography of Dr. Tokubei Kuroda (for commemoration of his 99th birthday). 103 pp, 33 pls. Nishinomiya, Hanshin Shell Club.
 Habe, T. & Inaba, A. (Eds.)(1996). Catalogue of the shellfish type specimens described by the late Dr. Tokubei Kuroda, in the possession of Nishinomiya City. 152 pp, 44 pls. Nishinomiya City, Hyogo.
 Habe, T. & Inaba, A. (Eds.)(1997). Catalogue of the shellfish type specimens described by the late Dr. Tokubei Kuroda, except the possession of Nishinomiya City. 61 pp. Nishinomiya City, Hyogo.

Notes

References
 Coan, Eugene V., Alan R. Kabat and Richard E. Petit, 2006.  2,400 years of Malacology, 3rd ed. American Malacological Society

External links
 Malacological Society of London

1886 births
1987 deaths
Japanese malacologists
Japanese marine biologists
20th-century Japanese zoologists
Japanese centenarians
Men centenarians
Recipients of the Order of the Sacred Treasure

Tokubei Kuroda


The Knowledge Based Software Assistant (KBSA) was a research program funded by the United States Air Force. The goal of the program was to apply concepts from artificial intelligence to the problem of designing and implementing computer software. Software would be described by models in very high level languages (essentially equivalent to first order logic) and then transformation rules would transform the specification into efficient code. The air force hoped to be able to generate the software to control weapons systems and other command and control systems using this method. As software was becoming ever more critical to USAF weapons systems it was realized that improving the quality and productivity of the software development process could have significant benefits for the military, as well as for information technology in other major US industries.

History
In the early 1980s the United States Air Force realized that they had received significant benefits from applying artificial intelligence technologies to solving expert problems such as the diagnosis of faults in aircraft. The air force commissioned a group of researchers from the artificial intelligence and formal methods communities to develop a report on how such technologies might be used to aid in the more general problem of software development.

The report described a vision for a new approach to software development. Rather than define specifications with diagrams and manually transform them to code as was the current process, the Knowledge Based Software Assistant (KBSA) vision was to define specifications in very high level languages and then to use transformation rules to gradually refine the specification into efficient code on heterogeneous platforms.

Each step in the design and refinement of the system would be recorded as part of an integrated repository. In addition to the artifacts of software development the processes, the various definitions and transformations, would also be recorded in a way that they could be analyzed and also replayed later as needed. The idea was that each step would be a transformation that took into account various non-functional requirements for the implemented system. For example, requirements to use specific programming languages such as Ada or to harden code for real time mission critical fault tolerance.

The air force decided to fund further research on this vision through their Rome Air Development Center laboratory at Griffiss air force base in New York. The majority of the early research was conducted at the Kestrel Institute in Northern California (with Stanford University) and the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) in Southern California (with USC and UCLA). The Kestrel Institute focused primarily on the provably correct transformation of logical models to efficient code. ISI focused primarily on the front end of the process on defining specifications that could map to logical formalisms but were in formats that were intuitive and familiar to systems analysts. In addition, Raytheon did a project to investigate informal requirements gathering and Honeywell and Harvard University did work on underlying frameworks, integration, and activity coordination.

Although not primarily funded by the KBSA program the MIT Programmer's Apprentice project also had many of the same goals and used the same techniques as KBSA.

In the later stages of the KBSA program (starting in 1991) researchers developed prototypes that were used on medium to large scale software development problems. Also, in these later stages the emphasis shifted from  a pure KBSA approach to more general questions of how to use knowledge-based technology to supplement and augment existing and future computer-aided software engineering (CASE) tools. In these later stages there was significant interaction between the KBSA community and the object-oriented and software engineering communities. For example, KBSA concepts and researchers played an important role in the mega-programming and user centered software engineering programs sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).  In these later stages the program changed its name to Knowledge-Based Software Engineering (KBSE). The name change reflected the different research goal, no longer to create a totally new all encompassing tool that would cover the complete software life cycle but to gradually work knowledge-based technology into existing tools. Companies such as Andersen Consulting (one of the largest system integrators and at the time vendor of their own CASE tool) played a major role in the program in these later stages.

Key concepts

Transformation rules
The transformation rules that KBSA used were different than traditional rules for expert systems. Transformation rules matched against specification and implementation languages rather than against facts in the world. It was possible to specify transformations using patterns, wildcards, and recursion on both the right and left hand sides of a rule. The left hand expression would specify patterns in the existing knowledge base to search for. The right hand expression could specify a new pattern to transform the left hand side into. For example, transform a set theoretic data type into code using an Ada set library.

The initial purpose for transformation rules was to refine a high level logical specification into well designed code for a specific hardware and software platform. This was inspired by early work on theorem proving and automatic programming. However, researchers at the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) developed the concept of evolution transformations.   Rather than transforming a specification into  code an evolution transformation was meant to automate various stereotypical changes at the specification level, for example developing a new superclass by extracting various capabilities from an existing class that can be shared more generally. Evolution transformations were developed at approximately the same time as the emergence of the software patterns community and the two groups shared concepts and technology. Evolution transformations were essentially what is known as refactoring in the object-oriented software patterns community.

Knowledge-based repository
A key concept of KBSA was that all artifacts: requirements, specifications, transformations, designs, code, process models, etc. were represented as objects in a knowledge-based repository. The original KBSA report describes what was called a Wide Spectrum Language. The requirement was for a knowledge representation framework that could support the entire life cycle: requirements, specification, and code as well as the software process itself. The core representation for the knowledge base was meant to utilize the same framework although various layers could be added to support specific presentations and implementations.

These early knowledge-base frameworks were developed primarily by ISI and Kestrel building on top of Lisp and Lisp machine environments. The Kestrel environment was eventually turned into a commercial product called Refine which was developed and supported by a spin-off company from Kestrel called Reasoning Systems Incorporated.

The Refine language and environment also proved to be applicable to the problem of software reverse engineering: taking legacy code that is critical to the business but that lacks proper documentation and using tools to analyze it and transform it to a more maintainable form. With the growing concern of the Y2K problem reverse engineering was a major business concern for many large US corporations and it was a focus area for KBSA research in the 1990s.

There was significant interaction between the KBSA communities and the Frame language and object-oriented communities. The early KBSA knowledge-bases were implemented in object-based languages rather than object-oriented. Objects were represented as classes and sub-classes but it was not possible to define methods on the objects. In later versions of KBSA such as the Andersen Consulting Concept Demo the specification language was expanded to support message passing as well.

Intelligent Assistant
KBSA took a different approach than traditional expert systems when it came to how to solve problems and work with users. In the traditional expert system approach the user answers a series of interactive questions and the system provides a solution. The KBSA approach left the user in control. Where as an expert system tried to, to some extent replace and remove the need for the expert the intelligent assistant approach in KBSA sought to re-invent the process with technology. This led to a number of innovations at the user interface level.

An example of the collaboration between the object-oriented community and KBSA was the architecture used for KBSA user interfaces. KBSA systems utilized a model-view-controller (MVC) user interface. This was an idea incorporated from Smalltalk environments.  The MVC architecture was especially well suited to the KBSA user interface.  KBSA environments featured multiple heterogeneous views of the knowledge-base. It might be useful to look at an emerging model from the standpoint of entities and relations, object interactions, class hierarchies, dataflow, and many other possible views. The MVC architecture facilitated this. With the MVC architecture the underlying model was always the knowledge base which was a meta-model description of the specification and implementation languages. When an analyst made some change via a particular diagram (e.g. added a class to the class hierarchy) that change was made at the underlying model level and the various views of the model were all automatically updated.

One of the benefits of using a transformation was that many aspects of the specification and implementation could be modified at once. For small scale prototypes the resulting diagrams were simple enough that basic layout algorithms combined with reliance on users to clean up diagrams was sufficient. However, when a transformation can radically redraw models with tens or even hundreds of nodes and links the constant updating of the various views becomes a task in itself. Researchers at Andersen Consulting incorporated work from the University of Illinois on graph theory to automatically update the various views associated with the knowledge base and to generate graphs that have minimal intersection of links and also take into account domain and user specific layout constraints.

Another concept used to provide intelligent assistance was automatic text generation. Early research at ISI investigated the feasibility of extracting formal specifications from informal natural language text documents. They determined that the approach was not viable. Natural language is by nature simply too ambiguous to serve as a good format for defining a system.  However, natural language generation was seen to be feasible as a way to generate textual descriptions that could be read by managers and non-technical personnel. This was especially appealing to the air force since by law they required all contractors to generate various reports that describe the system from different points of view. Researchers at ISI and later Cogentext and Andersen Consulting demonstrated the viability of the approach by using their own technology to generate the documentation required by their air force contracts.

References

Expert systems
Formal methods
Specification languages
United States Air Force
Theoretical computer science

Knowledge Based Software Assistant


Megan LeeAnn Turney (born March 12, 1987) is an American Twitch streamer, internet personality, cosplayer, glamour model, and vlogger. She became an internet personality through her hosting work, formerly with SourceFed and Rooster Teeth's The Know. She also maintains a personal YouTube channel where she posts vlogs and Let's Play videos and live streams. In addition to her work with online media, Turney also cosplays at various conventions, such as Comic-Con.

Cosplay modeling
Through a friend's invitation to Ushicon 1, Turney was introduced to cosplaying and anime conventions in 2002. Turney's first cosplay was of Sailor Heavy Metal Papillon from the anime, Sailor Moon. On her first cosplay, Turney recalled, "I failed terribly. I couldn't make half the costume, it was incredibly difficult, but I was as happy as a clam." Since then, Turney became recognized for her cosplaying and was able to generate a following large enough to turn cosplaying into her full-time career. The Vancouver Sun wrote that "Turney is an internet mainstay. She has her own YouTube channel and her Patreon fan site is an earner." When she began to receive cover in online publications, Turney's Faye Valentine, Princess Leia, and Psycho cosplays were particularly recognized. Turney's notability as a cosplayer led her to appear on the Syfy series Heroes of Cosplay and a commercial for Guild Wars 2. She hosted a cosplay contest in 2013 at SXSW. Turney was also a special guest at the 2016 edition of Fan Expo Vancouver.

Her cosplaying has been noted by various media publications to be racy and erotic. Turney's online content majorly includes images of her cosplaying and modeling, with Inquisitr writing that "she has a tendency to upload photos that push the boundaries of Instagram's community guidelines regarding nudity." On sexuality in cosplay, Turney has stated, "I think there is an element of sexuality for cosplay and for some people there is no sexuality whatsoever. I think it is all about how you approach it. I think that is true of any community really." Turney also maintains that there is more work involved in her cosplaying than showing off her body, such as costume designing, and stated "I think some people just go, 'She [fellow cosplayer Jessica Nigri] has boobs, that's why she's popular.' But that's not really the case." In January 2015, Playboy ranked Turney at number 10 on its "25 Hottest YouTube Stars" listing. In April 2015, FHM placed Turney at number 20 on its annual "100 Sexiest Women in the World" list.

Having worked with various photographers, Turney also has experience modeling outside of cosplay. In June 2015, Playboy conducted a photoshoot with Turney.

One of her cosplays was of her boyfriend Gavin's character from Rooster Teeth's show X-Ray and Vav, with Ashley Jenkins joining her as X-Ray at RTX 2014. Ray and Gavin themselves had attended the Achievement Hunter panel of the previous year's RTX in costume as the duo, which had originally started out as an intro flub on Gavin's part for a Halo 4 achievement guide.

Gallery

Online media career

Career beginnings and SourceFed (2012–2014)
Turney registered her YouTube channel in November 2009 but began posting vlogs in 2012. During the early years of her online media career, Turney hosted event coverage for deviantART and appeared as a featured host on CraveOnline's TechKnow show. In July 2012, Turney would break through as an online media host, making her debut appearance on SourceFed, alongside Steve Zaragoza, in which the two discussed Star Wars, Comic-Con, and cosplaying. Later that year Turney was alongside Elliott Morgan and Philip DeFranco during SourceFed's videos for YouTube's "Election Hub." In February 2013, Turney and her SourceFed co-hosts won an Audience Choice Streamy Award for Series of the Year. Along with being a co-host of the channel, Turney was also a writer for the SourceFed website. Turney would remain a host of the channel, as well as its Nerd spinoff, until April 2014, when she announced she would be leaving SourceFed.

During her time with SourceFed, Turney appeared as a host of other series including the AMA's On Demand, as well as Nerdist News. Additionally, in August 2013, Turney discussed Hollywood portrayals about life on Mars, alongside Bobak Ferdowsi, Matt Mira, and Kevin Lieber.

Work with Rooster Teeth (2014–2016)
After departing from SourceFed, Turney was announced as a new host for Rooster Teeth's news channel, The Know, on May 30, 2014. On joining Rooster Teeth, Turney claimed, "They have been pioneers in the industry for many years, and their level of originality and just plain fun in their content is unmatched in the space." On June 1, 2014, Turney made her first appearance on The Know. In July 2014, Rooster Teeth distributed the music video for "Did I Say That Out Loud?" by Barenaked Ladies, in which Turney portrays the exasperated girlfriend of Gavin Free's character. In August 2014, Turney began co-hosting The Know It All: Leaderboard, a collaborative series between Rooster Teeth and The Daily Dot. Turney also voiced Neon Katt in the animated series RWBY, and was a regular host on The Patch, Rooster Teeth's weekly gaming podcast. On June 27, 2016, Turney announced that she had left Rooster Teeth on good terms.

Twitch streaming and gaming (2016–present)
In October 2014, Turney was involved in a controversy when live streaming video website Twitch updated its rules of conduct telling users to not shoot videos in "lingerie, swimsuits, pasties, and undergarments". Some news websites reported that Turney was the first user banned for violating the updated rules of conduct. Turney clarified on Twitter, stating, "Dear everyone writing articles saying I was banned from Twitch, I wasn't. I've never been banned. I was told to change my picture," adding "while we're on the subject I've never done any 'sexy broadcasts'. I've never even streamed from that account." Additionally, Turney also provided her opinion that the rule was not unfair to women, but just unfair in general, stating, "If someone has a big push-up bra and a low-cut shirt while they play [League of Legends] or a guy streams shirtless, who cares?"

In June 2016, Turney began streaming on Twitch. In the years since leaving SourceFed and Rooster Teeth, Turney has continued to upload video game commentaries and streams, as well as cosplay-related vlogs on her personal YouTube channel.

In April 2019, Turney signed with talent agency Abrams Artists, joining its gaming roster. In June 2020, Turney moved from Abrams to TalentX Gaming, where she is currently represented. In October, she participated in a Dead by Daylight tournament hosted by Twitch Rivals.

Turney currently streams Dead by Daylight regularly, along with a variety of other games, and celebrated 5 years of Twitch partnership in June 2021. Turney's YouTube channel also became primarily used as a selection of highlights from her Twitch streams.

OnlyFans (2020–present)
In March 2020, Turney created an OnlyFans account to supplement her Patreon account. At the time, Patreon was her primary venue for releasing her modeling work while OnlyFans was there primarily to share older photosets that were no longer available on Patreon, but in October 2020, Turney announced on her Twitter that she was moving all of her content to OnlyFans and that the site would be her new primary content hub. After releasing her book of topless photos on her personal website, she began creating boudoir content full time on her OnlyFans. Turney still releases cosplay photosets on her OnlyFans, but most of her content is boudoir photography.
Meg Turney is one of the most searched model on OnlyFans finder Similarfans.com

Personal life
Turney has openly spoken about her bisexuality with her audience. In a video interview with the YouTube channel VlogBrothers, she further discussed being bisexual, and spoke about how she was teased for her sexual orientation. At VidCon 2013, Turney spoke during the convention's "Being LGBT on YouTube" panel.

She has been in a relationship with Gavin Free since 2013.

Home invasion
On January 26, 2018, a man armed with a handgun broke into Turney's and Free's home, breaking a window to enter and firing one round as he did. Turney and Free hid in a closet and called police. When the man could not find the couple, he left but was confronted by police outside. The suspect fired one shot and police returned fire; when officers approached the suspect's vehicle, they found him dead. Turney and Free were physically unharmed during the incident. It has been assessed the suspect was a fan who had developed an obsession with Turney and Free, and he was attempting to cause harm to Free, against whom he felt resentment. Turney ceased updating her YouTube channel for nearly half a year following the incident, citing concern for her safety in sharing her life with an audience.

Filmography

Web series

Film

Music video

References

External links

1987 births
20th-century American LGBT people
21st-century American actresses
21st-century American LGBT people
Actresses from Austin, Texas
American YouTubers
American bisexual writers
American bisexual actors
American LGBT models
American voice actresses
American women bloggers
American women podcasters
Bisexual actresses
Bisexual women writers
Bisexual women models
Cosplayers
Female models from Texas
Gaming YouTubers
Glamour models
LGBT people from Texas
LGBT YouTubers
Living people
OnlyFans creators
Rooster Teeth people
Screenwriters from Texas
SourceFed people
Twitch (service) streamers
Video game commentators
Women video bloggers
YouTubers from Texas
YouTube vloggers

Meg Turney


Alexandre Sabès Pétion (; 2 April 1770 – 29 March 1818) was the first president of the Republic of Haiti from 1807 until his death in 1818. One of Haiti's founding fathers, Pétion belonged to the revolutionary quartet that also includes Toussaint Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and his later rival Henri Christophe. Regarded as an excellent artilleryman in his early adulthood, Pétion would distinguish himself as an esteemed military commander with experience leading both French and Haitian troops. The 1802 coalition formed by him and Dessalines against French forces led by Charles Leclerc would prove to be a watershed moment in the decade-long conflict, eventually culminating in the decisive Haitian victory at the Battle of Vertières in 1803.

Early life
Pétion was born "Anne Alexandre Sabès" in Port-au-Prince to Pascal Sabès, a wealthy French father and Ursula, a free mulatto woman, which made him a quadroon (a quarter African ancestry). Like other gens de couleur libres (free people of color) with wealthy fathers, Pétion was sent to France in 1788 to be educated and study at the Military Academy in Paris.

In Saint-Domingue, as in other French colonies such as Louisiane, the free people of color constituted a third caste between the whites and enslaved Africans. While restricted in political rights, many received social capital from their fathers and became educated and wealthy landowners, resented by the petits blancs, who were mostly minor tradesmen. Following the French Revolution, the gens de couleur led a rebellion to gain the voting and political rights which they believed were due them as French citizens; this was before the 1791 slave rebellion. At that time, most free people of color did not support freedom or political rights for slaves.

Haitian Revolution
Pétion returned to Saint-Domingue as a young man to take part in the Haitian Revolution, participating in skirmishes with the British force in Northern Haiti. Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville, who was the Secretary of State for War to prime minister William Pitt the Younger, instructed Sir Adam Williamson, the lieutenant-governor of Jamaica, to sign an agreement with representatives of the French colonists that promised to restore the ancien regime, slavery and discrimination against mixed-race colonists, a move that drew criticism from abolitionists William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson.

There had long been racial and class tensions between the gens de couleur and enslaved and free blacks in Saint-Domingue, where the enslaved black population outnumbered the white and gens de couleur by ten to one. During the years of warfare against French planters (commonly referred to as grands blancs), racial tensions in Saint-Domingue were exacerbated in competition for power and political alliances.

When tensions arose between full blacks and mulattoes, Pétion frequently supported the mulatto faction. He allied with General André Rigaud and Jean-Pierre Boyer against Toussaint Louverture in a failed rebellion, the so-called "War of Knives", in the South of Saint-Domingue, which began in June 1799. By November, the rebels were pushed back to the strategic southern port of Jacmel; the defence was commanded by Pétion. The town fell in March 1800 and the rebellion was effectively over. Pétion and other mulatto leaders went into exile in France.

In February 1802, General Charles Leclerc arrived with tens of warships and 32,000 French troops to bring Saint-Domingue under more control. Gens de couleur Petion, Boyer, and Rigaud returned with him in the hope of securing power in the colony.

Following the French deportation of Toussaint Louverture and the renewed struggle, Pétion joined the nationalist force in October 1802. This followed a secret conference at Arcahaie, where Pétion supported Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the general who had captured Jacmel. The rebels took the capital of Port-au-Prince on October 17, 1803. Dessalines proclaimed independence on 1 January 1804, naming the nation Haiti. On 6 October 1804, Dessalines declared himself ruler for life and was crowned Emperor of Haiti as Jacques I.

Post-revolution

Disaffected members of Emperor Dessalines's administration, including Pétion and Henri Christophe, began a conspiracy to overthrow Dessalines. Following the assassination of Dessalines on 17 October 1806, Pétion championed the ideals of democracy and clashed with Henri Christophe who wanted absolute rule. Christophe was elected president, but he did not believe the position had sufficient power, as Pétion kept powers for himself. Christophe went to the north with his followers and established an autocracy, declaring the State of Haiti. The loyalties of the country divided between them, and the tensions between the blacks and mulattoes of the North and South, respectively, were reignited.

Pétion was elected President in 1807 of the southern Republic of Haiti. After the inconclusive struggle dragged on until 1810, a peace treaty was agreed to, and the country was split in two. In 1811, Christophe made himself king of the northern Kingdom of Haiti.

On 2 June 1816, Pétion modified the terms of the presidency in the constitution, making himself president for life. Initially a supporter of democracy, Pétion found the constraints imposed on him by the senate onerous and suspended the legislature in 1818.

Pétion seized commercial plantations from the rich gentry. He had the land redistributed to his supporters and the peasantry, earning him the nickname Papa Bon-Cœur ("good-hearted father"). The land seizures and changes in agriculture reduced the production of commodities for the export economy. Most of the population became full subsistence farmers, and exports and state revenue declined sharply, making survival difficult for the new state.

Believing in the importance of education, Pétion started the Lycée Pétion in Port-au-Prince. Petion's virtues and ideals of freedom and democracy for the world (and especially slaves) were strong, and he often showed support for the oppressed. He gave sanctuary to the independence leader Simón Bolívar in 1815 and provided him with material and infantry support. This vital aid played a defining role in Bolivar's success in liberating the countries of what would make up Gran Colombia. Petion was reported to be influenced by his (and his successor's) lover, Marie-Madeleine Lachenais, who acted as his political adviser.

Pétion named General Boyer as his successor; he took control in 1818 following the death of Pétion from yellow fever. After Henry I of the Kingdom of Haiti and his son died in 1820, Boyer reunited the nation under his rule.

References

External links

 Works by Pétion  in the Internet Archive

1770 births
1818 deaths
Deaths from yellow fever
Infectious disease deaths in Haiti
Haitian people of French descent
Haitian people of Mulatto descent
Haitian revolutionaries
Haitian generals
Haitian independence activists
People from Saint-Domingue
Presidents of Haiti
Presidents for life
People from Port-au-Prince
19th-century Haitian politicians
Free people of color

Alexandre Pétion


Stanley Dean Royer (born August 31, 1967, in Olney, Illinois) is a former third baseman/first baseman in Major League Baseball who played from  through  for the St. Louis Cardinals (1991–1994) and Boston Red Sox (1994). Listed at 6' 3", 195 lb., he batted and threw right-handed.

Drafted out of Charleston High School in Charleston, Illinois by the Atlanta Braves, Royer decided to not sign and attended college instead. Royer was selected by the Oakland Athletics in the 1988 draft out of Eastern Illinois University, from where he had earned an economics degree. Before the 1991 season, he was sent by Oakland along with Félix José and a minor leaguer to the Cardinals in the same transaction that brought Willie McGee to the Athletics.

In a four-season career, Royer was a .250 hitter (41-for-164) with 21 RBI in 89 games, including four home runs, 10 doubles, and 14 runs scored. He also played in the Oakland, St. Louis and Boston minor league systems from 1988 to 1994, hitting .270 with 72 home runs and 417 RBI in 707 games.

Royer is President of Claris Advisors, an investment advising and wealth management firm based in St. Louis.

Sources

Retrosheet

1967 births
Eastern Illinois Panthers baseball players
Southern Oregon A's players
Modesto A's players
Tacoma Tigers players
Huntsville Stars players
Louisville Redbirds players
Pawtucket Red Sox players
Major League Baseball infielders
Baseball players from Richland County, Illinois
St. Louis Cardinals players
Boston Red Sox players
Living people
Mat-Su Miners players

Stan Royer


Nagamese ("Naga Pidgin") is an Assamese-lexified creole language. Depending on location, it has also been described and classified as an "extended pidgin" or "pidgincreole". Spoken natively by an estimated 30,000 people in the Indian northeastern state of Nagaland, it developed primarily as a means of marketplace and trade communication. Despite the official language of the state being English, Nagamese functions as a lingua franca and is spoken by nearly all Nagaland inhabitants. It is also used in mass media as well as in official state-regulated domains, including news and radio stations, education and political and governmental spheres. Nagamese is classified as a creole as, despite it being spoken as an "extended pidgin" by the majority of speakers across Nagaland, it is also spoken as the native mother tongue of the Dimasa community in Nagaland's largest city, Dimapur.

Early origins and evolution
Although the precise origins of the Naga people is difficult to determine, it is generally believed by historians that the Naga settled over a period of time in waves as various Naga tribes from China and elsewhere entered the uninhabited Naga Hills through Burma. Additionally, as various different Naga communities settled into Nagaland, Nagaland became inhabited by over twenty indigenous Naga groups, as well as several other immigrant groups, all of whom spoke mutually-unintelligible languages. Despite groups generally remaining in isolation from one another, a way for intergroup communication between the Naga Hills tribes as well as the non-Naga Assamese indigenous people, who lived in the plains and included groups such as the Kachan, Assamese, and Manipuri people, was necessary.

Nagamese primarily developed as a lingua franca because of the contact in the barter trade centres in the plains of Assam between members of different Naga linguistic group communicating with Assamese traders and one another. The contact took place on a regular basis and allowed for the development and eventual stabilization of Nagamese.

Additionally, there is evidence of language contact interactions between the indigenous, Ahom rulers and various Naga groups regarding revenue and tax collection, treaty negotiation, administrative purposes and warfare. Ahom rulers would occasionally send expeditions to raid and subjugate the Nagas and to make them pay tribute, which caused tension and hostility to build between the Naga and Assamese at different times.

In 1826, British East India troops occupied the Ahom Kingdom, and Assamese was initially used as the primary language of instruction within schools, with English and Hindi to be introduced as second languages to the pupils. Assamese was thought to have become the lingua franca, but upon contact with the people from the Naga Hills, it was clear that Nagamese, which was viewed as "pidgin Assamese", was the lingua franca of the Naga Hills that was spoken by the majority, if not the entirety, of the population.

The propagation of Nagamese as a lingua franca was furthered after the 1930s. English was selected as the unifying official state language of Nagaland, but less than 5% of the population spoke it with any degree of fluency. Certainly, it was spoken by only a small number of the population, and most teachers often had a poor grasp of it. With the increased interest and emphasis on education, teachers often used Nagamese in classroom teachings, discussions, and proper explanations of the subject matter. As most Naga children either had some familiarity with or were fluent in Nagamese, rather than English, teachers teaching mixed classes often resorted to the use of Nagamese, which further cementing its as a language widely used by the majority of the population.

In the early 1970s, M.V Sreedhar sought to begin standardization processes with the intention of producing Nagamese educational material. He consulted with Naga leaders and relevant authorities regarding whether the Devanagari, Assamese, Roman or Bengali scripts should be made standard. It was agreed upon that the Roman script was to be adopted into Nagamese writing. As the population was predominantly Christianized under the British and was generally familiar with the Roman script by texts that the missionaries had brought, it was considered the most favourable. It was also considered the most neutral option, as it could be used to distance themselves from further association with the Assamese.

Despite the tension and history of ethnic conflict, the requirement of communication between the Naga and non-Naga peoples induced linguistic contact, which was conducive to the growth and use of Nagamese as a method of intergroup communication.

Nagamese gradually became more complex as it spread across the region and into various domains of the state and is now used in almost all domains of daily life. It functions as the language of wider communication, with speakers being able to converse about any topic that they wish to in Nagamese. In addition to being spoken casually between individuals, it is also used within official state-regulated domains such as conducting parliament meetings; at religious gatherings; within the education system; and within the healthcare system between nurse, doctor, and patient communication. Nagamese is also the preferred form of communication for extension works in rural areas and in mixed households.

Linguistics
Nagamese has a large lexicon, with a number of clear grammatical categories and clear inflectional morphology. It is structurally reduced in comparison to Assamese, which is the source of the majority of the lexicon, phonology, and syntax. Nagamese has two cases, two tenses and three aspectual distinctions. There is no gender, but grammatical gender is beginning to appear from Hindi influence and is particularly visible in Hindi words and expressions. There are 26 consonants, and 6 vowels. There are no nasal vowels in Nagamese, and there are no tones.

Phonology
The Nagamese Creole phonemic inventory consists of six vowels, seven diphthongs, and twenty-eight consonants (including two semivowels).

Consonants

See also

 Nefamese

Notes

References

External links
 Review of Bhattacharya's "Nagamese: Pidgin, Creole or Creoloid?"
 Survival Phrases in Nagamese
 Glottolog Langdoc (Naga Pidgin)

Assamese-based pidgins and creoles
Naga people
Languages of Nagaland

Nagamese creole