Costa-Gavras (short for Konstantinos Gavras; ; born 12 February 1933) is a Greek-French film director, screenwriter, and producer who lives and works in France. He is known for political films, such as the political thriller Z (1969), which won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and Missing (1982), for which he won the Palme d'Or and an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. Most of his films have been made in French, but six of them were made in English.

Early life
Costa-Gavras was born in Loutra Iraias, Arcadia. His family spent the Second World War in a village in the Peloponnese, and moved to Athens after the war. His father had been a member of the Pro-Soviet branch of the Greek Resistance, and was imprisoned during the Greek Civil War. His father's Communist Party membership made it impossible for Costa-Gavras to attend university in Greece or to be granted a visa to the United States, so after high school he settled in France, where he began studying literature at the Sorbonne in 1951.

Early career
In 1956, he left his university studies to study film at the French national film school, IDHEC. After film school, he apprenticed under Yves Allégret, and became an assistant director for Jean Giono and René Clair. After several further positions as first assistant director, he directed his first feature film, Compartiment Tueurs, in 1965.

Selected films
His 1967 film Shock Troops (Un homme de trop) was entered into the 5th Moscow International Film Festival.

In Z (1969), an investigating judge, played by Jean-Louis Trintignant, tries to uncover the truth about the murder of a prominent leftist politician, played by Yves Montand, while government officials and the military attempt to cover up their roles. The film is a fictionalised account of the events surrounding the assassination of Greek politician Grigoris Lambrakis in 1963. It had additional resonance because, at the time of its release, Greece had been ruled for two years by the "Regime of the Colonels". Z won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Costa-Gavras and co-writer Jorge Semprún won an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for Best Film Screenplay.

L'Aveu (The Confession, 1970) follows the path of Artur London, a Czechoslovakian communist minister falsely arrested and tried for treason and espionage in the Slánský 'show trial' in 1952.

State of Siege (1972) takes place in Uruguay under the civic-military dictatorship of Uruguay in the early 1970s. In a plot loosely based on the case of US police official and alleged torture expert Dan Mitrione, an American embassy official (played by Yves Montand) is kidnapped by the Tupamaros, a radical leftist urban guerilla group, which interrogates him in order to reveal the details of secret American support for repressive regimes in Latin America.

Missing, originally released in 1982 and based on the book The Execution Of Charles Horman, concerns an American journalist, Charles Horman (played by John Shea in the film), who disappeared in the 1973 coup d'état led by General Augusto Pinochet in Chile. Horman's father, played by Jack Lemmon, and wife, played by Sissy Spacek, search in vain to determine his fate. Nathaniel Davis, US ambassador to Chile from 1971 to 1973, a version of whose character had been portrayed in the movie (under a different name), filed a US$150 million libel suit, Davis v. Costa-Gavras, 619 F. Supp. 1372 (1985), against the studio and the director, which was eventually dismissed. The film won an Oscar for Best Screenplay Adaptation and the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

Betrayed (1988) is roughly based upon the terrorist activities of American neo-Nazi and white supremacist Robert Mathews and his group The Order.

In Music Box (1989), a respected Hungarian immigrant (Armin Mueller-Stahl) is accused of having commanded an Anti-Semitic death squad during World War II. His daughter, a Chicago defence attorney played by Jessica Lange, agrees to defend him at his denaturalization hearing. The film is inspired by the arrest and trial of Ukrainian immigrant John Demjanjuk and screenwriter Joe Eszterhas' realisation that his father had been a member of the Hungarian Arrow Cross Party. The film won the Golden Bear at the 40th Berlin International Film Festival.

La Petite Apocalypse (1993) was entered into the 43rd Berlin International Film Festival. Amen. (2003), was based in part on the highly controversial 1963 play, Der Stellvertreter. Ein christliches Trauerspiel (The Deputy, a Christian Tragedy), by Rolf Hochhuth. The film plot alleges that Pope Pius XII was aware of the plight of the Jews in Nazi concentration camps during World War II, but failed to take public action to publicise or condemn the Holocaust. Gavras won César Award for Best Writing for this film.

He was president of the Cinémathèque Française from 1982 to 1987, and again since 2007.

Political-commercial film

Costa-Gavras is known for merging controversial political issues with the entertainment value of commercial cinema. Law and justice, oppression, legal/illegal violence, and torture are common subjects in his work, especially relevant to his earlier films. Costa-Gavras is an expert of the "statement" picture. In most cases, the targets of Costa-Gavras's work have been right wing or far right movements and regimes, including the Greek   military in Z, and right-wing dictatorships that ruled much of Latin America during the height of the Cold War, as in State of Siege and Missing.

In a broader sense, this emphasis continues with Amen. given its focus on the conservative leadership of the Catholic Church during the 1940s. In this political context, L'Aveu (The Confession) provides the exception, dealing as it does with oppression on the part of a Communist regime during the Stalinist period.

Issues and style
Costa-Gavras has brought attention to international issues, some urgent, others merely problematic, and he has done this in the tradition of cinematic story-telling. Z (1969), one of his most well-known works, is an account of the undermining in the 1960s of democratic government in Greece, his homeland and place of birth. The format, however, is a mystery-thriller combination that transforms an uncomfortable history into a fast-paced story. This is a clear example of how he pours politics into plot, "bringing epic conflicts into the sort of personal conflicts we are accustomed to seeing on screen."

His accounts of corruption propagated, in their essence, by European and American powers (Z, State of Siege and Missing) highlight problems buried deep in the structures of these societies, problems which he deems not everyone is comfortable addressing. The approach he adopted in L'Aveu also "subtly invited the audience to a critical look focused on structural issues, delving this time into the opposite Communist bloc."

Until 2019's Adults in the Room, Costa-Gavras had never worked in Greece or made a film in the Greek language.

Influences
When Costa-Gavras asked about some of his biggest cinematic influences, he replied:

He also listed René Clément, Jacques Demy, and Gillo Pontecorvo's film The Battle of Algiers as an influence on his filmmaking.

According to his son Romain Gavras, Costa-Gavras used to show all of Tarkovsky's films to him at a young age.

Legacy and influence
Costa-Gavras films have been a significant influence on political cinema. Wade Major of the Directors Guild of America mentioned that, "With films like Z and Missing, Costa-Gavras almost single-handedly created the modern political thriller". When German Director Wim Wenders paid tribute to him in 2018 at the 31st European Film Awards in Seville, Spain, Wenders called him "One of the greatest filmmakers of our time."

He has influenced directors such as Oliver Stone, William Friedkin, Steven Soderbergh, Rachid Bouchareb, Mathieu Kassovitz, and Ben Affleck.

Stone mentioned that Costa-Gavras "was certainly one of my earliest role models, ... I was a film student at NYU when Z came out, which we studied. Costa actually came over with Yves Montand for a screening and was such a hero to us. He was in the tradition of Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers and was the man in that moment ... it was a European moment."

The American filmmaker William Friedkin listed Z as one of his favorite films and mentioned the film's influence on him when directing his film The French Connection: "After I saw Z, I realized how I could shoot The French Connection. Because he [Costa-Gavras] shot 'Z' like a documentary. It was a fiction film but it was made like it was actually happening. Like the camera didn't know what was gonna happen next. And that is an induced technique. It looks like he happened upon the scene and captured what was going on as you do in a documentary. My first films were documentaries too. So I understood what he was doing but I never thought you could do that in a feature at that time until I saw Z."

The American filmmaker Steven Soderbergh listed Z as an inspiration on his film Traffic and even stated that he "wanted to make it like [Costa-Gavras's] Z". In 2020, Costa Gavras wrote the preface to the book Opération Condor, by French writer and journalist Pablo Daniel Magee.

The French filmmaker Mathieu Kassovitz listed Costa-Gavras films (such as Z and The Confession) as influential to his work.

The French filmmaker Rachid Bouchareb listed Z as an influence on his film Outside the Law.

The American actor and filmmaker Ben Affleck listed Costa-Gavras's films as influences for his film Argo.

Accolades

Costa-Gavras's debut film, Compartiment Tueurs, won National Board of Review Award for Best Foreign Language Film and was nominated for the Edgar Award for Best Screenplay in 1967.

The film Z was the first film to be nominated for both the Best Picture and Best Foreign Language Film. It won the latter, as well as the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, and the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Film. Z was also the first foreign-language film to win the Best Film award from the New York Film Critics Circle. Gavras won the Best Director award as well.

Costa-Gavras has received an honorary doctorate from the Film School of the Aristotle University in 2013.

He was interviewed extensively by The Times cultural correspondent Melinda Camber Porter and was featured prominently in her book Through Parisian Eyes: Reflections on Contemporary French Arts and Culture (1993, Da Capo Press).

Costa-Gavras received the Magritte Honorary Award in 2013. He was the first filmmaker to receive the Catalonia International Prize (2017).

Personal life
His daughter Julie Gavras and his sons Romain Gavras and Alexandre Gavras are also directors. He is the first cousin of Penelope Spheeris, Jimmie Spheeris and Chris Spheeris.

In 2009, Costa-Gavras signed a petition in support of film director Roman Polanski, calling for his release after Polanski was arrested in Switzerland in relation to his 1977 charge for drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl.

Filmography

Films

References

Further reading

External links

1933 births
Living people
Best Adapted Screenplay Academy Award winners
Best Screenplay BAFTA Award winners
Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Director winners
European Film Awards winners (people)
Directors of Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award winners
Directors of Palme d'Or winners
Directors of Golden Bear winners
Edgar Award winners
English-language film directors
French film directors
French people of Greek descent
Greek communists
Greek film directors
Greek emigrants to France
Magritte Award winners
Writers Guild of America Award winners
Officers of the Ordre national du Mérite
Commanders of the Legion of Honour
People from Iraia

Costa-Gavras


Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, is forcing fractures in a rock layer, by fluid that is put under pressure. Although it can happen naturally, it is now used as a method to force oil and natural gas from shale.

History and method
Some hydraulic fractures form naturally: certain dykes are examples. This lets gas and petroleum from source rocks get to reservoir rocks. The first use of hydraulic fracturing to extract substances from rock was in 1947.

The modern fracturing technique, called 'horizontal slickwater fracturing', was first used in 1998. It made the extraction of shale gas economically practical. The energy from the injection of a highly pressurized fluid creates new channels in the rock. This increases the extraction rates and recovery of hydrocarbons, which are used for fuel. In 2010 it was estimated that 60% of all new oil and gas wells worldwide were being hydraulically fractured. As of the year 2012, 2.5 million hydraulic fracturing actions have been done on oil and gas wells worldwide, more than one million of them in the United States.

Advantages and disadvantages
The supporters of hydraulic fracturing point to the economic benefits from the vast amounts of previously out-of-reach hydrocarbons.

Opponents of fracking point to potentially harmful environmental effects. These include contamination of ground water, risks to air quality, the migration of gases and hydraulic fracturing chemicals to the surface, surface contamination from spills and flowback, and the health effects of these. For these reasons hydraulic fracturing has come under examination. Some countries are suspending or banning it.

In 2013, some of those countries, including the United Kingdom, lifted their bans.  Now they have regulations instead of outright prohibition.  Fracking can greatly increase the UK gas reserves.

References

Fuel
Geothermal energy
Environmental issues

Fracking


In Italian, frazione (plural frazioni) is the name for a village or hamlet, which is part of a bigger commune. Very often, frazioni have some infrastructure, such as a school, a post office, or a church. Many frazioni used to be independent communes in the past, but over time, several have merged to bigger ones.
The name is also used in the Swiss canton Ticino, which is Italian-speaking.
In San Marino frazioni are called curazie.

Settlements in Italy

Frazione


The DR-7, also known as the Santo Domingo-Samana Highway or simply Samana Highway, is the newest addition to the Dominican Republic national highway system.

Route description
The highway starts with the Autopista Las Américas DR-3 (30 km east of Santo Domingo) and ends at the intersection Cruce Rincón de Molinillos, Samaná Province. There are three different toll booths: the first one 300 metres after the southern start of the highway; the second one at km marker 16; and the third one was built in La Reforma, right before Samaná and the Cruce Rincón de Molinillos intersection.

History
The actual construction of the rural highway started in the 2005 by the Secretary of Public Works and Communication (Secretaria de Publicas y Comunicación, SEOPC). In November 2007 the highway started final paving, since the landscape is difficult and the financing has been a major issue for the project and had stalled on several occasions thus delaying the project. It was finished by early February 2008. The new highway opened on June 1, 2009, and stretches 106 kilometers at a cost of US$150 million.
It passes the city of Monte Plata, Bayaguana and the Los Haitises National Park and 12 bridges had to be built to cross difficult terrain and rivers. Each lane is 3.65 metres wide and there's a hard shoulder for emergency stops. The total width of the 2 lanes and the hard shoulder on each side is 8 metres.

The construction of this new rural highway was done through private financing which is to be paid with tolls from RD$350.00  up to RD$700.00 each way. Even though this is much more expensive than most other highway tolls in the Dominican Republic, it is more economical compared to the old route because less time is spent and less gas needed. On top one can circumvent the very dangerous rural highway from the highway DR-1 near Bonao via San Francisco de Macoris to Samaná, which is one of the most deadly rural highways in the Dominican Republic.

The new two lane toll based highway is expected to convert Samaná to another thriving tourist hub and it makes the Los Haitises National Park much more accessible to the general public. The highway reduced the time a trip from Santo Domingo to the Samaná region took from 4 hours and 30 minutes to now less than 2 hours. The highway is expected to reduce the traffic along the DR-1 which was the only highway connecting Santo Domingo to Samana.

See also
Highways and Routes in the Dominican Republic

External links
 Diario Libre (span.) information on the project

References

Highways and routes in the Dominican Republic

DR-7 (Dominican Republic highway)


GloZell Lyneette Green (born July 30, 1972), better known as GloZell, is an American YouTube personality. GloZell established her YouTube channel in 2008, with video interviews, comedy about her life and song parodies.  By 2015, the channel had accumulated more than four million subscribers and more than 700 million total views. Her most popular videos include her cinnamon challenge video, which has accumulated more than 53 million views, and "My Push up Bra will help me get my man" video, with more than 25 million views.  She gained wide notice when her blog about meeting Elijah Wood was mentioned by the actor during a 2011 interview on Jimmy Kimmel Live!.  In 2012, she appeared in the web series Dr. Fubalous.

In 2015, GloZell interviewed President Barack Obama in a YouTube livestream hosted at the White House. In 2018, Green had a small role as Little Debbie in Ralph Breaks the Internet.

In December 2020, it was announced that Green would be hosting "The GloZell Show" with Million Stories Media.

Early life
GloZell was born to Gloria and Ozell Green, her name being a portmanteau of the names of her parents. She has one sister, DeOnzell, who is an opera singer. In 1997, GloZell graduated from the University of Florida with a BFA degree in musical theatre.

Career
In 2003, GloZell moved to Hollywood, California, to pursue a career in acting and comedy. She joined The Groundlings and studied her favorite comedian, Jay Leno, by attending 600 consecutive tapings of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. She began a blog that included a series of interviews with other audience members at Leno's show, but she soon began using YouTube as a video host for the interviews. She began to create and post original comedy videos when people she met at Leno tapings told her that she was funny on her own. Her first viral YouTube video, in 2008, was "My Push up Bra will help me get my man"; by 2013, it had gained over 20 million views. She began to make more frequent YouTube comedy videos focusing on her daily life, celebrity impersonations, song parodies, and Internet fads. Some of her most popular early videos were her "translations" of pop songs, such as Kesha's "Tik Tok" and Rihanna's "Rude Boy".

In 2011, GloZell gained wider notice when her vlog about meeting Elijah Wood was mentioned by the actor during an interview on Jimmy Kimmel Live!. Her 2012 cinnamon challenge video became quickly popular and was ranked fourth on The Guardian'''s "Viral Video Chart" in February 2012. As of 2016, it had amassed more than 48 million views. In June 2012, she was featured in the video Beauty and the Beat by Todrick Hall, which reimagines the opening of Disney's Beauty and the Beast, in which Belle lives in an urban African-American neighborhood. Also 2012, GloZell was featured alongside Danny Trejo and Flavor Flav and fellow YouTube personalities Antoine Dodson and Colleen Ballinger in the musical web series Dr. Fubalous, where GloZell played the titular doctor's "ranch dressing-loving secretary", Maude "Ma" Cakes.Maude Cakes , Dr. Fubalous, YouTube, accessed August 12, 2012

GloZell has performed her stand-up act at such comedy venues as The Comedy Store, The Improv, the Laugh Factory, Showtime at the Apollo, Steve Harvey Talent Show, and the J. Anthony Brown's J Spot Comedy Club. She has appeared on The Dr. Oz Show, 20/20, ABC News and MTV and has been featured in The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, U.S. News & World Report, Ebony, Cosmopolitan, People and Forbes magazines, among other media. Each year since 2013, GloZell has hosted a free live variety show called GloZell Fest, with celebrity and YouTube guests including Sisaundra Lewis, Meghan Tonjes, Frankie Grande, Miranda Sings and Far Young."3rd Annual GloZell Festival", Glitter Magazine, September 14, 2015 She has also published a book of inspirational poems called Wait! Let Me Tell You.

In May 2013, GloZell released her first single, titled "Pick Up After Your Dog", on the iTunes Store, and the music video was soon released on YouTube. She released her second single, "Glozell's Cinnamon Challenge", later in May. By 2013, GloZell's YouTube channel had received more than 400 million total views, with 2.7 million subscribers, and was ranked the 25th most viewed comedy channel on YouTube. By 2015, the channel had accumulated more than 4 million subscribers and more than 700 million views.

On January 22, 2015 GloZell interviewed Barack Obama in a YouTube livestream hosted at The White House. She talked to him about, among other issues, racial profiling and officer-involved shootings, relations with Cuba and cybersecurity. At the end of the interview she handed Obama green lipstick to give to the first lady and their children, but misspoke saying, "One for your first wife…" resulting in some laughs from the audience in the room. GloZell made a guest appearance in the Nickelodeon sitcom Game Shakers and played a role in the 2015 film The Wedding Ringer. She plays the voice role of Grandma Rosiepuff in DreamWorks' animated film Trolls. She also has a docuseries, Glo All In, about her and her husband's quest to have a child, ultimately with a surrogate mother.; and

In June 2016, GloZell released an autobiography, Is You Okay?, written in collaboration with Nils Parker. In 2016, GloZell had a lead role as the Jazz Singer in the YouTube Red (now YouTube Premium) original series Escape the Night. The cast of the show, including her, Shane Dawson, Joey Graceffa, Lele Pons and Sierra Furtado, won the Streamy Award for best ensemble cast. In 2017, Green launched a new channel for preschoolers called GloBugz!, the series was produced by Bunim/Murray Productions.

In 2018, Green had a small role as Little Debbie in Ralph Breaks the Internet.

Personal life
GloZell was married from 2013 to 2019. She described her relationship with her ex-husband and their divorce in her autobiography Is You Okay?''. GloZell lived in Los Angeles with her manager and husband Kevin Simon. The two got married on August 9, 2013. On August 4, 2016, GloZell and her husband welcomed their first child, via surrogate, naming their daughter O'Zell Gloriana De Green Simon. In 2020, Glozell announced that she had divorced Simon.

References

External links

21st-century American comedians
1972 births
Actresses from Orlando, Florida
African-American female comedians
American bloggers
American women bloggers
American women comedians
American YouTubers
Comedy YouTubers
Lifestyle YouTubers
Living people
University of Florida alumni
Video bloggers
21st-century African-American women writers
21st-century American women writers
21st-century African-American writers
20th-century African-American people
20th-century African-American women
YouTubers from Florida

GloZell


Measurement of wow and flutter is carried out on audio tape machines, cassette recorders and players, and other analog recording and reproduction devices with rotary components (e.g. movie projectors, turntables (vinyl recording), etc.) This measurement quantifies the amount of 'frequency wobble' (caused by speed fluctuations) present in subjectively valid terms. Turntables tend to suffer mainly slow wow. In digital systems, which are locked to crystal oscillators, variations in clock timing are referred to as wander or jitter, depending on speed.

While the terms wow and flutter used to be used separately (for wobbles at a rate below and above 4 Hz respectively), they tend to be combined now that universal standards exist for measurement which take both into account simultaneously. Listeners find flutter most objectionable when the actual frequency of wobble is 4 Hz, and less audible above and below this rate. This fact forms the basis for the weighting curve shown here. The weighting curve is misleading, inasmuch as it presumes inaudibility of flutters above 200 Hz, when actually faster flutters are quite damaging to the sound. A flutter of 200 Hz at a level of -50db will create 0.3% intermodulation distortion, which would be considered unacceptable in a preamp or amplifier.

Measurement techniques

Measuring instruments use a frequency discriminator to translate the pitch variations of a recorded tone into a flutter waveform, which is then passed through the weighting filter, before being full-wave rectified to produce a slowly varying signal which drives a meter or recording device. The maximum meter indication should be read as the flutter value.

The following standards all specify the weighting filter shown above, together with a special slow-quasi-peak full-wave rectifier designed to register any brief speed excursions. As with many audio standards, these are identical derivatives of a common specification.

IEC 386
DIN45507
BS4847
CCIR 409-3
AES6-2008

Measurement is usually made on a 3.15 kHz (or sometimes 3 kHz) tone, a frequency chosen because it is high enough to give good resolution, but low enough not to be affected by drop-outs and high-frequency losses. Ideally, flutter should be measured using a pre-recorded tone free from flutter. Record-replay flutter will then be around twice as high as pre-recorded, because worst case variations will add during recording and playback.  When a recording is played back on the same machine it was made on, a very slow change from low to high flutter will often be observed, because any cyclic flutter caused by capstan rotation may go from adding to cancelling as the tape slips slightly out of synchronism. A good technique is to stop the tape from time to time and start it again. This will often result in different readings as the correlation between record and playback flutter shifts. On well maintained, precise machines, it may be difficult to procure a reference tape with higher tolerances.  Therefore, a record-playback test using the stop-start technique, can be, for practical purposes, the best that can be accomplished.

Audible effects
Wow and flutter are particularly audible on music with oboe, string, guitar, flute, brass, or piano solo playing. While wow is perceived clearly as pitch variation, flutter can alter the sound of the music differently, making it sound 'cracked' or 'ugly'. A recorded 1 kHz tone with a small amount of flutter (around 0.1%) can sound fine in a 'dead' listening room, but in a reverberant room constant fluctuations will often be clearly heard. These are the result of the current tone 'beating' with its echo, which since it originated slightly earlier, has a slightly different pitch. What is heard is quite pronounced amplitude variation, which the ear is very sensitive to. This probably explains why piano notes sound 'cracked'. Because they start loud and then gradually tail off, piano notes leave an echo that can be as loud as the dying note that it beats with, resulting in a level that varies from complete cancellation to double-amplitude at a rate of a few Hz: instead of a smoothly dying note we hear a heavily modulated one. Oboe notes may be particularly affected because of their harmonic structure. Another way that flutter manifests is as a truncation of reverb tails. This may be due to the persistence of memory with regard to spatial location based on early reflections and comparison of Doppler effects over time. The auditory system may become distracted by pitch shifts in the reverberation of a signal that should be of fixed and solid pitch.

The term "flutter echo" is used in relation to a particular form of reverberation that flutters in amplitude. It has no direct connection with flutter as described here, though the mechanism of modulation through cancellation may have something in common with that described above.

Equipment performance

 Professional tape machines can achieve a weighted flutter figure of around 0.02%, which is considered inaudible.
 High end cassette decks struggle to manage around 0.08% weighted, which is still audible under some conditions.
 Digital music players such as CD, DAT, or MP3 use electronic clocks to govern the speed of replay. The circuits used to control these frequencies do permit a very small amount of flutter (usually termed jitter), but the level is far below that which the human ear can discern.
 The linear sound track on VCR video recorders has much higher wow and flutter than the VHS-HiFi high fidelity track which is contained within the video signal.

Absolute speed
Absolute speed error causes a change in pitch, and it is useful to know that a semitone in music represents a 6% frequency change. This is because Western music uses the 'equal temperament scale' based on a constant geometric ratio between twelve notes; and the twelfth root of 2 is 1.05946. Anyone with a good musical ear can detect a pitch change of around 1%, though an error of up to 3% is likely to go unnoticed, except by those few with 'absolute pitch'. Most 'movie' films shown on European television are sped up by 4.166% because they were shot at 24 frames per second, but are scanned at 25 frames per second to match the PAL standard of 25 frame/s 50 field/s. This causes a noticeable increase in pitch on voices, which often brings surprised comment from the actors themselves when they hear their performance on video. It can also frustrate attempts to play along with film music, which is closer to a semitone sharp than its intended pitch. Recently, digital pitch correction has been applied to some films, which corrects the pitch without altering lip-sync, by adding in extra cycles of sound. This has to be regarded as a form of distortion, as there is no way to change the pitch of a sound without also slowing it down that does not change the waveform itself.

Flutter correction
Novel DSP processes have been developed that correct wow and flutter by tracking various spuriae on the tape or film which can be re-purposed as timing references. Several recent (2006) DVD releases have utilized a system developed by Plangent Processes that substantially reduces wow and flutter of very high rates to extremely low levels, with a substantial improvement in quality, and without adding distortion or extra cycles of sound. The software Capstan by Celemony analyzes the already digitalized musical material and uses varispeed playback to eliminate wow and flutter.

Scrape flutter
High-frequency flutter, above 100 Hz, can sometimes result from tape vibrating as it passes over a head (or other non-rotating element in the tape path), as a result of rapidly interacting stretching in the tape and stick-slip at the head. This is termed 'scrape flutter'. It adds a roughness to the sound that is not typical of wow & flutter, and damping devices or heavy rollers are sometimes employed on professional tape machines to reduce or prevent it. Scrape flutter measurement requires special techniques, often using a 10 kHz tone.

See also
Audio quality measurement
Noise measurement
Headroom
Rumble measurement
ITU-R 468 noise weighting
A-weighting
Weighting filter
Equal-loudness contour
Fletcher–Munson curves
Flutter (electronics and communication)
Wow (recording)

References

Audio engineering
Broadcast engineering
Sound production technology
Sound recording
Sound

Wow and flutter measurement


Capelrig House is an 18th-century house in Newton Mearns, East Renfrewshire, Scotland, upon whose lands is situated Eastwood High School. The house is protected as a Category A listed building.

The lands of Capelrig were held by the Knights Templar in the 12th century. Upon the suppression of the Templars, their property passed to the Knights Hospitaller. At the time of the Scottish Reformation, the Hospitallers' lands were surrendered to the Crown, but were returned by Mary, Queen of Scots to Sir James Sandilands, the last preceptor of the Hospitallers in Scotland.

Capelrig was later acquired by the Mure family of Caldwell. The Mures sided with the  Covenanters during the religious conflicts of the 17th century, and Capelrig was briefly taken by the Royalist General Tam Dalyell of the Binns. The family regained their lands upon the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

In 1765 Capelrig Estate was bought by Robert Barclay, whose mentor was William Mure and who gave him a lucrative post as a tax collector, becoming Depute Admiral of the Clyde. Barclay was regarded as the best whist player in Glasgow in his day and was a lawyer in the city in the firm of Barclay & Grahame. In 1769 a new house was erected, the present house in the Georgian style. It and the Estate descended through his family to James Barclay Murdoch, noted historian and antiquarian - and himself a descendant of the Browns and of the Murdochs who were Provosts of Glasgow. A wing was added to the south-west in 1913 by its new owner Kenneth Weir, on the occasion of his marriage. He later became the 2nd Viscount Weir of Eastwood. Much of the Estate continued to be owned by the Murdoch Trust families.

In 1948 Kenneth Weir sold the House and farmlands to John Lawrence & Co Ltd, housebuilders,  To provide for a new school Capelrig House and its immediate policies were purchased by the then Council of County of Renfrew who wished to demolish the building but were dissuaded after a public outcry. It was refurbished as an arts centre, and has been used as offices by East Renfrewshire Council.

References

Category A listed buildings in East Renfrewshire
Listed houses in Scotland
Country houses in East Renfrewshire
Newton Mearns

Capelrig House


Vincent Pagano (born October 13, 1967 in Providence, Rhode Island) is an American film and television actor and screenwriter.

Pagano's first recurring television role was on the NBC sitcom Suddenly Susan in 1996.

Pagano wrote, produced and starred in two movies, both set in his native Rhode Island: the 1999 release A Wake in Providence and the 2006 release Jesus, Mary and Joey (titled Welcome Back, Miss Mary for cable television).

Sabrina, the Teenage Witch star Melissa Joan Hart told the Providence Journal she took a role in Jesus, Mary and Joey/Welcome Back, Miss Mary because her roommate, Angelo Spizzirri, was a close friend of Pagano.

References

External links

 Lifetime TV's page on A Wake In Providence
 Boston Phoenix review of A Wake In Providence
 A Wake In Providence on Rotten Tomatoes

Living people
1967 births
Male actors from Providence, Rhode Island

Vincent Pagano


Burton is a Canadian rural community in Sunbury County, New Brunswick.

Geography
Located on the Saint John River immediately downstream (southeast) of Oromocto on New Brunswick Route 102. Burton is the shire town of the county and is the location of the Sunbury County courthouse.

Services
Burton has an elementary school for children from kindergarten to grade 2, educating about 40 students at a given time. Older children go to various other Anglophone West schools located in Oromocto.

Burton also has a court house and a general store, Ultramar. The first gas station in Burton was opened by the late Mr. Bonnar, eventually run by his son and sold to Mr. Finnan in the 1970s. It remained a full-service Petro-Canada until its closure in 2003 ().

Located adjacent to the Canadian Forces Combat Training Centre at CFB Gagetown, noises from artillery, helicopters, and other military equipment are common aspects of daily life in Burton, especially near Hamilton Road which becomes a dirt trail leading into the training area, across a former military rail line now used as a tank run ().

History

Of historical interest is an old homestead near the Burton Bridge, about which further information is required (). Local accounts of the history mention a tree near the homestead used for an extrajudicial hanging in the mid-19th century (). Several other aged buildings can be found in the area, including a mid-19th century house which stands across from the Burton trailer park on New Brunswick Route 102. The hanging tree is behind the Burton Trailer Park in the "Dead Woods" ().

Sunbury County Courthouse
The local courthouse located in Burton, while in the process of being decommissioned (), was at one time the host of landmark historical trials in New Brunswick and Canada at large.

Notable people

See also
List of communities in New Brunswick

References

Communities in Sunbury County, New Brunswick

Burton, New Brunswick


Chen Yibing (; born 19 December 1984 in Tianjin) is a Chinese gymnast, a four-time world champion on still rings. Chen was part of the Chinese team that won the gold medal in the team event at the World Artistic Gymnastics Championships in 2006, 2007, 2010 and 2011 (no team competition in 2005 and 2009) and the Asian Games in 2006 and 2010. Since his international debut at the 2006 World Artistic Gymnastics Championships, he was almost unbeatable on his specialist event, still rings, except to his teammate Yan Mingyong in 2009 and the Brazilian Arthur Nabarrete Zanetti at the 2012 Summer Olympics. He became the 2006, 2007, 2010 and 2011 world champions on still rings.

Chinese gymnastics head coach Huang Yubin questioned Chen's position at the 2012 Summer Olympics,  He was quoted as saying that "because of the ugly behaviors of the judges, it has hurt Chinese Gymnast, as well as being a humiliation to this event." According to Xinhua News, Huang also called the night a "dark night in the history of gymnastics". H.

Chen was also a member of the 2008 Beijing Olympics team and won gold for China in men's team gymnastics as well as gold on the Rings. His still rings performance was described as 'perfect' and 'textbook-worthy', highly acclaimed for its precision and high level of difficulty.

He is a student at the Beijing Normal University, the present captain of the men's Chinese gymnastic team and currently has 8 world titles and 3 Olympics gold medals.

See also

 China at the 2012 Summer Olympics

References

External links

1984 births
Living people
Chinese male artistic gymnasts
Gymnasts at the 2008 Summer Olympics
Gymnasts at the 2012 Summer Olympics
Medalists at the World Artistic Gymnastics Championships
Olympic gold medalists for China
Olympic silver medalists for China
Olympic gymnasts for China
Gymnasts from Tianjin
World champion gymnasts
Place of birth missing (living people)
Olympic medalists in gymnastics
Beijing Normal University alumni
Medalists at the 2012 Summer Olympics
Medalists at the 2008 Summer Olympics
Asian Games medalists in gymnastics
Gymnasts at the 2006 Asian Games
Gymnasts at the 2010 Asian Games
Asian Games gold medalists for China
Medalists at the 2006 Asian Games
Medalists at the 2010 Asian Games
Universiade medalists in gymnastics
FISU World University Games gold medalists for China
Medalists at the 2005 Summer Universiade
21st-century Chinese people

Chen Yibing


Lovin' the Day is the debut album of the Dove Award-winning American urban gospel group Out of Eden, released in 1994. It features sisters Lisa, Andrea, and Danielle Kimmey. It was the launch album of Gotee Records, and was the catalyst for the creation of the record label; founders of the label Toby McKeehan, Todd Collins, and Joey Elwood had wanted to produce the album, but after not being able to find a Record label to sign the act to, they formed Gotee Records and began distributing the band's material on their own. The album peaked at #10 on the Top Contemporary Christian music chart. It includes a cover of the Bill Withers hit Lovely Day.

Track listing
There are 14 songs on the album. It is 49 minutes and 54 seconds long.

Personnel

References

1994 debut albums
Out of Eden albums
Albums produced by TobyMac
Albums produced by Joey Elwood
Gotee Records albums

Lovin' the Day


Ralph Metzner (May 18, 1936 – March 14, 2019) was a German-born American psychologist, writer and researcher, who participated in psychedelic research at Harvard University in the early 1960s with Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (later named Ram Dass). Metzner was a psychotherapist, and Professor Emeritus of psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, where he was formerly the Academic Dean and Academic Vice-president.

Early life
Metzner was involved in consciousness research, including psychedelics, yoga, meditation and shamanism for over 50 years. He was a co-founder and President of the Green Earth Foundation, a non-profit educational organization devoted to healing and harmonizing the relationship between humans and the Earth. Metzner was featured in the 2006 film Entheogen: Awakening the Divine Within, a documentary about rediscovering an enchanted cosmos in the modern world.

He conducted workshops on consciousness transformation and alchemical divination, both nationally and internationally. He was also a poet and singer-songwriter and produced two CDs with Kit Walker: A spoken word CD ("Spirit Soundings," with music by Kit Walker) and one music CD of original songs ("Bardo Blues"). His books include The Well of Remembrance, The Unfolding Self, Green Psychology, and two edited collections on the science and the phenomenology of Ayahuasca and Teonanácatl, and a collection of reports about MDMA experiences. Metzner provided the foreword for Through the Gateway of the Heart: Accounts of Experiences with MDMA and Other Empathogenic Substances.

He received his Ph.D. in Psychology from Harvard.

Bibliography

(1979). Know Your Type: Maps of Identity (Anchor Press; 1st edition)

Discography
 1966 – The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead (with Richard Alpert & Timothy Leary) (reissued on CD in 2003 by Folkways)
 2006 – Bardo Blues – and Other Songs of Liberation (with Kit Walker) Music CD (Green Earth Foundation)
 2009 – Cognition Factor (2009)

References

External links

 Ralph Metzner's The Web of Life (Song, 2009, 15 min)
 Through the Gateway of the Heart, Second Edition - Accounts and Experiences with MDMA and other Empathogenic Substances

1936 births
2019 deaths
American male non-fiction writers
American psychology writers
German emigrants to the United States
Psychedelic drug researchers
American psychedelic drug advocates
Harvard University alumni
20th-century American psychologists
Psychonautics researchers

Ralph Metzner


WBBR (1130 AM) is a Class A clear-channel radio station licensed to New York, New York. It serves as the flagship station of Bloomberg Radio, Bloomberg L.P.'s radio service. The station offers general and financial news reports 24-hours a day, along with local information and interviews with corporate executives, economists, and industry analysts.

WBBR broadcasts with 50,000 watts, the maximum authorized power for AM stations, from a four-tower antenna array located in Carlstadt, New Jersey. A single tower is used during the day, at night, power is fed to all four towers in a directional pattern to protect KWKH in Shreveport, Louisiana, the other Class A station at 1130 AM. Even with this restriction, it can be heard across much of the Eastern United States and Canada, but is strongest in the Northeast. Studios are located at 731 Lexington Avenue ("Bloomberg Tower") in Midtown Manhattan.

History

Early years as WNEW: 1930s–1940s
WNEW was created by consolidation of two existing New York City-area stations that were sharing time on 1250 kHz: WAAM in Newark, New Jersey, and WODA in Paterson, New Jersey. WAAM was first licensed on April 10, 1922, to the I. R. Nelson Company in Newark. WODA was initially licensed in April 1925 to the James K O'Dea Radio and Victrola Shop, 115 Ellison Street in Paterson.

WNEW debuted February 13, 1934, as "New York's newest radio station", and with new call sign representing NEWark, NEW Jersey. The station had rights to 6/7ths time, with the other 1/7th time assigned to WHBI. WNEW was known for its popular adult music selection as well as its staff of radio personalities (including Martin Block, Dee Finch, Gene Rayburn, Gene Klavan, Al "Jazzbo" Collins, Ted Brown and William B. Williams), as well as for developing modern morning radio. In addition to its music and entertainment programming, WNEW featured an award-winning news staff and became "The Voice of New York Sports" for its coverage of New York Giants football team as well as the New York Rangers hockey and New York Knicks basketball.

WNEW was acquired in 1934 by advertising executive Milton H. Biow and watch manufacturer Arde Bulova, under the name The Greater New York Broadcasting Company. It also acquired the Manhattan studios at 501 Madison Avenue which had been constructed for the recently failed Amalgamated Broadcasting System. New York socialite Bernice Judis was hired as WNEW's first General Manager, making her a rare female executive during the "Golden Age of Radio". The call sign remained the same, to represent "the NEWest thing in radio". The community of license changed from Newark to New York City only after the station's ownership changed hands.

As an independent radio station, WNEW lacked the funds larger networks National Broadcasting Company, Columbia Broadcasting System and Mutual Broadcasting System used to produce daily programming, such as comedy shows, soap operas, game shows and dramatic programs. However, Judis was not discouraged, and welcomed the opportunity to develop her own schedule of innovative programming that included creating the first all-night radio show, dubbed Stan Shaw's Milkman's Matinee, and cultivating a line-up of popular morning radio show personalities.

In 1935, WNEW pioneered the concept of a disc jockey when staff announcer Martin Block needed to fill time between news bulletins during his coverage of the Lindbergh kidnapping trial of Bruno Hauptmann. Block did not have access to a live orchestra to play music during the breaks as most network stations did, so he played records instead. Soon afterward, he piloted a 15-minute experimental show called the Make Believe Ballroom, during which he played records from popular bands and singers, posed as a live performance in an imaginary ballroom. During Block's tenure as host of Make Believe Ballroom, the show attracted 25% of the listening audience in New York City. The show continued in sporadic runs until the station's end in 1992.

In 1936, as the popularity of recorded music grew, WNEW was the defendant in a lawsuit initiated by bandleaders Paul Whiteman, Sammy Kaye and Fred Waring.  They claimed that the playing of records on radio broadcasts was undermining performers' network contracts, which often called for exclusive services. The court ruled that WNEW, after purchasing each record, was allowed to broadcast it regardless of the resistance from artists. WNEW's victory subsequently authorized radio stations across the country to start playing recorded music and brought about the modern radio programming landscape.

As of January 1, 1940, WNEW was licensed on 1250 kHz for 2,500 watts by day, and 1,000 watts at night. On March 29, 1941, the North American Regional Broadcasting Agreement (NARBA) went into effect, which moved the stations on 1250 kHz to 1280 kHz, with WNEW now authorized for 5,000 watts both day and night.

November 12, 1941, call letter swap between WNEW and WOV
In late 1941, stations WNEW and WOV traded identities, with the call letters and programming of WOV moving from 1130 to WNEW's 1280 kHz assignment, while WNEW did the reverse, with its call letters and programming moving from 1280 to WOV's 1130 kHz assignment. The FCC approved the call sign changes on November 12, 1941, and the transfer was finalized on December 1, 1941, consisting of an "exchange of power, call letters and transmitting equipment between WOV and WNEW". Thus, following this exchange,
the WNEW call letters were now used on the station at 1130 kHz, with a boost to 10,000 watts full-time.

In 1942, Judis set up a broadcast desk at the New York Daily News and WNEW became one of the first stations to carry hourly newscasts, something that would become commonplace in the industry over the next fifteen years. The station ended its association with the Daily News in 1958 and went on to build its own news department with 13 reporters and writers.

1950s

WNEW was acquired in March 1954 by a group led by Richard D. Buckley, the future founder of Buckley Broadcasting. Less than eighteen months later, in October 1955 the station changed hands again with Buckley joining two new partners, television producer and investor Jack Wrather and banker John L. Loeb. Then, in March 1957 WNEW was purchased by the DuMont Broadcasting Corporation, the former owner of the DuMont Television Network; the sale to DuMont made WNEW a sister station to former DuMont network flagship WABD (channel 5). The TV station changed its call letters to WNEW-TV in 1958, and DuMont Broadcasting would later evolve into Metromedia.

Through the 1950s and 1960s, WNEW's programming was largely based on a personality-driven format, with a line-up of DJs who were ground-breaking at the time.  Comedian Dee Finch teamed up with Gene Rayburn, and later Gene Klavan, on the long-running morning show Anything Goes.  It often playfully mocked its own advertisers, who in turn were still eager to have their products touted on the popular show.

During this time, pop music was dividing between rock and roll and popular standards. Some stations moved to a predominantly rock and roll format and became known as "Top 40" stations, where the best-selling songs were played frequently, while others played popular adult standards, along with the softer hits from the current charts, earning the name "Middle of the Road" or MOR for short.  DJs Ted Brown, Al "Jazzbo" Collins and William B. Williams helped define the MOR musical character of WNEW, lending their own "professionalism and elegance" to popular standards music.

1960s
The news department at WNEW flourished in the late 1950s and early 1960s and was considered among the best news operations at an independent radio station.  WNEW sent reporters around the world to places like Cuba to interview Fidel Castro and to Africa to interview medical missionary Albert Schweitzer. In 1960, the station won a Peabody Award and an Associated Press Award for the best regularly scheduled news program in New York. Aerospace author Martin Caidin anchored live broadcasts for WNEW during early American space launches in the 1960s, traveling to Cape Canaveral to report on-site.

Long-time General Manager Bernice Judis left WNEW in 1959 and was replaced by John Van Buren Sullivan, who started the station's affiliation with the New York Giants football team in 1960. Since home games were blacked out on television, as much as 60% of the New York radio audience relied on WNEW for play-by-play game coverage. WNEW later aired Mets, Rangers and Knicks games, as "The Voice of New York Sports" for more than 30 years.

By the mid-1960s, contemporary artists like Bobby Vinton, Connie Francis, Wayne Newton, Steve Lawrence, Andy Williams and Dinah Washington were added, as well as softer songs by rock artists like Elvis Presley, The Beatles, The Association, The 5th Dimension and Petula Clark were heard. The station also played a couple of big band songs from the 1930s and 1940s per hour. Beginning in 1965, WNEW cut back on big bands, playing them only occasionally. The station also cut back on standards artists, airing them about four times each hour. The airstaff was ordered to stop playing standards and big bands from their own personal collections and were ordered to remove them from the station. WNEW focused more on soft rock and played more charting hits on the Adult Contemporary music charts.

1970s–1980s

The 1970s marked a period of decline for WNEW as listeners' musical tastes continued to evolve.  The station struggled to maintain an adult pop standards audience that was being replaced by an expanding youth market.  In an effort to attract at least some younger listeners, WNEW continued to air softer Top 40 hits, despite resistance from established DJs like William B. Williams, who helped build WNEW's pop standards tradition.  In 1971, WNEW shifted its programming again and evolved into a full service adult contemporary format. The station also cut back on music during morning and afternoon drive times.  The Milkman's Matinee name for overnight broadcasts was shelved for a time. The program director fired anyone who was rumored to have objected to the changes, including longtime sportscaster Marty Glickman.  Marv Albert was brought in to replace Glickman. Still, the station played a couple standards per hour and a big band song every few hours but also played many soft to mid-tempo top 40 hits one would not expect to hear on a MOR station.  WNEW was classified by trade publications as Adult Contemporary and Pop Adult.  Many of the current songs were AC only hits.  Also, WNEW played a moderate amount of 50s and 60s rock and roll artists, along with some Motown hits. WNEW also had "Million Dollar Weekends" focusing on oldies from the 50s and 60s along with an occasional standard.

With FM radio taking a larger share of young listeners, WNEW as an AM station opted to return to its roots in pop standards in 1976, reinstating Milkman's Matinee on overnights. In October 1979, Make Believe Ballroom was reinstated in middays. Initially, the station mixed in additional big bands and standards in with the AC format. In 1980, WNEW slowly began reducing AC hits. Later in the fall, the station went to all big bands and standards with the exception of morning and afternoon drive times. Million Dollar Weekends also became strictly Standards and Big Bands. In January 1981 WNEW converted to big bands and standards 24 hours a day and deepened the selection of songs.

By 1981, WNEW focused on album cuts by standards artists. The morning show focused on more hit based easy listening standards with some big bands mixed in. Middays played music from the 1930s and 1940s, with a mix of big bands and crooners. Afternoons concentrated on a mix of deep cuts by vocalists along with some big bands. Late nights featured traditional jazz.  On overnights, WNEW launched a jazz show in 1986, blending traditional, modern and smooth jazz.

WNEW was separated from its television sister station in March 1986, when WNEW-TV and Metromedia's other television outlets came under the ownership of Fox Broadcasting Company, then owned by 20th Century Fox and controlled by Rupert Murdoch. Two years later in 1988, WNEW went through a major ownership change as Metromedia sold the station to Westwood One for $22 million. Westwood One then sold a half-interest to media entrepreneur Robert F. X. Sillerman for $11 million, while retaining operational control.

Even with new additions to programming such as Larry King's overnight radio show, the station's ratings continued to decline.  Westwood One was forced to cut costs and downsize staff in an effort to attract potential buyers. By 1988, WNEW began to focus on bigger hits by standards artists.  The music focused more on 50s and 60s easy listening artists. In 1990, WNEW began mixing in soft hits by baby boomer pop artists such as Neil Diamond, The Carpenters, The Righteous Brothers, Carole King, Barry Manilow, Lionel Richie and Linda Ronstadt. Late in 1991, WNEW backed off this type of music and focused again on traditional standards artists. WNEW continued cutting staff and local news in an attempt to remain profitable.

Under Bloomberg

WNEW was put up for sale in 1991, with Bloomberg L.P. agreeing to purchase the station for $13.5 million in August 1992. In the period before the format change, the airstaff was given an opportunity to say goodbye, culminating on December 10 and 11, 1992, when the station had one big farewell show. During this farewell show, the airstaff remembered WNEW highlights and talked about the end of an era. The show ended at 8:15 p.m. on the 11th, as Mark Simone signed off for the last time with the entire current and many living former personalities at his side. The last two songs played were by Frank Sinatra: "Here's That Rainy Day" and "We'll Meet Again."  WNEW joined NBC Talknet in progress, followed by Larry King as usual.

After Larry King, beginning at 2:00 a.m. Saturday, WNEW began simulcasting WYNY for three days. The station broke away only for New York Giants football, Talknet, and Larry King. On December 15, the sale of WNEW to Bloomberg became final, with the station continuing to simulcast WYNY until 4:00 p.m. After airing the Perry Como Christmas Special, shows from Talknet, and the first hour of Larry King, the station signed off at 11:59 p.m. The airing of The Larry King Show ended abruptly and the pre-recorded voice of engineering director Alan Kirschner was broadcast, stating "At this time, 1130 WNEW New York will leave the air forever. Thanks for your support over the years. This is WNEW, New York".

At the transmitter site, engineer Rene Tetro then turned off the transmitter for two minutes, switching to the new feed from the Bloomberg offices. The station signed back on the air at 12:01 a.m. with the new call sign WBBR, and began simulcasting WQEW (1560 AM), then owned by The New York Times. In anticipation of the end of WNEW, WQEW had begun broadcasting a standards format some two weeks earlier. Over the next several weeks, WQEW asked listeners to 1130 to switch to 1560. The simulcast ended on January 4, 1993, when WBBR's business news format debuted.

References

External links

FCC History Cards for WADO (covers 1934-1981 as WNEW / WOV / WADO. This card set starts with WNEW's creation in 1934, as a consolidation of WODA and WAAM, which was eventually assigned to AM 1280. On November 12, 1941, the WNEW call letters were swapped to AM 1130, while AM 1280 became WOV. Still later, on November 1, 1959, this station on AM 1280 became WADO.)
FCC History Cards for WBBR covers 1938-1981 as WOV / WNEW. This card set starts with formation of "new" WOV, a consolidation of "old" WOV, WPG and WBIL, which was eventually assigned to AM 1130. On November 12, 1941, the WOV call letters were swapped to AM 1280, while AM 1130 became WNEW. Still later, in 1992, this station on AM 1130 became WBBR.
 Bloomberg Radio on Sirius
 WNEW The World's Greatest Radio Station

Further reading
 The Airwaves of New York: Illustrated Histories of 156 AM Stations in the Metropolitan Area, 1921-1996 by Bill Jaker, Frank Sulek and Peter Kanze, 1998.
 WNEW News Department Historical Profile (1978)

Bloomberg L.P.
XM Satellite Radio channels
Sirius Satellite Radio channels
News and talk radio stations in the United States
Business talk radio stations
Metromedia
Radio stations established in 1922
BBR
Business mass media in the United States
Sirius XM Radio channels
Clear-channel radio stations

WBBR


"Ring Out Your Dead" is the third episode of the fifth series of Midsomer Murders and the twentieth episode overall. It stars John Nettles as Detective Chief Inspector Tom Barnaby and Daniel Casey as Detective Sergeant Gavin Troy.

Synopsis
The Midsomer Wellow bell-ringing band is stalked by an elusive serial killer on the eve of a major tournament. A cute new member distracts some of the bell ringers of Midsomer Wellow from concentrating on the upcoming striking competition, but they still manage to place a group bet on a horse called Ring-A-Ding, which wins them 30,000 pounds. This combination of gambling and church bell ringing enrages some portions of the village. When one of the ringers is found in the tower, shot through the heart and clutching the ironic words "Ding Dong Bell", Barnaby isn't amused. As another murder takes place, Chief Inspector Barnaby wonders if he should be looking for a maniac, or the rather more rational nemesis of a rival team.

Murders
Throughout the episode, there are 4 murders, one of which is historical.  There is also a death by natural causes.
Greg Tutt: Lured to his death by a letter supposedly from another character asking to meet at the bell tower, then shot through the heart.
Emma Tysoe: Shot through the heart on the day of her wedding.
Marcus Steadman: Fears that he is being followed which brings on a panic attack, inflaming his asthma. After collapsing on a footbridge he is then pushed in a river with a walking stick, where he subsequently drowns.
The Reverend Jonathan Ebbrel : This murder takes place in 1860. The legend goes that the bellringers murdered him and hid his body in a well because he imposed strict rules on the bell ringers.

Other deaths
Reggie Barton: Dies of natural causes in his sleep.

Midsomer Murders episodes
2002 British television episodes

Ring Out Your Dead


A Mesopredator is a predator that occupies a mid-ranking trophic level in a food web. There is no standard definition of a mesopredator, but mesopredators are usually medium-sized carnivorous or omnivorous animals, such as raccoons, foxes, or coyotes. They are often defined by contrast from apex predators or prey in a particular food web. Mesopredators typically prey on smaller animals.

Mesopredators vary across different ecosystems. Sometimes, the same species is a mesopredator in one ecosystem and an apex predator in another ecosystem, depending on the composition of that ecosystem. When new species are introduced into an ecosystem, the role of the mesopredator often changes; this can also happen if species are removed.

The Mesopredator Release Effect

When populations of an apex predator decrease, populations of mesopredators in the area often increase due to decreased competition and conflict with the apex predator. This is known as the mesopredator release effect, which refers to the release of mesopredators from the trophic cascade. These mesopredator outbreaks can lead to declining prey populations, destabilize ecological communities, reduce biodiversity, and can even drive local extinctions.

Typically, mesopredators are in competition with apex predators for food and other resources. Apex predators reduce mesopredator populations and change mesopredator behaviors and habitat choices by preying on and intimidating mesopredators. When apex predator populations decline, mesopredators can access hunting and den areas once controlled by the apex predators, essentially assuming the role of an apex predator. However, mesopredators often occupy different ecological niches than the former apex predator and will have different effects on the structure and stability of the ecosystem.

Mesopredator outbreaks are becoming more common in fragmented habitats, which are areas where a species' preferred environment is broken up by obstacles. Fragmented habitats can be caused by geological or human activity, and particularly affect larger animals that roam and hunt across large territories, such as apex predators. Fragmented habitats can drive these species to leave and find more suitable habitats.

Additionally, in many fragmented habitats, apex predators have more encounters with humans, leaving them susceptible to harmful or deadly conflicts, sometimes resulting in eradication of the apex predator population entirely. Human development also promotes mesopredator outbreaks through increasing access to resources such as pet food, trash, and crops.

The mesopredator release effect is not entirely understood. Most research has been conducted on mammal species, with limited studies on non-mammal animal species. Additionally, it is not well understood how these dynamics may play out in ecosystems with many mesopredator and apex predator species.

See also
Mesocarnivore

References

Ecology

Mesopredator


Damien Hancock (born 10 March 1965) is an Irish soccer referee from Dublin. He has been on the National League panel since 1995, and regularly referees matches at the top level of the League of Ireland.

He was fourth official for the 2002 FAI Cup Final, and in March 2006 refereed the League of Ireland Cup Final at Belfield Park between UCD and Derry City, which Derry won 2-1.

In Europe, he was fourth official for the UEFA Cup match between Valur and Brøndby IF on 27 July 2006, which finished 0-0.

On 3 December 2006 he took charge of his first FAI Cup Final, but the last for the 86-year-old trophy, as a new one was to be introduced for 2007. Derry City beat St Patrick's Athletic 4-3 in the Final, in very windy conditions. This match was also the last soccer game to be played at the old Lansdowne Road before its redevelopment.

See also
 List of football referees

References

1965 births
Living people
Republic of Ireland association football referees
Sportspeople from Dublin (city)

Damien Hancock


In radio or television broadcasting, a director of network programming, program director, director of programming, president of TV entertainment, senior vice president for TV programming or vice president of program scheduling is an executive who typically plans the broadcast programming schedule, deciding what radio programs or TV shows will air and when.

A program director's selections are based upon expertise in the media as well as knowledge of the target demographic. In some countries, the program director in commercial broadcasting is of even greater importance, since he makes a decisive decision about the economic success of the broadcasters. In so-called "private television", the most important program directors were or are often the managing directors of the station, such as Les Moonves for CBS in the United States or Anke Schäferkordt for RTL in Germany.

In a broadcasting network, there might be a separation between the news department and the programming department, in which case there is a news director overseeing the news department, and the director of programming has no say.

See also
 Dayparting
 Full-service radio

References

Broadcasting occupations

de:Programmdirektor

Director of network programming


Christopher Robert Paul Gunness (born 1959) is the former chief spokesperson for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). He is currently the Director of the Myanmar Accountability Project.

Early life

Gunness was born in 1959 in what was then the Crown Colony of Trinidad, part of the British West Indies. He was educated in England, initially at Ardingly College, before gaining a scholarship to Oxford University in 1979.

BBC

He joined the BBC as a graduate trainee in 1982. During his 23-year career in broadcasting, he covered all the following roles: producer, studio manager, reporter, correspondent and anchor.

UNSCO

In 2005, Gunness left the BBC to join the United Nations Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process (UNSCO), which was created following the signing of the Oslo Accords. He was a member of a UN mission mandated by the UN to try and halt the Lebanon war in July 2006.

UNRWA

In 2007, he was appointed Spokesman and Director of Strategic Communications at UNRWA.

In 2014, during the war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, he made several media appearances.

On 27 July 2014 Gunness was interviewed by David Gregory on Meet the Press; Gregory was criticized for asking Gunness to comment on unverified video footage that Gunness was not able to see.

On 30 July 2014, following a live TV interview from his office in Jerusalem with al Jazeera-Arabic Gunness broke down in tears discussing the shelling of the UNRWA schools in Gaza, which resulted in the death of 15 people.

In 2014, Israel's U.N. ambassador, Ron Prosor, called for Gunness's suspension, accusing Gunness of "an ongoing pattern of anti-Israel bias"; Gunness responded by saying: "We guard our neutrality jealously, and we have a plethora of measures that we take to guard our neutrality." This exchange took place against the backdrop of caches of rockets having been discovered at three separate UNRWA schools, and accusations by the Israeli government that UNRWA had turned over one cache of rockets to Hamas; Gunness called these allegations unsubstantiated.

On December 4, 2014, in response to the Jerusalem Post's publication of a piece by Palestinian activist Bassem Eid, Gunness tweeted "boycott the JPost! Don't read their lies!"; in response, the U.S. State Department issued a statement underscoring the importance that UNRWA "uphold its stated policy of neutrality." Through a spokesperson, Gunness clarified that "he was not calling for a boycott against any media outlet but instead was making his objections to a single article."

Consulting & Myanmar Advocacy
In 2019, Gunness left the U.N.; he founded the Myanmar Accountability Project, MAP, in 2021, and also runs the consultancy Tiresias Communications. In 2021, Gunness advocated on behalf of  Kyaw Zwar Minn, Myanmar's former ambassador to the UK, as means of undermining the legitimacy of the junta that seized power in a coup d'état earlier that year. In September, 2021, MAP assisted in producing a legal opinion regarding which ambassador would be officially credentialed to represent Myanmar at the United Nations.

References

1959 births
Living people
People educated at Ardingly College
Alumni of the University of Oxford
Mass media about the Arab–Israeli conflict
British officials of the United Nations

Chris Gunness


Peter Behrens (born 1954) is a Canadian-American novelist, screenwriter and short story writer. His debut novel, The Law of Dreams, won the 2006 Governor General's Award for English fiction, and was shortlisted for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the CBA Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year, and the Amazon.ca First Novel Award.

Profile
Behrens was born and raised in Montreal, Quebec, where he studied at Lower Canada College, Concordia University and McGill University. He was a Fellow of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and held a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. His earliest short fiction can be found in Best Canadian Stories 1978 and Best Canadian Stories 1979, and in his debut short story collection, Night Driving (1987). He subsequently worked in Hollywood as a screenwriter; though he continued to publish short stories and essays in Canadian and American magazines, he did not publish another book until The Law of Dreams, his novel of a young man driven into exile during Ireland's Great Famine. The novel was rejected by 25 publishers in the United States before being accepted by Steerforth Press. The Law of Dreams was published by House of Anansi in Canada and was published in nine languages around the world, with the US trade paperback edition published by Random House

He followed up with the novels The O'Briens (2011) and Carry Me (2016). While researching Carry Me, Behrens held a fellowship at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS). Carry Me won the 2017 Vine Award for Canadian Jewish Literature.

Behrens was a 2015–16 fellow of Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. In fall 2017 he was the Mordecai Richer Writer in Residence at his alma mater, Concordia University (Montreal). In 2013 Behrens was Distinguished Visiting Writer at Wichita State University. He is an adjunct professor at Queen's University of Charlotte where he teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program. Behrens has guest-lectured at UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television and Concordia University's School of Cinema, and taught screenwriting at Simon Fraser University's Praxis Screenwriters' Workshop.

Behrens began his screenwriting career working in collaboration with the producer Jerome Hellman. Behrens has several film and television credits as writer and story consultant. He is a member of the Writers Guild of America (West) and the Writers Guild of Canada. He has guest-lectured at UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television and taught at Simon Fraser University (Vancouver), the University of Southern Maine, Colorado College, and Wichita State University.

His essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, The Globe and Mail, The Walrus, and The Atlantic and been broadcast on National Public Radio's All Things Considered.

Bibliography

Novels
The Law of Dreams (2006) – House of Anansi Press (Canada); Steerforth Press/Random House (US)
The O'Briens (2011) – House of Anansi (Canada); Pantheon Books (US)
Carry Me (2016) – House of Anansi (Canada); Pantheon Books (US)

Short stories
Night Driving: Stories (1987) – Macmillan of Canada
Travelling Light (2013) – Astoria

References

External links
 Peter Behrens

1954 births
Canadian male novelists
Canadian male short story writers
21st-century Canadian screenwriters
Writers from Montreal
Canadian expatriate writers in the United States
Living people
Governor General's Award-winning fiction writers
Anglophone Quebec people
21st-century Canadian novelists
Canadian male essayists
Canadian male screenwriters
21st-century Canadian short story writers
21st-century Canadian essayists
Concordia University alumni
McGill University alumni
20th-century Canadian short story writers
20th-century Canadian male writers
21st-century Canadian male writers
Stegner Fellows

Peter Behrens (writer)


The Virtuix Omni is an omnidirectional treadmill simulator for virtual reality games and other applications. It uses a platform to simulate locomotion i.e. the motion of walking, requiring both special shoes or shoe covers and a surface that reduces friction. It works in conjunction with the HTC Vive, and allows a Vive user to physically walk within a limited number of supported games.

In 2013, the Virtuix Omni became one of the ten biggest technology Kickstarter campaigns, raising $1.1 million in funding. Since then, Virtuix has raised another $35 million from private and institutional investors.

Although originally stated to be released in January 2014, production of the Omni only began in November 2015.

Kickstarter backers began receiving their orders during the third week of January 2017.

As of mid-2017 the company no longer offers this version of the Omni (the "Omni Pro") to consumers, instead supplying it for commercial use only. Virtuix has shipped more than 3,500 Omni Pro systems to date to over 500 commercial locations.

An updated consumer version of the device, called the "Omni One" had been planned for release by the end of 2021, though the first units were not shipped to investors until March, 2023.

History

Virtuix was founded by Jan Goetgeluk. The prototype for the Omni used dummy shoes and Kinect software to detect movement instead of the sensor system that became part of the final product. He applied for a U.S. patent on 23 October 2013 for his Locomotion System and Apparatus. Virtuix presented the prototype of the Omni at the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2013 in Los Angeles, California where it was reported on by Engadget and other electronic publications, including The Verge.

Virtuix launched a Kickstarter campaign in June 2013 to raise money for manufacturing. The campaign was endorsed by Oculus Rift founder Palmer Luckey and overshot its funding goal of $150,000 within three and a half hours of it being posted. The campaign raised a total of $1.1 million when it closed, making it one of the top 10 biggest technology crowdfunding campaigns at the time. Goetgeluk presented the Virtuix Omni on an episode of the TV show Shark Tank in 2013, after selling approximately 3,000 units in the Kickstarter campaign. He failed to obtain funding from the Sharks after asking for $2 million for 10% of the company. However, Shark Tank investor and billionaire Mark Cuban invested in Virtuix after the airing of the show. In 2016, the company tested the waters under Regulation A for a potential offering of shares to the public.

The Omni presented at SXSW in 2014 where Virtuix founder Jan Goetgeluk also spoke on the topic of virtual reality. The final version of the Virtuix Omni was presented at the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada. The Omni was also present at E3 in 2015, where it won an award for Best Technology.

In January 2016, the first production Omnis began to ship to consumers. In December 2016, Virtuix announced that they would not be able to fulfill international pre-orders, citing the logistical and financial difficulties of shipping such a large item internationally. As an apology, Virtuix refunded these customers with an additional 3% interest, compounded annually. Kickstarter backers began receiving their orders during the third week of January 2017.

In September 2017, Virtuix announced Omniverse™, their proprietary content delivery and arcade management platform for commercial entertainment venues. Omniverse allows customers to preview and launch games from a VR interface, and enables operators to manage multiple Omnis from a single device such as a tablet, and keep track of analytics from a web-based Control Center.

Omniverse currently features 24 virtual reality games optimized for arcade use. Among the first games to be released was Fallen Planet Studios' "Affected The Manor." -  in a statement, the studios' co-founder  Mark Paul said: "Omniverse represents an opportunity for us to launch our game on more than a thousand commercial entertainment systems at once, without the hassle of individual licensing agreements. We are excited to release Affected on the Omniverse platform and reach a worldwide audience in places that we hadn't been able to capture before."

The most recent game added to Omniverse is "Dead Zone."

In March 2018, an omnidirectional treadmill based on the Omni's design played a prominent part in Steven Spielberg's movie adaption of Ernest Cline's novel, Ready Player One. An Omni had been provided by Virtuix to the studio during production.

In November 2018, Virtuix unveiled their highly anticipated Omni Arena e-sports attraction at the IAAPA Attractions Expo in Orlando, together with their partner Funovation. More than 350 attendees signed up for a VIP demo before the show had started and press coverage was very positive following the reveal - Forbes named Omni Arena as one of the key stories of IAAPA 2018.

Omni Arena features four Omni 2.0 motion platforms and brings e-sports out-of-home, giving anyone who plays a chance to win in ongoing weekly and monthly prize contests with an annual prize pool of over $100,000. Its key features include an automated staging area for quick player setup and minimal attendant labor, mini-games to facilitate social interactions between players during setup, social sharing stations to share gameplay footage after playing, and a queuing app to eliminate wait lines and boost utilization. The attraction is also capable of broadcasting competitions over the live-streaming platform, Twitch.

The first installations of this new attraction was completed in March 2019.

In October 2020, Virtuix publicly revealed the latest design of their omnidirectional treadmill, called "Omni One". It was scheduled for release in 2H 2021, and marks a return to their original vision of providing a VR treadmill for the home; however, the first units had not began shipping to investors until March, 2023. Changes include the removal of the support ring that encircles the user's waist, allowing for greater freedom of movement for the user's arms. It also enables crouching, kneeling, and jumping. It will be offered as both a separate "dev-kit", and also as a bundle with a standalone VR headset (no PC required). The choice of headset has not been finalised, but their promotional video shows a Pico Neo 2.

Product overview

The Omni is a locomotion simulator designed to work as a game controller, and allows gamers to physically walk within the game environment in which they are playing. It is used in tandem with the HTC Vive for a full virtual reality game setup. The surface is bowl-shaped and requires special low friction shoes or shoe covers. It uses inertial sensors to track a person's position, the length of their stride, and how fast they are moving. The information is then sent to a computer which translates the data into the game movements.

The current Omni Harness design keeps the player stable in the Ring, without needing leg straps. As it rests on top of the support Ring, the player is able to turn rapidly while walking, jogging, or running, without the user having to rotate the vertical support along with them. Since its first release, the motion tracking has also improved, allowing for a wider range of player speed.

Omni One uses a vest instead of a harness, for increased freedom of movement.

Other uses

The Virtuix Omni can also be used for military and sports training.

See also
 Haptic suit
 Cyberith Virtualizer
 Wizdish ROVR

References

External links

Kickstarter-funded products
Multimodal interaction
Video game accessories
Game controllers
Virtual reality accessories
Oculus Rift
Computer-related introductions in 2017

Virtuix Omni


Johanna Umurungi (born 7 April 1996 in Turin, Italy) is a Rwandan swimmer who specialises in the 50 metre butterfly and the 100 metre butterfly. Umurungi was the only female swimmer representing Rwanda at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, where she competed in the 100 metre butterfly. She has also competed in three World Championships and a World Short Course Championship.

Competition
Umurungi's debut at an international swimming competition was at the 2011 World Aquatics Championships, where she competed in the 50 metre butterfly. She finished fourth in her heat in a time of 32.68 seconds. Her time was the 45th fastest out of 51 athletes. She was 5.85 seconds slower than the slowest athlete to progress to the semi-final round and she was therefore eliminated from the competition. At the 2013 World Aquatics Championships, Umurungi competed in both the 50 metre and 100 metre butterfly. In the 50 metre event she swam a time of 32.35 seconds in the heat round which was 56th quickest time out of 60 swimmers. She didn't progress to the semi-final round. In the 100 metre butterfly event, her time of one minute and 10.41 seconds was the 50th fastest out of 53 swimmer and she didn't progress to the semi-finals. The 2014 World Short Course Championships was Umurungi's first World Short Course Championships and she competed in both the 50 metre and 100 metre butterfly events. She finished 75th overall in the 50 metre race; with a time of 32.54 seconds; and 61st overall in the 100 metre race; with a time of one minute and 9.20 seconds. At the 2015 World Aquatics Championships Umurungi only competed in the 100 metre butterfly. She swam a time of one minute and 13.14 seconds in her heat and did not progress to the semi-finals.

2016 Summer Olympics
Umurungi was the only female swimmer representing Rwanda at the 2016 Summer Olympics. She and male swimmer Eloi Imaniraguha were selected to represent Rwanda after the International Olympic Committee extended an invitation to the country to send two swimmers; otherwise, Rwandan athletes in this category do not normally qualify through the usual qualifications process. Umurungi competed in the 100 metre butterfly. She was drawn in heat one, a heat containing four other athletes alongside Umurungi. Before the race she told The New Times, "I have been training for the whole year with my coach, though it has been difficult because it's not easy to study and do sport at the same time, I want to do my best". In the race on 6 August 2016, Umurungi swam a time of one minute and 11.92 seconds. Umurungi's time was the second slowest out of 44 finishing athletes, with Umurungi only quicker than Qatari Nada Arkaji, who swam approximately seven seconds slower than Umurungi. Umurungi's time was 13.17 seconds slower than the slowest athlete to progress to the next round and, therefore, she was eliminated.

References

External links

1996 births
Living people
Rwandan female swimmers
Olympic swimmers for Rwanda
Swimmers at the 2016 Summer Olympics
Place of birth missing (living people)

Johanna Umurungi


Cinnamtannin B1 is a condensed tannin found in Cinnamomum verum. It falls under the category of type A proanthocyanidin.

Cinnamon could potentially exhibit pharmacological effects in treating type 2 diabetes mellitus and insulin resistance. The plant material predominantly employed in the study was sourced from Chinese cinnamon (see Chinese cinnamon's medicinal uses). Recent phytochemical research has suggested that cinnamtannin B1, extracted from C. Verum, might have a potential therapeutic impact on type 2 diabetes, with the exception of postmenopausal patients studied using Cinnamomum aromaticum.

Cinnamtannin B1 possesses multiple phenolic hydroxyl groups and is noted for its antioxidant properties, antimicrobial activities, and ability to inhibit platelet aggregation, which could contribute to the protection of damaged tissues in wounds.

References

Procyanidins
Natural phenol trimers

Cinnamtannin B1


Nightstalkers is an American comic book series published by Marvel Comics from 1992 to 1994, featuring a trio of occult experts reluctantly banded together to fight supernatural threats. Operating under the business name Borderline Investigations, the team was composed of vampire hunters Blade and Frank Drake and private detective Hannibal King, all of whom had fought Count Dracula in the 1970s series The Tomb of Dracula. They are gathered by Doctor Strange in Nightstalkers #1 (November 1992) to battle an immediate threat, but under Strange's larger, hidden agenda.

The Nightstalkers appeared in Blade: Trinity.

Publication history
The team of vampire-hunters Blade and Frank Drake and vampiric private detective Hannibal King first reunited in Ghost Rider (vol. 3) #28 (cover dated August 1992). They subsequently starred in their own series, Nightstalkers, which ran 18 issues (November 1992–April 1994). It incorporated story threads from previous Marvel Comics supernatural series, primarily The Tomb of Dracula (April 1972–August 1979) where the three protagonists had first appeared.

The series' initial creative team was writer D. G. Chichester, penciller Ron Garney and inker Tom Palmer, reprising his role from The Tomb of Dracula. After 11 issues, Steven Grant took over scripting, with Frank Lovece wrapping up the fates of some of the 1970s series' characters in the last three issues. Artists included Mark Pacella, Kirk Van Wormer and Andrew Wildman.

Fictional team history
Before being formally gathered by Doctor Strange to fight supernatural threats, Hannibal King, Frank Drake, and Blade had founded the detective agency King, Drake, and Blade (later renamed Borderline Investigations).

After Strange manipulates the trio into forming the Nightstalkers, the team fights many emerging supernatural enemies. These include Lilith, Mother of All Demons; HYDRA's Department of Occult Armaments (DOA), led by Lt. Belial, and its renegade Dracula clone Bloodstorm; and the one-time Lord of Vampires, Varnae.

The Tomb of Dracula threads

In the final arc (#16–18, Feb.-April 1994), King's house, including Borderline's office, is destroyed by a HYDRA Dreadnought stealing Drake's anti-occult nanotech gun, the Exorcist. Doctor Strange reveals that the Montesi Formula, which had eradicated and prevented further vampires, was weakening. In response, he explains, he had gathered the three most experienced vampire-hunters so they could learn to function as a team before Dracula, the Lord of Vampires, returned. Since all three were traumatized by their early vampiric battles, Strange held off informing them of vampires' possible return until necessary.

In a final battle, Varnae, a previous Lord of Vampires who had already returned, takes psychic control of King and directs him to kill his comrades. King stakes himself instead. Drake attempts to sacrifice his own life to kill Varnae, engineering an Exorcist-powered explosion. Blade, in self-defense, has already staked Taj Nital, his old comrade from The Tomb of Dracula (who had been turned vampiric between the two series). Blade survives and attends his teammates' funeral but encounters King again in the subsequent series Blade. There he learns King's plunge into a metal pole (rather than silver or wood) had fortuitously not killed him and that he had escaped the explosion. King also informs Blade that Drake was left scarred and crippled in both body and mind.

In other media
A revised version of the Nightstalkers was depicted in the 2004 film Blade: Trinity starring Wesley Snipes as Blade, Jessica Biel as Abigail Whistler and Ryan Reynolds as Hannibal King. In the film, Blade was not a Nightstalker himself but allied with them, albeit reluctantly, as they were younger and, in his eyes, less experienced. In contrast to the more mature and reserved Hannibal King depicted in the comics, Reynolds' revision of the character was in keeping with his history of humorous, extroverted characters. Abigail Whistler was the leader of the group. Unlike in the comic, there were several lesser members who, being unsuited for physical action, stayed at headquarters in supporting roles.

References

External links
 The Unofficial Handbook of Marvel Comics Creators

Marvel Comics superhero teams
Marvel Comics titles
Blade (comics)
Midnight Sons

Nightstalkers (comics)


Francis Stanton Blake (born July 30, 1949) is an American businessman and lawyer, who was the chairman and CEO of The Home Depot from January 2007 to May 2014.  Prior to this he worked for the U.S. Department of Energy and General Electric. He was a longtime protégé of Robert Nardelli.

Education and family
Blake attended Brooks School in North Andover, Massachusetts, class of 1967. He received his bachelor's degree from Harvard University in 1971, and a Juris Doctor from Columbia Law School in 1976, where he served as the Editor-in-Chief of the Columbia Law Review.

In 1977, Blake married Anne McChristian with whom he had two children. In 2005, he married Elizabeth Lanier (Blake) who works as general counsel for Habitat for Humanity International.

Blake's son Frank Jr., who served in the 2003 Iraq War where he was a Bronze Star recipient, was previously a Home Depot store manager while Blake was CEO. Frank Jr. is now General Manager in the Atlanta region for Home Depot.

Legal career
From 1971 to 1973, Blake was a legislative assistant to the joint committee on Social Welfare of the Massachusetts legislature.  He was admitted to the District of Columbia bar in 1978.  He served as a law clerk to Judge Wilfred Feinberg and then to Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens. Blake also served as general counsel for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), deputy counsel to Vice President George H. W. Bush.

Management

From 1991 to 1995, he was the general counsel for General Electric. As senior vice president, Corporate Business Development, he led all business development efforts, including worldwide mergers, acquisitions, dispositions and identification of strategic growth opportunities. As GE Power Systems head of business development, he played a key role in expanding that business into new technology and global marketplaces. He also held the position of general counsel at GE Power Systems.

Blake then served as Deputy Secretary for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), a role similar to that of chief operating officer in the private sector. There, he was a leader in departmental policy decisions and managed DOE's annual $19 billion budget.

Blake joined the Home Depot in 2002 as executive vice president for Business Development and Corporate Operations, and vice chairman on the board of directors, reporting directly to chairman and CEO Robert Nardelli. His responsibilities include real estate, store construction and maintenance, credit services, strategic business development, special orders and service improvement, call centers and Installation Services Business.

In April 2004, Blake was elected to serve on the board of directors for Southern Company, a premier super-regional energy company based in Atlanta, Georgia.

On October 11, 2016, Blake was named non-executive chairman of Delta Air Lines.

CEO of Home Depot
After Nardelli resigned as chairman and CEO on January 3, 2007, amid controversy over the company's stagnating stock price, poor customer service and Nardelli's salary, Blake was elevated to these positions. Although a longtime deputy to Nardelli at GE and Home Depot, Blake has been said to lack Nardelli's hard edge and instead prefers to make decisions by consensus. Indeed, Blake repudiated many of his predecessor's strategies, and it has been reported that the two men have not spoken since Nardelli departed Home Depot.

Nardelli had pushed hard to make the company more efficient, instituting many metrics and centralizing operations, while cutting jobs to meet quarterly earnings targets.  While this initially doubled earnings and reduced expenses, it alienated many of the store managers and rank-and-file store associates, and by extension the customers, resulting in a drop in same-store sales which is a key metric that analysts used to gauge the company stock. Nardelli, who regarded home improvement store-by-store sales as less important due to market saturation from competition such as Lowe's, aimed to dominate the wholesale housing-supply business through building up HD Supply, a unit that Blake sold for $8.5 billion in August 2007 since it was not part of Home Depot's integrated business.

In comparison to Nardelli whose numbers-driven approach never appreciated the role of the store and its associates, Blake's strategy has revolved around reinvigorating the stores and its service culture (engaging employees, making products readily available and exciting to customers, improving the store environment, and dominating the professional contracting business, an area in which Home Depot's closest rivals trail far behind), as he recognized that employee morale is a more sensitive issue in retail compared to other industry sectors like manufacturing.
 Blake was given credit for returning to the "Orange Apron Cult — the nearly religious zeal for knowledgeable employees and high levels of customer service that was the secret of the company's original success", as he believed that customer service was the key to Home Depot to differentiate itself from competitors on aspects other than price.

Under Nardelli's tenure, Home Depot's stock performance lagged behind rival Lowe's, however this situation has been reversed under Blake.

On August 21, 2014, The Home Depot announced that Craig Menear, President of U.S. Retail for The Home Depot, would take over as president and CEO on November 1, 2014. Menear has also been elected to the Board of Directors, effective immediately.  Blake remained chairman until his retirement on February 2, 2015, with Menear taking the role.

Awards and honors
In 2019, Blake was named a Georgia Trustee by the Georgia Historical Society, in conjunction with the Office of the Governor of Georgia, to recognize accomplishments and community service that reflect the ideals of the founding body of Trustees, which governed the Georgia colony from 1732 to 1752.

See also
 List of law clerks of the Supreme Court of the United States (Seat 4)

References

 Who's Who in America 2008 Edition, p. 414

1949 births
Living people
American retail chief executives
Harvard University alumni
United States Deputy Secretaries of Energy
Law clerks of the Supreme Court of the United States
The Home Depot people
General Electric people
Columbia Law School alumni
Lawyers from Boston
Brooks School alumni
American chief executives of Fortune 500 companies
Businesspeople from Boston

Frank Blake


Karl Gerland (14 July 1905 – 21 April 1945) was a Nazi Gauleiter of Gau Kurhessen and Oberpräsident of the Prussian Province of Kurhessen. On 21 April 1945, Gerland was killed in action against the Soviet Red Army at Frankfurt (Oder).

Early years
Gerland was born in Gottsbüren (now a part of Trendelburg) near Kassel. He graduated from the gymnasium in Kassel in 1923 and then was employed as a mechanical engineer by the German National Railway. He pursued additional training in engineering at the University of Hanover until 1928 and then worked in various commercial and technical businesses.

Nazi career
Gerland joined the Nazi Party in December 1929 and became  Kreisleiter (County Leader) in Kreis Hofgeismar from September 1930 to January 1932. From January to July 1932, he was Beziksleiter (District Leader) in Fulda-Gersfeld-Hünfeld and Deputy Propaganda Leader of Gau Hesse-Nassau North. In July 1932, he advanced to Gau Propaganda Leader. After the Nazi seizure of power, he became head of the provincial office of the Reich Ministry of Propaganda from May to November 1934. He then worked as a department head in the office of Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess in the Party Reichsleitung (National Leadership) in Munich from November 1934 to November 1938. In March 1936, Gerland was elected to the Reichstag from electoral constituency 8, (Liegnitz). On 30 January 1938, he was awarded the Golden Party Badge. Gerland joined the SS on 16 March 1938 with the rank of Hauptsturmführer. From 1 June 1938 until 6 November 1943, he was Deputy Gauleiter in Reichsgau Lower Danube.

The war years
From May to September 1940, Gerland saw military service as an Unteroffizier of Reserves, and was wounded in the battle of France. On 9 November 1940, he was promoted to SS-Oberführer and assigned to the staff of the Reichsführer-SS. In November 1943, Gerland was promoted to SS-Brigadeführer and, on 6 November, he was appointed Gauleiter and Reich Defense Commissioner in Gau Kurhessen. He succeeded Karl Weinrich, who had been removed from these posts for abandoning the city of Kassel during an air raid on 22 October. Gerland served as acting Gauleiter from 6 November 1943 until being named permanent on 13 December 1944. From 1 July 1944 Gerland was also Oberpräsident (High President) of the newly formed Prussian Province of Kurhessen, which formerly had  been part of the Province of Hesse-Nassau. Gerland thus united under his control the highest party and governmental offices in the province. On 1 August 1944 Gerland was promoted to SS-Gruppenführer.

In the spring of 1945, with the American Army invading his Gau, he received high praise from Joseph Goebbels. In his diary entry of 2 April 1945, Goebbels noted that Gerland was conducting himself "superbly," adding, "I would have expected this from [him] anyway." When his capital, Kassel, fell to American forces on 4 April 1945, Gerland fled eastward and joined German forces fighting in Brandenburg. On 21 April, Gerland was killed near Frankfurt (Oder) during fighting on the Eastern Front.

References

Sources

External website

1905 births
1945 deaths
Gauleiters
Members of the Reichstag of Nazi Germany
Nazi propagandists
Military personnel from Hesse-Nassau
People from Kassel (district)
SS-Gruppenführer
German military personnel killed in World War II

Karl Gerland