St Stephen's House is an Anglican theological college in Oxford, England. From 2003 to 2023 it was a permanent private hall  of the University of Oxford.

The college typically matriculates a small number of undergraduate students (just 5 in the academic year 2022-23), but has graduate students in a number of fields including theology, Byzantine studies, education, and music. Between 2003 and 2023, roughly one quarter of the students were pursuing professional training as classroom teachers, and another quarter professional theological and ministerial training as priests, with the other half following a diverse range of studies and research, many remotely or on a flexible basis.

History

St Stephen's House was founded in 1876 by members of the Oxford Movement within the Church of England, and was originally located in the very centre of Oxford, on what is today the site of the New Bodleian Library. Its principal founder was Edward King, Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford and later Bishop of Lincoln.

In 1919 the college relocated to new buildings in Norham Gardens, near to the University Parks and Lady Margaret Hall. The college moved again in 1980, having outgrown its earlier buildings, and now occupies the former Anglican Monastery of the Society of St. John the Evangelist (Cowley Fathers).

The college was an "Associated Institution" of the University of Oxford, able to matriculate students in the fields of theology and philosophy, until 2003, when it became a permanent private hall of the university.

Buildings
The college is located in east Oxford, between the Iffley and Cowley Roads (to west and east) and James Street and Marston Street (to north and south), with entrances onto all these roads. Although there are some modern buildings, notably the Moberly Close residential accommodation building, most of the college buildings are older, and have listed status.

Grade I listing applies to the Church of St John the Evangelist, which is the principal college chapel, and an arts centre, as well as housing some teaching and research facilities in its sacristies and song school. Constructed in 1894–1896 to a design by George Frederick Bodley (1827–1907), it has held grade I listing since 1968. The castellated west tower was added in 1902. The east, west, and north-east windows contain stained glass designed by C. E. Kempe (1837–1907) and made in about 1900.
The Church also contains painted Stations of the Cross by the late Pre-Raphaelite artist, Edward Arthur Fellowes Prynne, created for the Cowley Fathers between 1918 and 1921.

Grade II listing was applied to the bulk of the college's other central buildings in 1992. This listing includes the college's main cloister built in 1899 to a design by Bodley, the three lesser cloisters, the Benson Building (residential and teaching accommodation built late nineteenth century, probably designed by Clapton Crabb Rolfe), the King Building (residential, teaching, and administrative accommodation, including the college refectory, the library, and the common room, also designed by Bodley), and the two smaller chapels – the Founders Chapel, and the Ninian Comper designed House Chapel.

St John's Church (and sometimes also the college cloisters) has been since 2012 the performance and display venue for SJE Arts Oxford, a society promoting performing arts and music, and which organises an annual summer choral festival at the college site.

The Song School, once the music department of SSJE, and later the residence of the college's vice principal, has since 2008 housed the  Centre for Muslim-Christian Studies, Oxford, an independent body whose senior teaching and research staff are mostly current or former members of the Faculty of Theology and Religion, University of Oxford.

Arms
In 2020, St Stephen's House was granted by the College of Arms the current arms Per chevron Gules and Sable in chief two Cross crosslets and in base a Celestial Crown Or and badge A Cross Crosslet Or surmounted by a closed Book Gules leaved Argent and charged with a key wards upwards Or. The badge is used on the college sports kit.

Prior to this, the college used the assumed arms Gules a Celestial Crown between three Bezants two and one Or, on a chief Sable an Apostolic Eagle between two Crosses crosslet Or.

Principals and fellows

Principals

The Head of House is known as the "principal." To date, every person to have held the office has been an ordained Anglican priest.
1876–1877 (res.): Robert Moberly
1877–1881: ?
1881–1884 (res.): John Octavius Johnston
1884–1885 (res.): Berkeley Randolph
1885–1888 (res.): Charles Myers
1888–1895 (res.): Hugh Currie
1895–1903 (res.): Charles Plumb
1903–1917 (res.): George Bown
1917–1919: ?
1919–1936 (res.): Gilbert Mitchell
1936–1962 (res.): Arthur Couratin
1962–1974 (res.): Derek Allen
1974–1982 (res.): David Hope
1982–1987 (res.): David Thomas
1987–1995 (res.): Edwin Barnes
1996–2006 (res.): Jeremy Sheehy
2006–present: Robin Ward

Honorary research fellows
Notable honorary research fellows have included:
Andrew Linzey, theologian, author and prominent figure in the Christian vegetarianism movement
James Whitbourn, conductor and composer
Luke Miller, Archdeacon of London
Norman Russell, former Archdeacon of Berkshire

Alumni

Many former students, in the tradition of the college, go on to minister in urban priority areas and parishes which suffer poverty and deprivation. The following are amongst the notable former students:
 Jonathan Baker –  Bishop of Fulham and the former Bishop of Ebbsfleet
 Norman Banks –  Honorary Chaplain to the Queen and Bishop of Richborough
 J. W. B. Barns – Professor of Egyptology at the University of Oxford
 Mark Bonney — Dean of Ely
 Andrew Burnham – former Bishop of Ebbsfleet and former vice principal
 Anthony Caesar – composer
 Alan Chesters – former Bishop of Blackburn
 David Conner –  Dean of Windsor (since 1998)
 Stephen Cottrell – Archbishop of York (since 2020)
 Ivor Gordon Davies – Archdeacon of Lewisham from 1972 to 1985.
 Roy Davies – Bishop of Llandaff from 1985 to 1999
 Hovnan Derderian – Primate of the Western Diocese of the Armenian Church of North America
 Mark Elvins – Roman Catholic priest and Warden of Greyfriars, Oxford
 Walter Hooper – literary advisor to the estate of CS Lewis
 William Howard, 8th Earl of Wicklow – Irish peer
 David Jasper – Professor of Literature and Theology at the University of Glasgow
 Jeffrey John – Dean of St Albans
 Eric Kemp – former Bishop of Chichester
 Peter Laister –  Rector of Saint Clement's Church, Philadelphia,  from 1986 to 1993
 Kenneth Leech – priest and Christian socialist
 Trevor Mwamba – Bishop of Botswana, appears as himself in The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency
 Philip North – Bishop of Burnley
 Mark Oakley – Canon Chancellor of St Paul's Cathedral, London
 Gordon Roe – former Bishop of Huntingdon
 John Saward –  theologian, fellow of Greyfriars, Oxford
 David Silk – former Bishop of Ballarat in the Anglican Church of Australia
 Glyn Simon – former Archbishop of Wales
 Michael Spence – vice-chancellor of the University of Sydney
 Tim Thornton – Bishop of Truro
 Stephen Venner – Bishop to the Forces and Bishop for the Falkland Islands
 Martin Warner – Bishop of Chichester
 William Gordon Wheeler –  former Roman Catholic Bishop of Leeds
 Colin Williams – General Secretary of the Conference of European Churches
 A. N. Wilson – writer and newspaper columnist, left after his first year

See also
 St John the Evangelist Church, Oxford

References

External links

 St Stephen's House website
 St John the Evangelist church website
 Virtual tour of St Stephen's House

1876 establishments in England
Permanent private halls of the University of Oxford
Anglo-Catholic educational establishments
Anglican seminaries and theological colleges
Bible colleges, seminaries and theological colleges in England
Buildings and structures of the University of Oxford
Anglican buildings and structures in Europe

St Stephen's House, Oxford


João Carlos de Medeiros Pardal Mallet (December 9, 1864 – November 24, 1894) was a Brazilian journalist and novelist. He is the patron of the 30th chair of the Brazilian Academy of Letters.

Life
Mallet was born in the city of Bagé, in Rio Grande do Sul, in 1864. His father was the General João Nepomuceno de Medeiros Mallet, and his grandfather was the French-born Marshal Émile Mallet. He was also of Portuguese and Irish descent.

From childhood, he had a strong affinity for literature. He also learned to speak English and French.

After completing his primary studies, he moved to Rio de Janeiro in order to study medicine at the Faculdade de Medicina da Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, but he would not finish the course, because his teacher, the Viscount of Saboia, threatened to expel him because of his Republican ideals. He then abandoned medicine to devote himself to literature and journalism.

He then moved to São Paulo, to study law at the Faculdade de Direito da Universidade de São Paulo, but finished his course in Recife, Pernambuco. There, when he was receiving his diploma, he refused to take an oath because of his Republican ideals. The situation was circumvented thanks to Joaquim Nabuco. During his stay in Pernambuco, he published his first books: Hóspede and Meu Álbum, both in 1887.

Returning to Rio de Janeiro, he befriended many famous writers at the time, such as Olavo Bilac, Raul Pompeia, Coelho Neto, Luís Murat, José do Patrocínio, Artur and Aluísio Azevedo, Émile Rouède and Francisco de Paula Ney.

In 1888, he became the editor in chief of José do Patrocínio's journal A Cidade do Rio. However, Mallet would leave the journal in the following year due to political differences. Also in 1889, he had an argument with Olavo Bilac, that ended in a duel. One of Mallet's ribs was injured, but he and Bilac would reconcile.

After the proclamation of the First Brazilian Republic, Mallet joined the Revolta da Armada, in opposition to then-President of Brazil Floriano Peixoto. He was then arrested and exiled in the city of Tabatinga, in Amazonas. After amnesty was given, he returned to Rio.

He contracted tuberculosis and moved to the city of Caxambu, in Minas Gerais, in order to mitigate the disease, unsuccessfully. He died on November 24, 1894.

Works
 Meu Álbum (short stories – 1887)
 Hóspede (novel – 1887)
 Lar (novel – 1888)
 A Pandilha (short stories – 1883)
 O Esqueleto (novel written in partnership with Olavo Bilac — 1890)
 Pelo Divórcio! (pamphlet – 1894)

External links

 Mallet's biography at the official site of the Brazilian Academy of Letters

1864 births
1894 deaths
Brazilian people of French descent
Brazilian people of Irish descent
Brazilian people of Portuguese descent
Brazilian journalists
People from Bagé
Patrons of the Brazilian Academy of Letters
19th-century deaths from tuberculosis
Tuberculosis deaths in Minas Gerais
19th-century journalists
Brazilian male journalists
19th-century Brazilian novelists
Brazilian male novelists
19th-century Brazilian male writers

Pardal Mallet


Arthur Moyle, Baron Moyle, CBE (25 September 1894 – 23 December 1974) was a British bricklayer, trade union official and politician. As a member of parliament for nineteen years, he was principally known for serving as Parliamentary Private Secretary to Clement Attlee during Attlee's Premiership. He was also perennially lucky in the ballot for Private Member's Bills.

Early work
Moyle was a native of Cornwall, the son of a stonemason. He grew up in Llanidloes, Montgomeryshire and went to the National School there. He learned the trade of a bricklayer, and worked in Wales and the Welsh Marches. He was active in trade union work and in 1918, he became Secretary of the Shrewsbury Building Trades Federation.

1924 election
From 1920 Moyle was promoted to be an official of the National Federation of Building Trade Operatives. He also became active in the Labour Party, and in the 1924 general election he was chosen as Labour Party candidate for Torquay. Moyle's intervention in what was a close fight between the Conservatives and Liberals, where Labour had not fought in the two previous elections, was met with annoyance on the part of the Liberal Party. In the end, the Liberals lost the seat by much more than the 2,752 votes which Moyle obtained.

Trade union work
After trade union mergers, Moyle became National Officer of the National Union of Public Employees, which made him responsible for local authority workers generally and not just those in construction. In the year 1937–38 Moyle was Chairman of the National Joint Council for Local Authorities Non-Trading Services. He was a spokesman of a delegation to the government to ask for pensions for manual workers as well as local government officers in 1937.

In May 1938 he joined a delegation pressing for a Whitley Council for nurses, to fix minimum salaries and maximum hours. During the Second World War, Moyle served on a departmental committee on Nurses' salaries under Lord Rushcliffe. Moyle was a member of the National Joint Council for Local Authorities Administrative Professional, Technical and Clerical Staffs, and in 1945 was chairman of the Trade Union Congress Local Advisory Committee.

Member of Parliament
Moyle had been adopted as Labour Parliamentary candidate for Stourbridge in January 1940, His chance to fight the seat had to be delayed during the war, but when the election came in 1945 he won the seat from the Conservatives with a majority of nearly 16,000. In Parliament he concentrated on local authority workers' issues, and in supporting the National Insurance Bill in February 1946, he spoke of his concern for the local authority staff who would find themselves redundant after the Bill became law. He called for adequate compensation to be paid.

Parliamentary Private Secretary
In May 1946, Moyle was appointed as Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, following Geoffrey de Freitas who had been given a ministerial post. The appointment gave Moyle a central role in managing relations between Attlee and government backbenchers, and almost silenced him in the chamber of the House of Commons. Attlee gave his PPS access to almost all important decisions, and respected Moyle's advice on the sometimes fractious Parliamentary Labour Party.

Private member's bills
After boundary changes, Moyle was elected for Oldbury and Halesowen in the 1950 general election. That November, he drew top place in the ballot for Private Member's Bills, and introduced a Bill to tighten up the licensing of fireworks. The Bill passed into law. Moyle continued to act as Attlee's Parliamentary Private Secretary when Labour went into opposition after the 1951 general election, and was appointed a Commander of Order of the British Empire (CBE) in Attlee's resignation honours list.

In July 1952 Moyle insisted that civil defence, even in the nuclear age, should not be made into a disciplined force, but instead find its own level of discipline as in the Second World War. In November 1953 he came top of the ballot for Private Member's Bills, and chose the subject of humane slaughter of horses. His Bill received government support and was also enacted. Later, in June 1957, Moyle was elected chairman of the International League for the Protection of Horses.

Air pollution
After Attlee retired as Leader of the Opposition, Moyle was allowed to range more widely in his contributions. He was particularly concerned about air pollution and complained that smokeless fuel was too expensive and slow to order; he advocated the nationalisation of the companies who made it to expand production. During the Suez crisis, Moyle stated that Britain had destroyed her moral authority by one action and lost the opportunity to criticise the Soviet Union for its action in Hungary. He wanted naval courts martial to be composed of petty officers and ratings as well as officers.

Third private member's bill
Moyle topped the ballot for Private Member's Bills for a third time in November 1957. This time he introduced a Bill to implement recommendations of a Royal Commission on the children of divorced people. As with his previous Bills, he secured government support and received Royal Assent. In 1957 and 1958, Moyle ran unsuccessfully for the Shadow Cabinet, although he polled poorly.

After the 1959 general election, Moyle found himself unable to play an active part in Parliament due to illness. His lack of participation was highlighted by the BBC television programme "That Was The Week That Was" in January 1963, which listed all 13 MPs who had not made a speech in the entire Parliament. He announced his retirement, and left the House at the 1964 general election.

Life peerage
In September 1965, Moyle wrote to The Times to urge that one cricket test match in each tour should be allocated to South Wales. In the Queen's Birthday honours list of 1966, he was given a life peerage, being created Baron Moyle, of Llanidloes in the County of Montgomery on 23 June 1966. On the death of Earl Attlee (as he had since become), Moyle was named as his literary executor. In March 1970 he spoke against making an application to join the European Communities, arguing that Britain should stand by the United States who had stood by Britain in two world wars and were continuing to do so.

Moyle married Elizabeth Evans from Llanidloes in 1921, but was widowed in 1949. Their son, Roland Moyle, was later a Labour Member of Parliament for Lewisham. He remarried in 1951 to Lena Bassett of Frant, Sussex.

References
M. Stenton and S. Lees, "Who's Who of British MPs" Vol. IV (Harvester Press, 1981)
W.D. Rubinstein, "The Biographical Dictionary of Life Peers" (St. Martin's Press, 1991)

External links

1894 births
1974 deaths
Labour Party (UK) MPs for English constituencies
Labour Party (UK) life peers
Commanders of the Order of the British Empire
UK MPs 1945–1950
UK MPs 1950–1951
UK MPs 1951–1955
UK MPs 1955–1959
UK MPs 1959–1964
UK MPs who were granted peerages
Life peers created by Elizabeth II
English trade unionists
Parliamentary Private Secretaries to the Prime Minister

Arthur Moyle, Baron Moyle


Averroës (also known as Ibn Rušd or Ibn Rushd; 14 April 1126 – 10 December 1198) was a Muslim polymath from Al-Andalus. He was a scholar of Greek and Islamic philosophy. He also studied Islamic theology, law, politics, classical music, and the sciences of medicine, psychology, physics, astronomy, geography and mathematics.

Averroes was born in Córdoba, Al-Andalus. He lived during a unique period in academic history. Interest in philosophy and theology was failing in the Muslim world but just beginning to become influential in Christian Europe. Averroes himself was influenced by the ideas of Aristotle. His philosophy was often criticised by fellow Muslims. He had a larger influence on Western European society. He has been described as the founder of secular thought in Western Europe.

Averroes is most famous for his commentaries of Aristotle's works. Aristotle had been mostly forgotten in the West since the 6th century. Averroes' interpretations of Aristotle's ideas revived Western scholarly interest in Aristotle and ancient Greek philosophy in general. They also led to the development of scholasticism in medieval Europe.

Averroes's life

Averroes was born as ʾSan sebastián De La Cruz ʾAḥmad bin Rušd. He was born in 1126 in Andalusia, which at the time was a Muslim country called Al-Andalus. At a young age Averroes had many teachers who helped him begin his study of Islam. He excelled in this and was also interested in law. He began studying medicine in Seville under a man named Abu Jafar al-Turjali.

Averroes began his career with the help of Ibn Tufail, a physician at the caliph's court in Marrakesh. He was able to go to Marrakesh and become a physician because of his knowledge of physics. Averroes was granted many honors and became a Qadi (judge) in Seville in 1169.

Two years later he became the Qadi of Córdoba. In his free time he studied and wrote. In 1195, Averroes wrote a paper about how he thought philosophy was less than useful for the discovery of religious truth. He was disgraced and many of his papers were burned. The Caliph imprisoned Averroes and exiled him from the country. He lived in Lucena for a short time, then he was brought back by the Caliph to be a judge. He died in 1198.

References

Other websites

1126 births
1198 deaths
Arab people
Astronomers
Andalusian Muslims
12th-century philosophers
People from Córdoba, Andalusia
Polymaths

Averroes


The Unduyamo (Andooyomo) were an indigenous Australian people who once lived around the northern shore of Newcastle Bay, Cape York Peninsula Queensland. It has been hypothesized that, among other aspects of their life, they functioned as religious specialists for Torres Strait Islanders, whose mastery of increase rituals attracted the native mariners from the north.
Together with the Gudang, who apparently spoke the same language and whose territory ran from Cape York to Fly Point opposite Pabaju (Albany Island), the Unduyamo had strong cultural, kin and trade ties with the Kaurareg, the southwestern islanders centered on Muralag, with whom they enjoyed an alliance that permitted reciprocal residence on each other's territory. All three groups regarded the Yadhaigana and Gumakudin as hostile.

Archaeology has uncovered a dense network of ritual sites consisting of stone rings and turtle mounds in various forms located on rocky headlands jutting forth towards Torres Strait which are thought to have functioned as sentinels or 'approach points' for travellers from the north, in the areas associated with the Gudang and Unduyamo peoples. According to Greer, McIntyre-Tamwoy and Henry these stoneworks were raised by ritual specialists among these northern Cape tribes for ceremonial purposes associated with initiation rites and increase magic, for example to ensure the reproduction of maritime species prized by hunters, such as the dugong.

Notes and references

Notes

References

Archaeology of Australia
Indigenous peoples of Australia
Prehistory of Oceania

Unduyamo


Lubanki, also known as Labanki, is a extinct Indo-Aryan language spoken by the Lubanas tribal grouping in the Republic of India and Pakistan. It is classified as a form or dialect of Punjabi. Lubanki has been spoken in the Rajasthan and Gujarat areas and some areas of Pakistan. The Punjabi word tanda is allegedly of Lubanki origin and means a town. The dialect is almost extinct. With the loss of the language's prestige and status, most Lubanas now speak other forms of Punjabi as their primary language.

When Guru Tegh Bahadur Was discovered by Baba Makhan Shah Labana, Makhan Shah climbed on top a village roof and started shouting the famous line Guru ladho rae "The Guru has been found", which is alleged to be in Lubanki dialect.

Languages of Pakistan
Punjabi language

Lubanki dialect


Craigtoun () is a residential suburb in the soothwast o the Scots ceety o Glesga. It borders Bellahouston Pairk, Cardonald an Gouan. It haes a primar schuil, Craigton Primary School, a smaw industrial estate an a nummer o shops linin Paisley Road West.  Craigton Cemetery is immediately tae the wast o Craigton an wis opened in 1873.

Gouan

Craigtoun, Glesga


Mary D. Watkins (born 1939, Denver, Colorado) is an American composer and pianist in jazz and  classical music.

Watkins graduated from Howard University in 1972 and began performing in jazz ensembles in Washington, D.C. shortly after. Watkins released several full-length albums and composed commissioned works for jazz ensembles, including a score for the play Lady Lester Sings the Blues and a jazz version of The Nutcracker ballet.

Discography
 Something Moving (Olivia, 1978)
 Winds of Change (Palo Alto, 1981)
 Spirit Song (Redwood, 1985)
 The Soul Kings (Wenefil, 1992)
 Touch Heal & Deliver (DDS, 1995)
 Watkins' Five Movements in Color and Wilson's Of Visions and Truth: A Song Cycle, performed by the New Black Music Repertory Ensemble. (Center for Black Music Research, and Albany Records, 2010)

References

American women composers
African-American women composers
African-American composers
20th-century American composers
Songwriters from Colorado
Musicians from Colorado
1939 births
Living people
20th-century American women pianists
20th-century American pianists
21st-century American women pianists
21st-century American pianists
20th-century women composers
Howard University alumni
African-American songwriters
African-American pianists
African-American women musicians
20th-century African-American women
20th-century African-American musicians
21st-century African-American women
21st-century African-American musicians

Mary Watkins


Capital punishment in Slovakia () was abolished in 1990 and the most severe punishment permissible by law is life imprisonment. Before that, capital punishment was common in Czechoslovakia, the Slovak State, Austria-Hungary, the Kingdom of Hungary and probably all previous political entities that existed in the area of today's Slovakia. Since 1989, no one has been executed in Slovakia save for a few controversial political killings by the Slovak Secret Service in the 1990s. Since then, there have been no reports of the government or its agents committing arbitrary or unlawful killings.

The last person executed in Slovakia remains Štefan Svitek (28) from Podbrezová who killed his wife and two daughters with an axe in 1987 and  was executed on June 8, 1989 in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia (at that time).

Public opinion
A 2005 poll carried out by the MVK agency for the SME daily showed that 61.7 percent of respondents were in favour of reintroducing capital punishment.

References

See also
 Life imprisonment in Slovakia

Slovak Republic
Law of Slovakia
Death in Slovakia
Human rights abuses in Slovakia

Capital punishment in Slovakia


Plungington is a district of Preston, Lancashire, England, to the northwest of the city centre. Historically, it was an area of working-class terraced housing dating from the late 1880s. Parts of the area particularly to the south closer to the city centre have now become home to many students from the University of Central Lancashire.

Plungington Road, which changes its name beyond Aqueduct Street to Adelphi Street, also crosses the main Preston-Blackpool road, the A5085.

Geography of Preston

Plungington


A smart ring is a compact wearable electronic device that combines mobile technology with features for convenient on-the-go use. These devices, typically designed to fit on a finger like a traditional ring, offer functionalities like mobile payments, access control, gesture control, and activity tracking. Smart rings can connect to smartphones or other devices, and some can operate independently, communicating with cloud-based systems or performing standalone tasks. While lacking traditional displays, they respond to contextual cues, such as proximity to payment terminals or specific gestures.

In 2013, the British company McLear, co-founded by John McLear, Chris Leach, and Joe Prencipe, introduced the first commercially available smart ring. Today, a multitude of companies produce smart rings for various use cases, expanding the options available to consumers.

Use

A prominent feature of smart rings is their ability to function as near-field communication devices, providing an alternative to carrying traditional items such as credit cards, door keys, car keys, and potentially even ID cards or driver's licenses. Additionally, these rings can connect to smartphones, serving as notification devices for incoming calls, text messages, emails, and other alerts. They can also act as gesture-based controllers, enabling users to perform various actions with simple hand motions. Furthermore, smart rings offer the capability to track health-related metrics, including steps taken, distance travelled, sleep patterns, heart rate, and calorie consumption.

Security

Secure access control such as for company entry and exit, home access, cars, and electronic devices was the first use of smart rings. Smart rings change the status quo for secure access control by increasing ease of use, decreasing physical security flaws such as by ease of losing the device, and by adding two-factor authentication mechanisms including biometrics and key code entry.

Payments and ticketing

Smart rings can perform payments and metro ticketing similar to contactless cards, smart cards, and mobile phones. Security of the transaction is equal to or greater than contactless cards. The first smart ring to be created with contactless payments was the NFC Payment Ring, which was mass produced and unveiled at the Olympics Summer Games at Rio de Janeiro in August 2016.

Activity
Similar to smartwatches, smart rings utilise in-built sensors to provide activity and wellness tracking. For example, step and heart beat tracking, temperature and sleep tracking (through measuring heart beats and movements) and blood flow. The smart ring form factor contains enough space to contain the same components as smartwatches. However, due to size constraints, smaller components are typically used in current smart ring products in the market, such as smaller and less accurate accelerometers, and smaller batteries leading to lower battery life than smartwatches.

Communications
Through the use of a small microphone, or bone conduction, some smart rings can allow the wearer to make phone calls while paired with a compatible mobile phone. Smart rings are also able to notify the wearer of incoming calls and messages, by means of vibrating or lighting up.

Additionally, some smart rings allow the wearer to see and feel real-time heartbeat of the 2nd smart ring wearer, where the heartbeat is displayed on the ring similarly by means of lighting up and vibrations. Such smart rings require connection to a smartphone with active data or Wi-Fi connection to allow the transfer of data between two smart rings. The idea behind such function is to advance on a premise known as vena amoris and serve as a digital alternative to classic wedding or engagement rings.

Social

Smart rings provide social feedback to users and can be used to engage in the user's environment in a way that other wearables and mobile devices do not permit. Some smart rings provide notifications (e.g. lights or vibrations) to notify the user when they receive a text message, phone call, or other notification. This enables the user to be aware of the notification without having to constantly check their smartphone.

See also
 Smartwatch
 Wearable computer
 Personal organizer
 Near-field communication
 Oura Health
 Ultrahuman
 Circular

References

Mobile computers
Human–computer interaction
Ubiquitous computing
Wearable computers
Wearable devices
Rings (jewellery)

Smart ring


Mahmoud Asgari (), and Ayaz Marhoni (), were Iranian teenagers from the province of Khorasan who were publicly hanged on July 19, 2005. They were executed after being convicted of having raped a 13-year-old boy. The case attracted international media attention and the facts of the case are heavily debated.

Execution
Mahmoud Asgari and Ayaz Marhoni were executed on July 19, 2005, in Edalat (Justice) Square in Mashhad, northeast Iran, after being convicted by the court of having raped a 13-year-old boy. The case attracted international media attention and the facts of the case are heavily debated.

Shari'a (Islamic Law) in Shiite Iran prescribes the death penalty for homosexual acts but it requires four eyewitnesses to the event, but the Convention on the Rights of the Child, of which Iran is a signatory, forbids the execution of juveniles. According to Asgari's lawyer, Rohollah Razaz Zadeh, "death sentences handed to children by Iranian courts are supposed to be commuted to five years in jail", but the Supreme Court in Tehran upheld the death sentence. The ages of the two remain unclear, with some sources claiming they were fourteen and sixteen at the time of their arrests and sixteen and eighteen when executed, and others claiming that the older boy, Marhoni, was already nineteen, when the alleged crime(s) took place.

Media reports and international reactions
On July 19, 2005, the Iranian Students' News Agency (ISNA) posted an article in Persian describing the execution of the two youths. Its headline stated that they had been executed for "lavat beh onf", which means "sodomy/homosexual sex by force" and is a legal term used for rape of men by men. Earlier on the morning of the executions, Quds, the local daily newspaper in Mashhad, published a report on the executions. It gave a detailed account of how the two had raped a 13-year-old boy, and included statements by the father of the rape victim.

The ISNA article became the center of the dispute. The gay-rights group, OutRage!, led by Peter Tatchell, published its own free translation of the article on July 21, suggesting that the two had been executed for engaging in consensual homosexual sex.

Two news sources heavily involved in Iranian exile politics had meanwhile contributed to the spread of the story in English. On July 20, 2005, an Iranian opposition group, the National Council of Resistance, the political wing of the People's Mojahedin, released a press release about the executions. It stated that: "The victims were charged with disrupting public order among other things." It did not mention the charges of rape. Iran Focus, a news website that is widely regarded as an affiliate of the People's Mojahedin, also published an article about the hangings, mentioning no charges at all.

On July 22, 2005, Amnesty International issued a news release saying:

"According to reports, they were convicted of sexual assault on a 13-year-old boy and had been detained 14 months ago. Prior to their execution, the two were also given 228 lashes each for drinking, disturbing the peace and theft."

On July 27, 2005, after researching reports on the hangings, Human Rights Watch released letters to Iran's president and the head of the judiciary. In writing to the Iranian leadership, Human Rights Watch condemned the use of the death penalty in Iran. It stated that the two "were put to death on July 19 after they were found guilty of sexually assaulting a thirteen-year-old boy some fourteen months earlier," but did not address whether those charges were accurate. Its public statement noted:

"Death is an inhumane punishment, particularly for someone under eighteen at the time of his crimes," said Hadi Ghaemi, Iran researcher for Human Rights Watch. "All but a handful of countries forbid such executions. Iran should as well."

In Tehran, Nobel Peace laureate Shirin Ebadi decried the imposition of the death penalty on minors but did not comment on the nature of the charges in this case.

The first reports in the Iranian media had all identified the hangings as the result of a rape conviction. However, these reports only came to light after later English-language accounts had suggested the two might have been killed for being gay. This made it appear plausible to some that the rape charges might have been simply a "cover story" put out later by the Iranian government—even though the story of rape had actually been the first one told. Several bloggers promoted the story heavily and gave wide coverage to the pictures of the hanging. U.S. blogger Doug Ireland referred to the charges of rape as "the Iranian government's story."

The hangings quickly became a political issue in disputes over U.S. and European policy toward Iran. The conservative U.S. commentator Andrew Sullivan posted the photographs in an entry on his blog called "Islamists versus Gays." Seeing the hangings as a reason gay people should support U.S. military action, he quoted a gay U.S. soldier who wrote him that:

 "Your post on the Islamo-fascist hanging/murder of the two gay men confirmed for me that my recent decision to join the U.S. military was correct. I have to stuff myself back in the closet – something I thought I left a decade ago – but our war on terror trumps my personal comfort at this point. Whenever my friends and family criticize – I'll show 'em that link."

The Log Cabin Republicans, a conservative U.S. gay group, issued a statement reading, "In the wake of news stories and photographs documenting the hanging of two gay Iranian teenagers, Log Cabin Republicans re-affirm their commitment to the global war on terror."

Reason for prosecution
The British group OutRage! alleged that the two had been executed for engaging in consensual homosexual sex. However, some human rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch and the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, have urged observers to refrain from casting the incident as a "gay" issue, and cast doubt on the claim that Marhoni and Asgari were hanged as a result of consensual acts. They have emphasized instead that the executions are a violation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (Iran is a signatory to both), which prohibit the execution of minors.

OutRage! stated that "the allegation of sexual assault may either be a trumped up charge to undermine public sympathy for the youths, a frequent tactic by the Islamist regime in Iran" or that "it may be that the 13 year old was a willing participant, but that Iranian law (like UK law) deems that no person of that age is capable of sexual consent and that therefore any sexual contact is automatically deemed in law to be a sex assault."

OutRage! also questioned why the 13-year-old was not identified and also put on trial if he had been sexually assaulted. The two were believed to have been juveniles at the time of the offense, and one is believed to have been a juvenile at the time of his execution. Iran frequently executes people for offenses committed as children, a practice condemned by international human rights treaties.

The facts of the case are still subject to heated debate. The British activist Peter Tatchell has accused activists who have suggested the two were charged with rape of being "Western left-wing and Islamist apologists" of the "Iranian regime." Some of the reports that were first used to discredit the rape charges originated with an Iranian dissident group accused of serious human-rights violations, one that is classified as a terrorist organization by the United States and Iran (the National Council of Resistance of Iran).

Controversy
Within weeks of the hangings, both reporters and human rights organizations—while continuing to condemn the brutality of the hangings—began to produce more nuanced accounts. The U.S. periodical The Nation published a lengthy investigation of the story. It criticized the role of Peter Tatchell and OutRage! in spreading the belief the executed youths were gay before it had examined the evidence. The article concluded that, given Tatchell's "recent statements, it seems likely that his ideological disposition caused him to look past or dismiss information that cast doubt on the 'gay teenagers' story."

Faisal Alam, founder of the lesbian and gay Muslim group Al-Fatiha Foundation, published an opinion piece claiming that:
"Very few people took the time to research the details of the case or even consult with experts who deal with such news on a daily basis. In fact it was almost a week later that we began to read more accurate accounts of why the teens were executed from international human rights groups including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission – all of whom have contacts in Iran and ways to confirm news of such incidents from independent sources. While no one will ever know why these two young men were executed in Iran, what remains clear is that the hysteria surrounding the executions was enormous and only fed to the growing Islamaphobia and hatred towards Muslims and the Islamic world."

OutRage! and Peter Tatchell continued to defend their claim that the two victims were hanged because they were lovers. It accused them of being "apologists" and of giving the "Iranian government the benefit of the doubt." Other gay and human rights groups that had researched the case had condemned the killings as gross rights violations. Nonetheless, Brett Lock of OutRage! wrote that those groups "showed little concern" about human rights violations in Iran:

"OutRage! is appalled that large sections of liberal and left opinion in the West shows little concern regarding the murderous brutality of the clerical fascist regime in Tehran. We deplore the gullibility of many gay, left and human rights groups concerning the abuse of LGBT human rights in Iran.... They have long swallowed Iran's homophobic propaganda."

Tatchell accused those who disagreed with him over the case of "racism." OutRage! cited the case to "urge the international community to treat Iran as a pariah state." Tatchell stated, "There  can  be  no  normal relations with an abnormal regime".

OutRage! and blogger Doug Ireland cited sources inside Iran to support their continuing assertion that Mahmoud Asgari and Ayaz Marhoni were hanged solely for being gay. Their source is Somalia-born activist Afdhere Jama, who lives in San Francisco in the U.S. According to OutRage!, Jama has told them that he has spoken to three people from Mashhad who maintain that Mahmoud Asgari, Ayaz Marhoni, and five other friends were originally accused of committing consensual homosexual acts on each other.

Scott Long of Human Rights Watch noted in 2006 that Afdhere Jama's sources "have refused to speak to anyone else, including human rights investigators," and that allegations of a huge crackdown against gay people in Iran based on their evidence are third-hand at best. Long also criticised Doug Ireland for "deeply irresponsible" reporting by accepting second-hand claims from Iranian exile groups without confirmation. Long wrote:

A few Iranian exile groups saw a new audience in Western gays. They began reporting multiple executions in Iran as gay-related... After four men were hanged for unspecified "sexual offenses" in Iran, Ireland found verbal similarity in the reporting enough to "strongly suggest" that they were hanged for homosexuality. The men were hanged for heterosexual rape – two for the rape of girls aged 8 and 10. When I made this clear to Ireland, he never qualified his earlier claim.

In addition to Human Rights Watch, Paula Ettelbrick, executive director of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, has also said "It was not a gay case." Ettelbrick has also said she was also disturbed by the charged language used by some gay rights groups to condemn the execution, pointing  to Peter Tatchell's statement, "This is just the latest barbarity by the Islamo-fascists in Iran."

Aftermath
Both Sweden and The Netherlands responded to the stories around the Mashhad executions by announcing that they would immediately halt extraditions of LGBT asylum claimants to Iran. The Dutch government also announced that its Ministry of Foreign Affairs would investigate the treatment of gays and lesbians in the country. Civil rights groups in the U.S., United Kingdom and Russia have also called for similar policies.

In March 2006 Dutch Immigration Minister Rita Verdonk proposed an end to a moratorium on deporting gay asylum-seekers to Iran, stating that it was now clear "that there is no question of executions or death sentences based solely on the fact that a defendant is gay", adding that homosexuality was never the primary charge against people. Under parliamentary pressure, and based on evidence from groups including Human Rights Watch that torture of gays in Iran remained endemic, she was forced to extend the moratorium on deportation for a further six months. In late 2006, also due to lobbying from groups including Human Rights Watch, the Netherlands instituted a new policy of removing the burden of proof from Iranian LGBT refugee claimants.

Scott Long of Human Rights Watch has written that "lesbian and gay Iranians are not abstractions, sheltered from politics—or missiles. Their lives should not be reduced to the agendas of well-meaning strangers in the West." He added, criticizing allegations he considered unsupported, that "If we want to challenge Iran's government, we need facts. There is enough proof of torture and repression that we can do without claims of 'pogroms.'"

In 2006, the one-year anniversary of the hangings in Mashhad was designated an International Day of Action Against Homophobic Persecution in Iran by OutRage!, with vigils planned for Amsterdam, Berlin, Brussels, Chicago, Fort Lauderdale, Frankfurt, London, Marseille, Mexico City, Moscow, New York, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, Stockholm, Toronto, Vancouver, Vienna, Warsaw, Washington, D.C., and other cities and with hearings planned in the British House of Commons.  These demonstrations saw a renewal of controversy over whether the claims made about the case by OutRage! had any basis in fact.

The New York Times reported that ISNA, the student news agency, carried photographs of the execution. The Washington Post reported that photographs of the hangings were carried by protestors at rallies and demonstrations at over two dozen events worldwide.

Cultural references
 The album Fundamental by the British musical group Pet Shop Boys is "Dedicated to Mahmoud Asgari and Ayaz Marhoni".
 R. Timothy Brady composed an opera, Edalat Square, based on this act. The opera won the 2008 Opera Vista Festival, and was performed at the 2009 Opera Vista Festival in Houston, TX, and was conducted by Viswa Subbaraman.
 Jay Paul Deratany wrote the play Haram Iran about the trial and executions of Ayaz Marhoni and Mahmoud Asgari; it was first performed by the Athenaeum Theatre in Chicago.

Use of the execution photograph
A photograph of the teens' execution has been used for various purposes: Dutch right-wing political figure Geert Wilders used it in his short film Fitna as a warning of what would happen to gays in a dystopian future in which Muslims rule the Netherlands, and it has been misrepresented in social media as Palestinians rather than Iranians hanging homosexuals.

Former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was shown the photograph during a 2008 interview and was asked if he thought "gay men and lesbians should die in Iran?" Ahmadinejad answered: "No, there is no law for their execution in Iran. Either they were drug traffickers or they had killed someone else. Those who kill someone else or engage in acts of rape could be punished by execution. Otherwise, homosexuals are not even known who they are to be hung. So, we don't have executions of homosexuals."

In the United States, black-and-white reproductions of the photographs were brought by protesters to a rally in Dupont Circle, and the images were also used in at least 26 other protests in countries around the world, according to those who organized them. Before they closed, the pictures had also been put on display in the windows of Lambda Rising, an LGBT bookstore in Washington, D.C.

Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi, an Iranian known for her human rights work, and the founder of Defenders of Human Rights Center protested against the execution of minors. Philip Kennicott, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, wrote in The Washington Post that "perhaps the saddest thing about these pictures is that no major news organization outside Iran has tracked down what really happened. The final indignity of these boys' short lives was that they didn't matter enough to spark a serious investigation."

See also
 Judicial system of Iran
 LGBT in Islam
 LGBT rights in Iran

References

Footnotes

Further reading
 Iran Human Rights
 Scott Long, "Debating Iran
 Iran Executes Two – What Was Their Crime?
 IranAffairs.com: Iran Gays Executed?
 "Shocking new photo released in hanging of Iran gay teens" – Direland
 Full account of case with detailed information on both Asgari and Marhoni
 Peter Tatchell editorial on executions, with evidence from Afdhere Jama
 Interview to Wajahat Ali Abbasi, director of "SIN", a movie inspired by this story

1980s births
2000s missing person cases
2005 deaths
21st-century executions by Iran
Criminal duos
Executed Iranian people
Formerly missing people
Incidents of violence against boys
Kidnappings in Iran
Missing person cases in Iran
People executed by Iran by hanging
People executed for rape
People executed for sodomy
Rape in Iran
Same-sex couples
Violence against gay men
Violence against LGBT people in Asia
Violence against men in Asia
Rape of males

Mahmoud Asgari and Ayaz Marhoni


Orthoretrovirinae is a subfamily of viruses belonging to Retroviridae, a family of enveloped viruses that replicate in a host cell through the process of reverse transcription. The subfamily currently includes six genera, of which Lentivirus contains the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). These viruses cause a variety of tumors, malignancies and immune deficiency disease in humans, other mammals and birds.  A few, like Simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), apparently cause no disease in their natural hosts.

References

Retroviridae
Virus subfamilies

Orthoretrovirinae


Wang Tiantian (; born February 14, 1986, in Tianjin, China)

Wang's first major competition was at the 2003 Asian Championship. She won the vault finals as well a silver medal on floor exercise. Her success at Asian Championship gave her the chance to compete at the 2003 World Championships where she placed 4th with her team. In 2004 Wang became China's National All Around Champion and Triple Silver Medalist during Event Finals (vault, uneven bars and floor). She competed at the 2004 Summer Olympics and the 2004 World Cup Final. In the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens she qualified for the Vault finals and the Individual All-Around. She had a weak showing in these Olympics. In the team final she fell on floor exercise (underrotating her triple twist in her final pass and putting her hands down) and scored an 8.637. She fell on her beam dismount in the Individual AA competition and scored an 8.725 (she ended up 13th that night). She then fell on her first Vault in the event finals and averaged a 9.081 (ranking 7th). She did not win any medals in either the Olympics or the World Cup. Before the World Cup Finals, Wang had some success at the 2004 Trophee Massilia Cup, where she won five medals (2 gold, 1 silver, 2 bronze). In 2005, she won bronze medals on vault at the 2005 National Championships and at the 2005 Cottbus Cup.

In October, 2005, Wang Tiantian competed at the National Games, but a nagging foot injury hampered her performance.  The injury kept her out of the East Asia Games several weeks later and eventually required surgery at the end of 2005.

As of January 2006, she was still recovering from the injury but had rejoined the National Team in Beijing.

External links

1986 births
Living people
Chinese female artistic gymnasts
Gymnasts at the 2004 Summer Olympics
Gymnasts from Tianjin
Universiade medalists in gymnastics
FISU World University Games gold medalists for China
Olympic gymnasts for China

Wang Tiantian


Benedict Kisdy (, ) (c. 1598 – 22 June 1660) was a Hungarian Roman Catholic bishop in the 17th century. He was the founder of the Royal University (Universitas Cassoviensis) in present-day Košice and the Bishop of Eger.

Biography
From 1596 to 1700, Kassa, Kingdom of Hungary (today: Košice, Slovakia) was the seat of the bishops of Eger. It was during this time, from 1648 until 1660, that Benedict was bishop.

On 26 February 1657, he founded an academy in Košice, the first of its kind in the city. He went on to present it with 40,000 tallers. He placed it under the teaching administration of the Jesuits. The academy became a university with promulgation of a bull on 6 August 1660 by the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I. In 1777, the university was removed from Jesuit administration and became a Royal University.

He is buried in the Franciscan seminary church in Košice.

Legacy
On 6 April 1979, Pope John Paul II made an address to a group of Hungarian bishops, priests and congregation members. At the start of the speech he mentioned the work of the Hungarian College and the alumni of that college, stating, "I do not want to pass over in silence the figure of Benedict Kisdy, whose admirable hymns still ring out in your churches."

Gallery

See also

 Košice
 Church of the Holy Trinity, Košice

References

Bishops of Eger
17th-century Roman Catholic bishops in Hungary
1590s births
1660 deaths
Clergy from Košice

Benedict Kisdy


A Tale of Two Cities is a book written by Charles Dickens. It was published (printed) in 1859. It is set during the time of the French Revolution (1775-1793). The story happens in France and England. It talks about the French Revolution and the troubles the poor go through and how the rich ignore them. The main characters are Sydney Carton, Charles Darnay and their love interest, Lucie Manette. The story's main theme is society.

Other websites

1859 books
Books by Charles Dickens
English novels

A Tale of Two Cities


The gods (UK English), or sometimes paradise, is a theatrical term referring to the highest areas of a theatre such as the upper balconies. These are generally the cheapest seats; the moniker may have come from the ornately painted ceilings in older venues, often based on mythological themes. Similarly those seated so high up look down upon both the performers and the occupants of more expensive seats, akin to the Greek pantheon looking down from Mount Olympus upon the lives of mortals.

There are references to the "gods" in many plays and films, among them the famous French film Les Enfants du Paradis (or Children of Paradise in its US release), described as "set in the teeming theatre district of 1840s Paris (the "boulevard du crime"), the paradise of the film's title is a reference to "the gods", the highest, cheapest seats in the theatre, occupied by the poorest of the poor. As the well-known 1930s-and-later screenwriter Jacques Prévert said when asked about the meaning of the title, "it refers to the actors ... and the audiences too, the good-natured, working-class audience".

See also

 Bleachers
 Box (theatre)
 Nosebleed seats
 Peanut gallery

References

Theatre

The gods (theatrical)


James Joseph Sorgi Jr. (born December 3, 1980) is a former American football quarterback. He played college football at the University of Wisconsin and was drafted by the Indianapolis Colts in the sixth round of the 2004 NFL Draft. Sorgi served as the backup to Peyton Manning for several years, and won a ring when the Colts won Super Bowl XLI against the Chicago Bears. Once he was released by the Colts, he signed with the New York Giants as the backup to Eli Manning, but was injured in a preseason game, and was placed on IR.

Early years
Sorgi attended Fraser High School in Fraser, Michigan and was a letterwinner in football, basketball, and baseball. In football, he was the two-time Team Most Valuable Player, and as a senior, he garnered All-League honors, All-County honors, and All-State honors, and was a USA Today Honorable Mention All-USA selection. In baseball, he posted a batting average of .450 as a senior.

College career
Sorgi played college football for the Wisconsin Badgers.  Sorgi was Wisconsin's career pass efficiency leader (141.2), co-holder of most passing touchdowns in one game (five) and sixth in career passing yards in Wisconsin history.

In an incident on October 11, 2003 referred to as the Reynolds–Sorgi incident, Ohio State linebacker Robert Reynolds intentionally choked Sorgi, injuring Sorgi's trachea, after the play had been whistled dead. Sorgi was unable to play for the remainder of the game, struggling to breathe and unable to speak.  On October 28, 2011, Reynolds made a public apology for the incident, citing his wife and four children as the reason he wanted to clear his reputation and be accountable for his actions. Reynolds also stated that he and Sorgi had made amends years prior to the interview.

2000: 45/67 for 592 yards with 6 touchdowns vs 1 interception.
2001: 64/132 for 1,096 yards with 9 touchdowns vs 8 interception.  30 carries for 34 yards and 2 touchdowns.
2002: 38/70 for 536 yards with 1 touchdown vs 2 interception.
2003: 140/248 for 2,251 yards with 17 touchdown vs 9 interception.

Professional career

Indianapolis Colts
Sorgi was drafted in the sixth round in the 2004 NFL Draft by the Indianapolis Colts.  While there, Sorgi proved to be an adequate back-up to starting quarterback Peyton Manning.  In his first season, Sorgi played against the Denver Broncos, throwing for 175 yards and 2 touchdowns.  That was his only appearance that season.  In the 2005 NFL season, he gained slightly more playing time, and completed 42 of 61 attempts for 444 yards.  The bulk of his playing time in 2005 came against the Seattle Seahawks at the end of the regular season.

In the 2008 season, he did not take the field until the final regular season game.  He had a majority of the playing time in the 2008 preseason, as Manning was recovering from knee surgery. As of the end of the 2008 regular season, he had six career touchdown passes and one interception.  On December 9, 2009, Sorgi was placed on injured reserve due to a torn labrum in his right shoulder.  Sorgi was released by Indianapolis on March 5, 2010.

New York Giants
Sorgi signed with the New York Giants on March 9, 2010. Entering camp, Sorgi was expected to back up starting quarterback Eli Manning, but in a preseason game against the New York Jets, Sorgi tore the capsule in his right shoulder, and was later placed on season-ending Injured Reserve. Following the season, he became an unrestricted free agent.

Personal life
Sorgi currently resides in Pittsboro, Indiana with his wife Lana and sons, Jimmy III, Jackson and Jace.

He is the co owner of Pro Team Tactical Performance.

Jim Sorgi was honored with the designation of Badger of the Year by the Wisconsin Alumni Association - Indianapolis Chapter on May 5, 2015.

References

External links

1980 births
Living people
American football quarterbacks
Indianapolis Colts announcers
Indianapolis Colts players
National Football League announcers
New York Giants players
Wisconsin Badgers football players
High school football announcers in the United States
People from Avon, Indiana
Sportspeople from the Indianapolis metropolitan area
People from Danville, Indiana
People from Fraser, Michigan
Sportspeople from Macomb County, Michigan
Players of American football from Michigan

Jim Sorgi


Grass Point State Park is a  state park located in the Town of Orleans in Jefferson County, New York. The park is located along the St. Lawrence River by NY 12 and NY 180, between Clayton and Alexandria Bay.

Park description
Grass Point State Park offers picnic tables with pavilions, a playground and playing fields, fishing and ice fishing, a boat launch and docks, a swimming beach, and seasonal hunting. A nearly  snowmobile trail passes through the park, which may be used for hiking during the summer months.

The park also includes a campground with 53 tent and 19 trailer sites, in addition to Grass Point Cottage, a two-story full-service accommodation located on the river's edge. The park is open from mid-May through mid-October.

The park offers views of nearby Rock Island Light, also owned by New York State but accessible only by boat.

See also
 List of New York state parks
 Fishers Landing, New York

References

External links
New York State Parks: Grass Point State Park

State parks of New York (state)
Parks in Jefferson County, New York

Grass Point State Park


One Day in September is a 1999 documentary film directed by Kevin Macdonald examining the 5 September 1972 murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, Germany. Michael Douglas provides the sparse narration throughout the film.

The film won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 72nd Academy Awards, on 26 March 2000.

Summary

The documentary begins with an advertisement by the Munich Tourism Bureau with a beautiful young girl inviting the world to visit the city for the Olympics, then shows interviews with the wives of some of the murdered athletes, including Ankie Spitzer, widow of fencing coach Andre Spitzer. The film also features the first known filmed interview with Jamal Al-Gashey, a surviving terrorist. Al-Gashey, who is in hiding in Africa, wears a cap and sunglasses and his face is slightly blurred.

There are various shots of the Games getting under way, and attention is given to the lax security the Germans had at the Games. The terrorists are seen preparing for the assault; Al-Gashey claims that he and the other members were trained in Libya before going to West Germany to begin the assault.

The assault is described by Al-Gashey as well as by some of the German security staff present. Footage of ABC anchor Jim McKay is interspersed, along with sound clips of Peter Jennings, to give an impression of events unfolding as they happened. General Ulrich Wegener, founder of the German counter-terrorist unit GSG 9, was also interviewed during the film, and was roundly criticized for his seemingly flippant attitude about the subject matter.

The film offers evidence supporting the allegation that the rescue operation was poorly planned and executed; for instance, the German police aboard the getaway aeroplane voted to abandon their mission without consulting the central command, while the snipers were not prepared and were poorly positioned. The film implies that had the German government prepared better, the athletes might have been saved. Former Mossad Director Zvi Zamir, who was present at the airport during the final gunfight, is interviewed about his views on the failed rescue (he had previously been interviewed on this subject in an NBC profile of the Munich massacre broadcast during the Barcelona Olympics). At the end of the section, graphic photographs of the dead Israelis and Palestinians are shown in a photo-montage set to the Deep Purple song "Child in Time".

The film also alleges that the 29 October hijacking of a Lufthansa jet and the subsequent release of the three surviving Black September members in exchange for the hostages was a set-up by the German government, who did not want their failings to be made obvious in the trial.

Reception

After the film's release, film critic Roger Ebert recommended the film, stating that it "grips the attention and is exciting and involving. I recommend it on that basis--and also because of the new information it contains." He also stated that "Macdonald brings remarkable research to the film" and "he relentlessly builds up a case against the way the Germans and the International Olympic Committee handled the crisis." However, Ebert criticized the style of the film, and the film's "tasteless conclusion", which included a montage of action shots and photos of victims' corpses with a rock music score.

Concerns about screenings for Academy Awards
Roger Ebert continued his criticisms after the film received an Academy Award, claiming that the producer, Arthur Cohn, intentionally subverts the Academy's documentary and foreign film by-laws – which dictate that only members who have seen all nominated films may vote – by limiting screenings of his films to a small group of invited people; "by limiting those who have seen his, Cohn shrinks the voting pool and improves his odds."

Joe Berlinger, director of the documentaries Brother's Keeper and Paradise Lost, joined Ebert in criticizing Arthur Cohn's method of screening his films, but stressed that the problem is the Academy by-laws: "Until there is a documentary branch of the Academy that treats docs like any other film in any other category, nothing will change, despite the recent band-aid attempt to improve the situation."

See also
 Munich '72 and Beyond
 Munich (2005)

Notes

Companion book
 Reeve, Simon (New York, 2001), One Day in September: the full story of the 1972 Munich Olympic massacre and the Israeli operation 'Wrath of God'

External links
 One Day in September  at Passion Pictures
 One Day in September at the British Film Institute

1999 films
Best Documentary Feature Academy Award winners
Documentary films about terrorism
Documentary films about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict
Munich massacre
Films set in Munich
Films directed by Kevin Macdonald (director)
Films scored by Alex Heffes
Documentary films about the Olympics
Films about the 1972 Summer Olympics
1999 documentary films
Films produced by John Battsek
Sony Pictures Classics films
1990s English-language films
British sports documentary films
1990s British films
English-language documentary films

One Day in September


Health insurance is a form of insurance which pays for medical care. Exactly what such plans cover varies. There's bare bones insurance policies that don't pay for much more than emergency lifesaving treatments, and at the opposite side of the scale are plans that include everything except for elective procedures like plastic surgery.

Insurance
Healthcare

Health insurance


iperf, Iperf, or iPerf, is a tool for network performance measurement and tuning. It is a cross-platform tool that can produce standardized performance measurements for any network. iperf has client and server functionality, and can create data streams to measure the throughput between the two ends in one or both directions. Typical iperf output contains a time-stamped report of the amount of data transferred and the throughput measured.

The data streams can be either Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) or User Datagram Protocol (UDP):
 UDP: When used for testing UDP capacity, iperf allows the user to specify the datagram size and provides results for the datagram throughput and the packet loss.
 TCP: When used for testing TCP capacity, iperf measures the throughput of the payload. iperf uses 1024 × 1024 for mebibytes and 1000 × 1000 for megabytes.
iperf is open-source software written in C, and it runs on various platforms including Linux, Unix and Windows (either natively or inside Cygwin). The availability of the source code enables the user to scrutinize the measurement methodology.

iperf is a compatible reimplementation of the ttcp program that was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois by the Distributed Applications Support Team (DAST) of the National Laboratory for Applied Network Research (NLANR), which was shut down on December 31, 2006, on termination of funding by the United States National Science Foundation.

iperf3
iperf3 is a rewrite of iperf from scratch to create a smaller, simpler code base. It also includes a library version which enables other programs to use the provided functionality. iperf3 is single threaded while iperf2 is multi-threaded.

iperf3 was started in 2009, with the first release in January 2014. iperf3 is not backwards compatible with iperf2.

iperf3 only officially supports Linux. Unofficial builds for Windows provided by Vivien Guéant have not been maintained since 2016. A user of Neowin, BudMan, provides unofficial Windows builds on his server.

Most current Linux distributions have up-to-date versions of iperf3 in their native package repositories.

See also
 Netperf
 Nuttcp
 NetPIPE
 bwping
 Flowgrind
 Measuring network throughput
 Packet generation model

References

External links
 Iperf 2 & Iperf 3 Comparison Table

Network performance
Software using the BSD license
Free software programmed in C

Iperf


Morecambe and Wise: In Their Own Words is a television documentary introduced and narrated by Jonathan Ross. It aired on BBC One on New Year's Day 2008, featuring clips telling the story of the rise to fame of the comedy double act Morecambe and Wise.  It featured many previously unseen archive clips of the double-act from their days in variety as separate acts, through to their final shows for Thames Television prior to Eric Morecambe's untimely death at the age of 58 in 1984.  Included within the show was one of his last interviews from Gloria Hunniford's Sunday, Sunday programme.  As well as the usual clips of their work (mostly drawn from their years with the BBC with some earlier and later footage) there were transcripts of correspondence unearthed from the BBC's records and these were read by impressionist Jon Culshaw throughout the programme.

References

External links

2007 television films
2007 films
BBC television documentaries
Morecambe and Wise
2000s British films

Morecambe and Wise: In Their Own Words


Giuseppe Colombani is known as l'Alfier lombardo (the Pride of Lombardy. It's unrelated to Francesco Alfieri - the Italian word l'Alfier(e) means "the standard bearer".) He wrote a treatise on martial arts, published in 1711. It is the latest known treatise discussing the spadone, or longsword, before the revivalist movements of historical fencing in the 20th century.

Historical European martial arts

Giuseppe Colombani


Batman '66 is a superhero comic book series published by DC Comics featuring Batman as a continuation of the 1966–68 television series starring Adam West and Burt Ward as Batman and Robin. The series was written primarily by Jeff Parker and Tom Peyer, with cover art by Mike Allred. It published 30 issues from 2013-16, although the setting has been used in occasional crossovers since 2016.

Publication history
In 2013, DC began publication of Batman '66, which tells all-new stories set in the world of the 1966–68 TV series. It was written by Jeff Parker, and featured cover art by Mike Allred while interior art was done by different artists each issue. Original characters from the television series such as the Bookworm, the Minstrel, the Sandman, Olga, Queen of the Cossacks, Zelda the Great, Shame, King Tut, and Marsha, Queen of Diamonds all made their first comic book appearances in the series. The Joker, The Penguin, Riddler, Catwoman and Mr. Freeze also appeared in the series. Characters who were not featured in the television series (some of them were created after the series ended) also appeared in Batman '66, with Red Hood and Dr. Quinn appearing in issue #3, Poison Ivy in issue #26, Bane in issue #27, The Scarecrow and Killer Croc in issue #28, Kobra in issue #72, Copperhead in Batman '66 Meets Wonder Woman '77 issue #5, Professor Hugo Strange in Batman '66 Meets the Man from U.N.C.L.E., and Ra's al Ghul and Talia al Ghul in Batman '66 Meets Wonder Woman '77. Also, new characters and vehicles were created for the series such as the Bat-Jet, used to follow False Face to Mount Rushmore, as well as a new villainess named Cleopatra.

The series was released both physically and digitally. The series was cancelled in 2015, with physical issue #30, cover-dated February 2016, and digital issue #73.

In April 2014, the first five issues were compiled into the Batman '66 Vol. 1 trade paperback. Additional volumes collecting the rest of the issues have since been released. Len Wein and José Luis García-López produced a comics adaptation of a Two-Face story written by Harlan Ellison originally intended for the Batman television series in the 1960s. In June 2014, Kevin Smith and Ralph Garman's six-issue Batman and the Green Hornet crossover miniseries, Batman '66 Meets The Green Hornet, began publication. There are also three other crossover miniseries with fellow 1960s and 1970s TV shows; The Man from U.N.C.L.E. with Batman '66 Meets the Man From U.N.C.L.E., TV's The Avengers with Batman '66 Meets Steed and Mrs. Peel, and Wonder Woman, as played by Lynda Carter, in Batman '66 Meets Wonder Woman '77. In July 2017, a new crossover one-shot issue called Batman '66 Meets the Legion of Super Heroes shows Batman and Robin teaming up with the Legion of Super Heroes. In July 2018, the Batman archvillains attempted to take over Riverdale in the crossover miniseries Archie Meets Batman '66.

Batman '66 has been designated Earth 66 in the post-Dark Crisis multiverse.

Collected editions

Reception
Response to the series was positive. Benjamin Bailey of IGN gave the first issue a 9.8 out of 10, calling it "nothing short of brilliant", saying that "even if you aren't a fan of the classic TV show, you'll have a good time here. It's a blast from start to finish". Meanwhile, Den of Geek gave the first issue an 8 out of 10, saying that "Batman '66 looks like it might just fit right in with the spirit of the show's better episodes". The A.V. Clubs Oliver Sava, in reviewing the second issue, called it "a delightfully silly look at a bygone era of Batman, (and) also one of the year's finest superhero comics".

References

DC Comics titles
2013 comics debuts
Adaptations of works by Harlan Ellison
Batman titles
Comics based on television series
Comics by Kevin Smith
Comics by Len Wein
Batman (TV series)

Batman '66


Robert Barker (1739 – 8 April 1806) was a famous painter from Kells, Co. Meath, Ireland.

Biography
The itinerant portrait painter Robert Barker coined the word "panorama", from Greek pan ("all") horama ("view"), in 1792 to describe his paintings of Edinburgh, Scotland, shown on a cylindrical surface, which he soon was exhibiting in London, as "The Panorama". The Barker Panorama of Edinburgh from Calton Hill is considered to be the earliest panorama view and held within University of Edinburgh. This six piece set of engravings show a 360 degree view of the city of Edinburgh from a standing position on Calton Hill.

In 1793 Barker moved his panoramas to the first purpose-built panorama building in the world, designed by Robert Mitchell and built in Leicester Square, and made a fortune. Viewers flocked to pay 3 shillings to stand on a central platform under a skylight, which offered an even lighting, and get an experience that was "panoramic" (an adjective that didn't appear in print until 1813). The extended meaning of a "comprehensive survey" of a subject followed sooner, in 1801. Visitors to Barker's semi-circular Panorama of London, painted as if viewed from the roof of Albion Mills on the South Bank, could purchase a series of six prints that modestly recalled the experience; end-to-end the prints stretched 3.25 meters.

Barker's accomplishment involved sophisticated manipulations of perspective not encountered in the panorama's predecessors, the wide-angle "prospect" of a city familiar since the 16th century, or Wenceslas Hollar's Long View of London from Bankside, etched on several contiguous sheets. When Barker first patented his technique in 1787, he had given it a French title: La Nature à Coup d' Oeil ("Nature at a glance"). A sensibility to the "picturesque" was developing among the educated class, and as they toured picturesque districts, like the Lake District, they might have in the carriage with them a large lens set in a picture frame, a "landscape glass" that would contract a wide view into a "picture" when held at arm's length.

Barker's Panorama was hugely successful and spawned a series of "immersive" panoramas: the Museum of London's curators found mention of 126 panoramas that were exhibited between 1793 and 1863. In Europe, panoramas were created of historical events and battles, notably by the Russian painter Franz Roubaud. Most major European cities featured more than one purpose-built structure hosting panoramas. These large fixed-circle panoramas declined in popularity in the latter third of the nineteenth century, though in the United States they experienced a partial revival; in this period, they were more commonly referred to as cycloramas.

In Britain and particularly in the US, the panoramic ideal was intensified by unrolling a canvas-backed scroll past the viewer in a Moving Panorama (noted in the 1840s), an alteration of an idea that was familiar in the hand-held landscape scrolls of Song dynasty. Such panoramas were eventually eclipsed by moving pictures (see motion picture). The similar diorama, essentially an elaborate scene in an artificially-lit room-sized box, shown in Paris and taken to London in 1823, is credited to the inventive Louis Daguerre, who had trained with a painter of panoramas.
Barker died 8 April 1806, and was buried at Lambeth, Surrey.

Family
One of his sons, Henry Aston Barker, was also an artist and assisted with and then carried on his father's profession of painting and exhibiting panoramas. The eldest son, Thomas Edward Barker, though not an artist, also helped run the family's business, then, in 1801, set up a rival panorama exhibition with artist Ramsay Richard Reinagle at 168/9 The Strand, London.

See also

Panorama
Panoramic painting
International Panorama Council

References

Ralph Hyde, Panoramania, 1988 (exhibition catalogue)
Object Lessons:Edinburgh from Calton Hill

Attribution:
 .

1739 births
1806 deaths
18th-century English painters
19th-century English painters
Artists from Newcastle upon Tyne
English people of Irish descent
English male painters
English landscape painters
English portrait painters
Irish Travellers from England
19th-century English male artists
18th-century English male artists
People from Kells, County Meath
Artists from County Meath
18th-century Irish painters
19th-century Irish painters

Robert Barker (painter)


The James Akey Farm is a historic farmstead near the village of Mount Eaton in southeastern Wayne County, Ohio, United States.  Composed of a farmhouse and several significantly newer outbuildings, it was constructed as the home of Irish immigrant James Akey and his family, who moved to the area in the early 19th century and built the present farmhouse in 1822.  The farmhouse is primarily a sandstone structure, although with some newer elements of concrete; its roof is made of metal.  A plain structure without ornate architectural details, it is a large residence that architectural historians have seen as imposing and highly proportional.

Located in a rural valley, the Akey farm is far from any other farmsteads.  After a period of Amish ownership, during which most of the present outbuildings were constructed, the farm came under the ownership of the Wilderness Center, and it has accordingly been converted into a museum known as the "Stark Wilderness Center Pioneer Farm."  The only Wilderness Center property in southeastern Wayne County, it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978, due both to its well-preserved historic architecture and its place in local history.

References

1820s architecture in the United States
Houses on the National Register of Historic Places in Ohio
Irish-American history
Irish-American culture in Ohio
Sandstone houses in the United States
Houses in Wayne County, Ohio
National Register of Historic Places in Wayne County, Ohio

James Akey Farm


A superbase is a compound that has a particularly high affinity for protons.  Superbases are of theoretical interest and potentially valuable in organic synthesis. Superbases have been described and used since the 1850s.

Definitions
Generically IUPAC defines a superbase as a "compound having a very high basicity, such as lithium diisopropylamide." Superbases are often defined in two broad categories, organic and organometallic.

Organic superbases are charge-neutral compounds with basicities greater than that of proton sponge (pKBH+ = 18.6 in MeCN)." In a related definition: any species with a higher absolute proton affinity (APA = 245.3 kcal/mol) and intrinsic gas phase basicity (GB = 239 kcal/mol) than proton sponge. Common superbases of this variety feature amidine, guanidine, and phosphazene functional groups. Strong superbases can be designed by utilizing various approaches to stabilize the conjugate acid, up to the theoretical limits of basicity.

Organometallic superbases, sometimes called Lochmann–Schlosser superbases, result from the combination of alkali metal alkoxides and organolithium reagents.  Caubère defines superbases as "bases resulting from a mixing of two (or more) bases leading to new basic species possessing inherent new properties. The term superbase does not mean a base is thermodynamically and/or kinetically stronger than another, instead it means that a basic reagent is created by combining the characteristics of several different bases."

Organic superbases

Organic superbases are mostly charge-neutral, nitrogen containing species, where nitrogen act as a proton acceptor. These include the phosphazenes, phosphanes, amidines, and guanidines.  Other organic compounds that meet the physicochemical or structural definitions of 'superbase' include proton chelators like the aromatic proton sponges and the bispidines.  Multicyclic polyamines, like DABCO might also be loosely included in this category. Phosphanes and carbodiphosphoranes are also strong organosuperbases.

Despite enormous proton affinity, many organosuperbases can exhibit low nucleophilicity.

Superbases are used in organocatalysis.

Organometallic

Organometallic compounds of electropositive metals are superbases, but they are generally strong nucleophiles. Examples include organolithium and organomagnesium (Grignard reagent) compounds. Another type of organometallic superbase has a reactive metal exchanged for a hydrogen on a heteroatom, such as oxygen (unstabilized alkoxides) or nitrogen (metal amides such as lithium diisopropylamide).

The Schlosser base (or Lochmann-Schlosser base), the combination of n-butyllithium and potassium tert-butoxide, is commonly cited as a superbase. n-Butyllithium and potassium tert-butoxide form a mixed aggregate of greater reactivity than either component reagent.

Inorganic
Inorganic superbases are typically salt-like compounds with small, highly charged anions, e.g. lithium hydride, potassium hydride, and sodium hydride. Such species are insoluble, but the surfaces of these materials are highly reactive and slurries are useful in synthesis. Caesium oxide is probably the strongest base according to quantum-chemical calculations.

See also
Superacid
Phosphazene

References

Bases (chemistry)

Superbase


The Fortuna III is a yacht owned and operated by the Argentine Navy. The ship was designed by naval architect German Frers, and she is built in carbon fiber. Fortuna III set the sailing record of 24 hours and two minutes between Buenos Aires and Mar del Plata in 2009, at an average speed of 10.5 knots.

References

Fortuna IIIndi
Fortuna III
Fortuna III
Germán Frers

ARA Fortuna III


Side Show  is a 1931 American pre-Code musical comedy drama film directed by Roy Del Ruth and starring Winnie Lightner, Charles Butterworth, Evalyn Knapp and Donald Cook. It was produced and released by Warner Bros. The film was based on a story by William K. Wells. Although it was planned and filmed as a full-scale musical, most of the songs were cut from the film before release due to the public tiring of musicals.

Plot
Pat (Winnie Lightner) does everything she can to keep the struggling Colonel Gowdy Big City Shows traveling circus afloat, despite an alcoholic though well-meaning Colonel Gowdy (Guy Kibbee) and disgruntled unpaid workers. She sings and dances, and even does a high dive into a shallow pool of water when the "Great Santini" quits just before a performance. One of her few comforts is her love for barker Joe Palmer (Donald Cook). He, however, seems less enthused about the relationship and regularly takes money from her. To add to her troubles, her younger sister Irene (Evalyn Knapp), whom she is having educated to become a lady, visits her during school vacation and wants to stay with the circus.

Irene and Tom fall in love. When Pat finds out, she sends Irene back to school, fires Tom, and tells Gowdy she is quitting the circus. Tom and Irene come to their senses, and Tom asks Pat to marry him.

Cast
Winnie Lightner as Pat. (The film's director, Roy Del Ruth, later fell in love with Lightner and married her in 1934.)
Charles Butterworth as Sidney, a circus worker who loves Pat and keeps spouting odd, illogical sentences
Evalyn Knapp as Irene
Donald Cook as Joe Palmer
Guy Kibbee as Pop "Colonel" Gowdy
Matthew Betz as Tom Whalen
Fred Kelsey as Sheriff Hornsby
Tom Ricketts as Tom Allison
Vince Barnett as "The Great Santini" (uncredited)

Production
The film was originally intended to be released in the United States early in 1931, but was shelved due to public apathy towards musicals. After waiting a number of months for public tastes to change, Warner Bros. reluctantly released the film in September 1931 after removing all but one song, "She Came from a South Sea Isle", sung by Lightner. The film was released outside the United States (where there was no aversion to musicals) as a full musical comedy early in 1931.

Reception
Mordaunt Hall, critic for The New York Times, gave the film a generally unfavorable review, writing, "What little there is in the way of entertainment in 'Side Show,' the picture now at the Strand, is delivered by Charles Butterworth, but even this clever comedian is handicapped by the hardy efforts of others to arouse laughter." He also noted that Kibbee "does his best to make this film diverting", but "Miss Lightner can scarcely be congratulated on her performance."

Preservation
Only the cut print released in 1931 in the United States is known to have survived.

References

External links

1931 films
1931 musical comedy films
American black-and-white films
American musical comedy films
Circus films
1930s English-language films
American films based on plays
Films directed by Roy Del Ruth
Warner Bros. films
1930s American films

Side Show (film)