Villavicencio () is a city and municipality in Colombia. The capital of Meta Department, it was founded on April 6, 1840. The municipality had a population of 531,275 in 2018. The city is located at 4°08'N, 73°40'W, 75 km (about 45 mi) southeast of the Colombian capital city of Bogotá (DC) by the Guatiquía River. It is the most important commercial center in the Llanos Orientales (Eastern plains) of Colombia.

Villavicencio has a warm and humid climate, with average daily temperatures ranging from 21 °C to 30 °C.2 It is affectionately called "Villavo" la bella. Lying in a rural zone of tropical climate, Villavicencio is on the great Colombian-Venezuelan plain called the Llanos, situated to the east of the Andes mountains. Villavicencio is also called "La Puerta al Llano", or "The Gateway to the Plains", due to its location on the historical path from the Colombian interior to the vast savannas that lie between the Andes range and the Amazon rainforest.

Villavicencio's proximity to huge mountains and great plains make the city an example of Colombia's geodiversity. Because it is located in the foothills of the Andes, the morning and evening breezes cool the city, which is very hot for most of the day.

History
The German Conquistador Nikolaus Federmann reached the altiplano of Bogotá in 1536 by approaching it from the plains of Venezuela, a large unsettled area that is formed by the Orinoco basin. However, the vast area of these plains remained unexplored and uncolonized for the next 300 years. Colombia was settled along the mountainous folds of the Magdalena and Cauca valleys, and its commerce with the outside world was oriented towards the Caribbean Sea, thus, because of its mountainous barriers, the extreme heat, and inhospitable climate, the Llanos remained forgotten and unsettled for many decades.

The Llaneros, the inhabitants of the plains, are fierce horsemen who first fought for the Spanish royalists and then for the Venezuelan and Colombian rebels during the War of Independence. During independence, they crossed the Cordillera Oriental with Simón Bolívar, and surprised the royalist army on the plains of Boyaca on the 6th of August, 1819, which cleared the way for the taking of an abandoned Santa Fe de Bogotá the next week.

In the 1840s, some farmers from Caqueza, a town on the eastern folds of Bogotá, started the modest settlement of Gramalote, which would officially become the parish of Villavicencio in 1855. The parish was named for Antonio Villavicencio, a patriot in the Colombian war of independence. Vaccines, a mule road, and the availability of vast areas of free land, drove new colonizers to continue the settlement of Villavicencio. As the roads improved the access to the Llanos, the farmers could send their produce and cattle to the markets of Bogotá.

In 1948, large landowners expelled many farmers out of their lands across the country, explained in part by the momentum of the assassination of Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, a popular Liberal politician. The Llaneros resisted by driving the army out of population centers. The guerrillas never took Villavicencio, but they brought the fighting to the military base of Apiay. As the fighting between the government and the Llanero guerrillas was out of control, a military coup in June 1953, took Gustavo Rojas Pinilla to power who immediately negotiated a cease fire and amnesty for the insurgents.

1948–present
Villavicencio has grown from a small settlement of no more than 20 people in the 1850s to a settlement of over 500,000 inhabitants in 2018. A new road of bridges and tunnels has shortened the driving time to Bogotá from two or three hours, depending on the season of the year, to one and half hours to move the oil, cattle, and agricultural products faster.

Geography

The city is located in the Orinoquia region, where the Oriental Plains begin. Most of the city's land is flat ground draining away from the Andes. The Guatiquia borders the city to the north and east. Caqueza and Chipaque are located northwest of Villavicencio. A true portal to the Llanos,  the roads south of Villavicencio lead to Acacias and San Martin, the first historical town of the Llanos, which was an early Jesuit settlement. East of Villavo they point towards Apiay, Puerto Lopez and the fluvial port of Orocue on the Meta river, a strong affluent of the Orinoco.

Hydrography
Villavicencio, capital of the Department of Meta, lies on the slopes of the Eastern Cordillera a few blocks from the mighty Guatiquía River, surrounded by streams and creeks such as the Parrado and Gramalote, the Ocoa to the east and the Negro and Guayuriba rivers to the south. Among the main tributaries that irrigate the jurisdiction of Villavicencio are the Guatiquía, Guayuriba, Negro and Ocoa rivers.

Climate
Villavicencio has a tropical rainforest climate (Köppen Af). The climate is hot and sometimes humid, though its proximity to the foothills of the Oriental Andes brings mild breezes to the city at nightfall. Average temperature is . Although January is almost dry enough for tropical monsoon (Am) classification, the other eleven months all receive over  of rain, and for eight months from April to November monthly rainfall consistently exceeds .

Economy

In recent years the city has achieved an economic development strengthened by the trade sector, thanks to the dynamics generated by the roads that channel to the interior and the center of the country the agricultural and agro-industrial industry of the Llano, as well as the products entering the region from different parts of Colombia. Construction activity is very important. Gas and oil exploitation in the Apiay field are part of the region's mining activity.
Cattle, agriculture,  and the exportation of crude oil fuel the Villavicencio economy. Imports from the surrounding area include coffee, bananas, and rice.

La Vanguardia Airport serves Villavicencio with flights to the rest of Colombia on four airlines, including Colombian major airlines Avianca and Latam Colombia.

Villavicencio continues to be the main collection and supply center for the municipalities of Villavicencio and the municipalities of the Colombian Orinoco region, as well as the main oil and gas-producing municipality; however, most of the jobs are being generated in commercial and service activities, that is, in non-productive and non-tradable sectors. Large constructions, roads, financial resources, and tourism revolve around these commercial dynamics and services. This means that the department's contribution to the National GDP is less than 2%, a figure that has been maintained over the last 49 years, that is, from 1960 to 2009.

Education
The city of Villavicencio has a network of public and private institutions that provide and guarantee the right to education at the primary, secondary, technical, and higher education levels. As the hub city of the Eastern Plains, Villavicencio is the main urban university center of the region to which young people from neighboring departments come.
 University of the Llanos is a public university located within Villavicencio. Other higher education institutions include Cooperative University of Colombia, Saint Thomas Aquinas University, Saint Martin University, Uniminuto, UAN.
 Universidad Santo Tomás Offers presential programs, and more than 22 programs in open and distance mode (VUAD), among which are: International Business, Agricultural Business Administration, Civil Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Psychology, Law and Public Accounting. It has High-Quality Institutional Accreditation Res. 01456/29/01/2016.
 Universidad Cooperativa de Colombia: The Universidad Cooperativa de Colombia is an institution of Higher Education founded in 1958, socially owned, which by its origin and organization belongs to the Solidarity Economy sector. It has branches in other cities of the country.
 Unimeta: It has 14 undergraduate programs, 25 specializations, 23 diploma courses, and several extension courses.
 Minuto de Dios University offers the following degree programs and free courses: Social Communication-Journalism, Business Administration, Computer Technology, Graphic Communication Technology, among free courses in Basic Computer Science and Basic Programming.

Sports
The city has a football (soccer) team, the Llaneros futbol club, which plays in Colombia's second division.

The Colombian Football Federation announced that Villavicencio was to have been one of the venue cities to host the 2016 FIFA Futsal World Cup, however it was replaced by Medellín.

Sports facilities
 Estadio Manuel Calle Lombana
 Estadio La Esperanza
 Coliseo Álvaro Mesa Amaya
 Coliseo La Grama
 COFREM

Tourism
Villavicencio's tourism activity has been the result of progress in commercial activity and services; in other words, its growth depends on commercial dynamics, the services provided, and the efforts of municipal and departmental administrations. Tourism is carried out in both urban and rural areas (corregimientos) and has grown in both sectors.
Due to the growing interest in tourism in the region, the highways have been modernized and improved, shortening the driving time and distance to the capital Bogotá. As a result, Villavicencio and other adjacent municipalities (Acacías, Cubarral, Cumaral, Restrepo, Puerto Lopéz, Puerto Gaitán, Cáqueza) are growing in popularity as tourist destinations. In preparation to meet this demand, tourism development plans and strategies are implemented by the departmental and municipal governments, as well as the Cotelco branch. In relation to physical infrastructure, the city has an acceptable hotel inventory, as well as agro-tourism properties.

Monuments
 Cristo Rey: This cultural heritage site is located on El Redentor hill, with a height of approximately 30 meters and with the figure of Christ the King, which with his arms outstretched to the sides and looking at the city, symbolizes protection, a cry for peace in times of violence that the territory lived in the 50s.

 Monument to the Founders: It was the last work of the renowned Colombian sculptor, Rodrigo Arenas Betancourt, is located in the park of the same name on the road that leads from Villavicencio to Acacías.
 Biodiversidad Monument: Represented by a yellow hand with a ring in each of its five fingers, pays homage to the natural heritage of the Eastern Plains Region. Meta department, rich in ecosystems, flora and fauna, proudly shows respect for its characteristic biodiversity.
 Waterfalls: Meta is considered one of the best departments in Colombia to enjoy tourism, given the variety of flora, fauna, culture, and gastronomy that characterizes it. In addition to the unique experience that can be lived by the natural waterfalls with which it counts.

 Los Ocarros Biopark: Located on the road leading to Restrepo and Cumaral, around the lake formed by the waters of the Vanguardia stream and as a gateway to the nature reserve of the same name. It is the only zoological institution in the country dedicated exclusively to the preservation of regional natural wealth, which brings together the biodiversity of fauna, flora, and ecosystems of the Colombian Orinoco region. Exclusively flora and fauna of the region, highlighting the serpentarium, the giant armadillos or ocarros, the Orinoco caiman, and the spectacled bear.

Festival
Villavicencio is the capital of the Llanos Orientales and celebrates its anniversary every April 6 to pay tribute to its history and culture. This is an event where the city attracts much more tourism as artistic events such as concerts, parades, fairs, as well as sports competitions and fireworks are held. All activities are free and all are welcome to attend.

Concurso mundial de la Mujer Vaquera
Occurring annually in Las Malocas Park, participants demonstrate their skills in llano work and rodeo, and where llanera music is also performed by top musicians of this Colombian-Venezuelan genre. This event is in March, Women's Month and lasts three days, it is dedicated to exalting the skills of the llanera women and also summons other sportswomen from other countries. The llanera women compete in different events such as milking, agility and dexterity in horse riding, saddling, and rein handling.

International Joropo Tournament (Villavicencio):

The International Joropo Tournament is the most important cultural and artistic event in the region of Meta. It is held in the first week of July and lasts 5 days. As part of this event, the anniversary of the department is also celebrated. Highlights of the event include the international joropo beauty pageant, competitions such as voice passage, contrapunteo, best artist, best maraquero, best harpist, unpublished voice and unpublished song. The so-called Joropódromo is held in the streets of Villavicencio where more than 3,000 couples gather to dance the joropo dance, a traditional dance of the region.

Parks

The periodistas Park
It was previously named Infantilpark. It is a landmark of the foundation of the city, which occurred around 1842. The park is surrounded by a group of colorful houses from the 19th century, by restaurant and cafes and by trees that lavish shadow and freshness.

The Hacha Park
The actual name of this central park is Jose Eustacio Rivera, but people in Villavicencio call it Hacha Park because of the monument that presides it. The place pays tribute to the author of The Vortex, while the ax refers to the early settlers that used this tool to open the trails in Meta and change the land.

Los Centauros Plaza
It is located in the center of Villavicencio and surrounded by leafy trees, is a pleasant walking area. It takes its name from the sculpture made by the artist Patricia Vilduvieso and Luis Enrique Ballen. The art piece pays a tribute to the plains cowboys who is totally assimilated with his horse.

Culture
Villavicencio shares the condition of land of immigrants with the region of the Eastern Plains of Colombia; from its foundation to the present, people from the interior of the country and the coasts have sought and found in the city the conditions and the receptivity to establish themselves; At the same time, they have contributed to forge a mestizo culture in which, nevertheless, they struggle to impose a stronger relationship with the region, a bond of identity with the llanera culture. Mamona, coleo, cockfighting, joropo, dance, legends, myth, the renewed and popularized use of the poncho, among others are currently struggling not to disappear before the thrust of urban or modern life. Folklore is made up of the traditional customs of the people.

Gastronomy
In Villavicencio the typical dishes are in turn representative of the gastronomy of the Eastern Plains.

Carne a la Llanera (mamona or veal)

Veal roasted in wood and marinated only with salt and beer. It is served with cassava, potatoes, and plantains; optionally it is accompanied by a stew or sauce based on chili and a beer or lemonade based on panela. In the city, there is a wide variety of restaurants and grills that offer several typical dishes of the region. This dish is also known as Mamona or Ternera a la Llanera, due to the fact that it uses veal, which is slaughtered when the cow is still suckling.
This is the most representative dish of the Llanos region, in such a way that it can be found in other parts of the country. The citizen who is living in Villavicencio is used to cook of meat during festivals and parties. It is common for Villavicences to eat this kind of meat in Joropodromo, at birthday parties, meetings.

Arepas and breads

Rice arepas, rice bread, cassava bread, corn and corn wrapped, tungos, fish dish, three-phase sancocho, pâté broth, minced soup, pajarilla broth.

Rice bread

The rice bread is a snack made with rice and curd which is currently carrying a special safeguard plan before the Ministry of Culture of Colombia and also through the Association of bread producers and marketers of Rice Meta ( ASPAMET) with the help of the Chamber of Commerce of Villavicencio, are promoting the product to aspire to have a designation of origin before the Superintendence of Industry and Commerce of Colombia, rice bread is an important link in the cuisine of Villavicencio, currently is the municipality where this food is sold the most locally, nationally and internationally, the most traditional bakery and former rice bread producer is Rosquipan since 1990.

Drinks

Guarulo, Masato, Lemonade with panela, Guarapo de Piña and the coffee . In addition to the typical liquors such as Aguardiente Llanero and Ron San Martín Añejo.

Notable people
 Cato Manuel Lizaraso Ekrene, film director
 Carolina Gaitán, Colombian television actress
 William Pulido, former professional cyclist
 Óscar Ruiz, former football referee and lawyer
 Nathalia Sánchez, gymnast

References

External links
 Movie Times in Villavicencio
 Real Estate in Villavicencio

Municipalities of Meta Department
Capitals of Colombian departments

Villavicencio


Mark George Tobey (December 11, 1890 – April 24, 1976) was an American painter. His densely structured compositions, inspired by Asian calligraphy, resemble Abstract expressionism, although the motives for his compositions differ philosophically from most Abstract Expressionist painters. His work was widely recognized throughout the United States and Europe. Along with Guy Anderson, Kenneth Callahan, Morris Graves, and William Cumming, Tobey was a founder of the Northwest School. Senior in age and experience, he had a strong influence on the others; friend and mentor, Tobey shared their interest in philosophy and Eastern religions. Similar to others of the Northwest School, Tobey was mostly self-taught after early studies at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1921, Tobey founded the art department at The Cornish School in Seattle, Washington.

Tobey was an incessant traveler, visiting Mexico, Europe, Palestine, Israel, Turkey, Lebanon, China and Japan. After converting to the Bahá'í Faith, it became an important part of his life. Whether Tobey's all-over paintings, marked by oriental brushwork and calligraphic strokes, were an influencer on Jackson Pollock's drip paintings has been left unanswered. Born in Centerville, Wisconsin, Tobey lived in the Seattle, Washington area for most of his life before moving to Basel, Switzerland in the early 1960s with his companion, Pehr Hallsten; Tobey died there in 1976.

Early years
Tobey was the youngest of four children in a Congregationalist family. His parents were George Tobey, a carpenter and house builder, and Emma Cleveland Tobey. The father carved animals from stone and sometimes drew animals for young Mark to cut out with scissors. In 1893, the family settled in Chicago. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1906 to 1908, but, like others of the Northwest School, was mostly self-taught. In 1911, he moved to New York City where he worked as a fashion illustrator for McCall's. His first one-man show was held at Knoedler & Company in lower Manhattan, in 1917. The following year, Tobey came in contact with New York portrait artist and Bahá'í Juliet Thompson—an associate of Khalil Gibran—and posed for her. During the session, Tobey read some Bahá'í literature and accepted an invitation to Green Acre where he converted to the Bahá'í faith. His conversion led him to explore the representation of the spiritual in art. In the following years, Tobey delved into works of Arabian literature and teachings of East Asian philosophy.

Career

Early years
Tobey's arrival in Seattle in 1921 was in part an effort for a new start following a marriage and quick divorce.  When his ex-wife found Tobey's address, she sent him a box of his clothes topped with a copy of Rudyard Kipling's The Light That Failed. In the following year, Tobey met Teng Kuei, a Chinese painter and student at the University of Washington, who introduced Tobey to Eastern penmanship, beginning Tobey's exploration of Chinese calligraphy. The beginning of his lifelong travels occurred in 1925 when he left for Europe, settling in Paris where Tobey met Gertrude Stein. He spent a winter at Châteaudun, and also traveled to Barcelona and Greece. In Constantinople, Beirut and Haifa, he studied Arab and Persian writing.

Upon returning to Seattle in 1927, Tobey shared a studio in a house near the Cornish School (with which he was intermittently associated) with the teenage artist, Robert Bruce Inverarity, who was 20 years younger. Inspired by Inverarity's high-school project, Tobey developed interest in three-dimensional form and carved some 100 pieces of soap sculpture. The next year, Tobey co-founded the Free and Creative Art School in Seattle with Edgar Ames, and in autumn, he taught an advanced art course at  Emily Carr's Victoria studio.

In 1929, he participated in a show that marked a change in his life: a solo exhibition at Romany Marie's Cafe Gallery in New York.  Alfred H. Barr, Jr., then a curator at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), saw the show and selected several pictures from it for inclusion in MoMA's 1930 exhibition: Painting and Sculpture by Living Americans. In 1931, Tobey became a resident artist of the Elmhurst Progressive School while teaching at Dartington Hall in Devon and painting frescoes for the school. He became a close friend of Bernard Leach, who was also on the faculty. Introduced by Tobey to the Bahá'í Faith, Leach  became a convert. During his stay in Devon, Tobey found time to travel to Mexico (1931), Europe, and Palestine (1932). In 1934, Tobey and Leach traveled together through France and Italy, then sailed from Naples to Hong Kong and Shanghai, where they parted company. Leach went on to Japan, while Tobey remained in Shanghai visiting his old friend, Teng Kuei, before departing for Japan. Japanese authorities confiscated and destroyed an edition of 31 drawings on wet paper that Tobey had brought with him from England to be published in Japan. No explanation for their destruction has been noted; possibly they considered his sketches of nude men pornographic. In early summer, he studied Hai-Ku poetry and calligraphy at a Zen monastery outside Kyoto before returning to Seattle in autumn.

Tobey's first solo exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum occurred in 1935; he also traveled to New York, Washington, D.C., Alberta, Canada, as well as Haifa for a Bahá'í pilgrimage. Sometime in November or December, while working at night at Dartington Hall and listening to the horses breathe in the field outside his window, he painted a series of three paintings, Broadway, Welcome Hero, and Broadway Norm, in the style that would become known as "white writing" (an interlacing of fine white lines).

Mid-career

Tobey expected to return to teaching in England in 1938, but the mounting tensions of war building in Europe kept him in the US. Instead, he began to work on the Federal Art Project, under the supervision of Inverarity. In June 1939, when Tobey attended a Bahá'í summer program and overstayed his allotted vacation time, Inverarity dropped him from the Works Progress Administration (WPA) project. Tobey met the Swedish scholar, Pehr Hallsten (died 1965, Basel), in Ballard in 1939 and they became companions, living together from 1940. By 1942, Tobey's process of abstractionism was accompanied by a new calligraphic experiment. Marian Willard of the Willard Gallery in New York had seen some of Tobey's WPA paintings and gave him a show in 1944, which was considered to be a major success. In 1945, he gave a solo exhibition at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon, and the Arts Club of Chicago held solo shows of his work in 1940 and 1946. He studied the piano and the theory of music with Lockrem Johnson, and, when Johnson was away, with Wesley Wehr, who was introduced to Tobey in 1949 by their pianist friend Berthe Poncy Jacobson. Wehr, an undergraduate at the time, happily accepted the opportunity to serve as a stand-in music composition tutor for Tobey and over time became friends with him and his circle of artists, becoming a painter himself, as well as a chronicler of the group.

Tobey showed at New York's Whitney Museum in 1951. He also spent three months as guest critic of graduate students' work at Yale University on the invitation of Josef Albers, and had his first retrospective show at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. In 1952, the film "Tobey, Mark: Artist" debuted in the Venice and Edinburgh film festivals. Acknowledging "academic responsibility," Hallsten enrolled in graduate school at the University of Washington's department of Scandinavian languages and literature in the early 1950s and, after receiving his master's degree, Tobey began referring to him by the honorific, Professor.

On September 28, 1953, Life magazine published an article on Tobey, Guy Anderson, Kenneth Callahan, and Morris Graves entitled, "Mystic Painters of the Northwest," which placed them in the national limelight. The four were considered founders of the Northwest School. He held a solo show at the Galerie Jeanne Bucher in Paris in 1955, and traveled to Basel and Bern. He began his ink wash paintings two years later. In 1958, he became the second American, after James Abbott McNeill Whistler, to win the International Grand Prize at the Venice Biennale.

Later years

Tobey and Hallsten emigrated to Basel, Switzerland in the early 1960s. Tobey, who had been an incessant traveler in earlier years, concentrated on his art, while Hallsten felt restless and traveled through Europe, returning to Basel. In 1960, Tobey participated in the Association of Visual Artists Vienna Secession, and in the following year, he became the first American painter to exhibit at the Pavillon de Marsan in Paris. Solo exhibits occurred at MoMa in 1962, and at the Stedelijk Museum in 1966, the same year that he visited the Bahá'í World Center in Haifa. In 1967, he showed again at the Willard Gallery, and held a retrospective show at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts the following year. Another major retrospective of the artist's work took place at the Smithsonian's National Collection of Fine Arts in 1974. Tobey died in Basel in 1976.

In 2017 (from 6 May to 17 September), an important retrospective exhibition of Tobey's mature work was mounted in Venice, Italy, sponsored by the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, organized by the Addison Gallery of American Art Philips Academy of Andover, Massachusetts, and curated by Debra Bricker Balken. The exhibition was able to draw crowds from the Venice Biennale, gaining international attention and spurring an international reassessment of Tobey's significance before traveling to the Addison Gallery of American Arts, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts and exhibited 4 November 2017 to 11 March 2018.

Style

Tobey is most noted for his late "white writing" style, where an overlay of white or light-colored calligraphic brush strokes is painted over an abstract field of muted color, which is itself composed of small, interwoven brush strokes. This method, in turn, gave rise to the type of "all-over" painting style made most famous by Jackson Pollock and later painters.

When unveiling his white writing work at the Willard Gallery,  where a lot of the future Abstract Expressionists were then exhibiting, Tobey did not want to confuse people as he was based in Seattle with strong ties to Asian art. Willard hired Sidney Janis (who would in 1948  open his own gallery in New York, pulling the Abstract Expressionists Jackson Pollack, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, and Philip Guston with him) to write an essay for the Tobey work at Willard to clarify Tobey's position. This essay both acknowledged Tobey's orientation toward Asia and emphasized an important distinction between his white writing and the automatic writing of the Surrealists which would inspire many of the American Abstract Expressionists. To quote Janis:Nine years ago in 1935, Mark Tobey evolved the technique of white writing, which has distinguished his work. This method, a fusion of the spirit of Chinese writing with morphic characters rooted in twentieth-century painting, derives from Tobey's intensely personalized vision. ... It is presumably different from the psychic automation in [that it] is essentially under conscious direction.Janis claimed that Tobey's style was "at odds with the latest iterations of modernism," because "Tobey's white writing was more studied and controlled, the outcome of prolonged deliberation."  In this regard, Tobey's painting Threading Light (1942), which was in the Willard show of 1944, has been compared to Pollocks's Night Mist of 1945 and André Masson's Automatic Drawing of 1924, which is an example of work directly influenced by Surrealist automatic writing.

Influence
Tobey, the senior of the 'mystical painters', was an influence on Graves. Tobey studied piano and music theory with John Cage, and thereafter, it was Tobey who had an influence on Cage.

Elizabeth Bayley Willis showed Tobey's painting Bars and Flails to Jackson Pollock in 1944. Pollock studied the painting closely and then painted Blue Poles, a painting that made history when, in 1973, the Australian government bought it for $2 million. A Pollock biographer wrote: "...[Tobey's] dense web of white strokes, as elegant as Oriental calligraphy, impressed Jackson so much that in a letter to Louis Bunce he described Tobey, a West Coast artist, as an 'exception' to the rule that New York was 'the only real place in America where painting (in the real sense) can come thru." Pollock went to all of Tobey's Willard Gallery shows where Tobey presented small to medium-sized canvases, measuring approximately . After Pollock viewed them, he went back home and blew them up to , pouring paint onto the canvas instead of brushing it on. Pollock was never really concerned with diffused light, but he was very interested in Tobey's idea of covering the entire canvas with marks up to and including its edges, something not done previously in American art.

Helmi Juvonen, another Northwest School artist and diagnosed manic-depressive, was obsessed with Tobey, and suffered the delusion that she and Tobey were to be married, even though Tobey was gay.

Legacy
At least five of his works are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Northwest Art. Tobey's work can also be found in most major museums in the U.S. and internationally, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Tate Gallery in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. There have been at least four posthumous individual exhibitions of Tobey's work: National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., USA, 1984; Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany, 1989; Galerie Beyeler, Basel, Switzerland, 1990; and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain, November 11, 1997  – January 12, 1998 where the exhibition brought together about 130 works from some 56 different collections, covering the years from 1924 to 1975. Two of Tobey's paintings are in Guggenheim collections. A number of his figurative and abstract works are held by the Dartington Hall Trust. Four of Tobey's signed lithographs hang in the reception hall in the Seat of the Universal House of Justice, the supreme governing institution of the Bahá'í Faith, as his work was inspired by Oriental influences and his involvement in the Bahá'í Faith.

Anatoma tobeyoides, a species of sea snail, is named in honor of Tobey.

Awards
 1968, "Commander, Arts and the Letters of the French Government"
 1961, won first prize, Carnegie International, Pittsburgh
 1959, became the first American since James McNeill Whistler to win the Painting Prize at the Venice Biennale
 1956, elected at the National Institute of Arts and Letters
 1956, Guggenheim International Award

References

Bibliography
 Balken, Debra Bricker (2017) "Mark Tobey: Like Tracks in the Snow" in Mark Tobey: Threading Light. New York: Skira Rizzoli.

 Heiner Hachmeister (Ed.): Mark Tobey: Light. Space. Muenster: Hachmeister Verlag 2004
 Heiner Hachmeister (Ed.): Mark Tobey: Werke. Oeuvres. 1945-1975. Muenster: Hachmeister Verlag 1991

Further reading
 Balken, Debra Bricker (2017), Mark Tobey: Threading Light  (English edition),  (Italian edition)
Roberts, Colette (1960), Mark Tobey
 Seitz, William Chapin (1980), Mark Tobey
 Tobey, M., Dahl, Arthur L. (1984), Mark Tobey, art and belief
 World Order Vol 11 No 3 Spring 1977.

External links

 Committee Mark Tobey
 Guggenheim Museum Biography
Mark Tobey at the Northwest Museum
 Mark Tobey at the Seattle Public Library's Northwest Art Collection dead link
 Mark Tobey representation in Seattle: Woodside Braseth Gallery

Abstract expressionist artists
Abstract painters
20th-century American painters
American male painters
Modern painters
1890 births
1976 deaths
Pacific Northwest artists
Painters from Seattle
Painters from Wisconsin
People from Centerville, Manitowoc County, Wisconsin
American Bahá'ís
School of the Art Institute of Chicago alumni
Cornish College of the Arts faculty
Pike Place Market
Federal Art Project artists
Converts to the Bahá'í Faith
20th-century Bahá'ís
Northwest School (art)
American LGBT artists
LGBT Bahá'ís
20th-century American printmakers
LGBT people from Wisconsin
LGBT people from Washington (state)
20th-century American LGBT people
20th-century American male artists

Mark Tobey


Carol Lee Scott (20 December 1942 – 4 July 2017) was an English entertainer, best known for her role on British television in the 1980s and 1990s as "Grotbags". Throughout her career, Scott regularly performed on the international cabaret circuit, and prior to her TV work, she was a singer and released two albums.

Early career

Born in Bridgwater, Somerset as Carol Waterman, she began her career after moving to London singing in local pubs, all while working day shifts at the record department at Rumbelows.

She gained her break as a performer when she joined Pontins, ultimately working there for 19 years, playing at all of the UK holiday camps, along with those in Scandinavia, Spain, and elsewhere. During the off-season, Scott played many of the northern England and Scotland working men's clubs, sharing a bill with stars including The Four Tops, Morecambe and Wise and Tommy Cooper.

During this time, she recorded an album in 1974 which she originally sold only at her concerts.

Grotbags

The concept of Grotbags came about while Scott was performing in summer season in Cleethorpes with Rod Hull. When Hull was approached to make a new show to be broadcast at the launch of Central Independent Television, he created the series Emu's World, and approached Scott to play the witch. Together they came up with the premise of Grotbags' character and name (the latter coming with Scott suggesting 'Miss Grot', the name the MD of Ladbrokes used to call her; Hull revised it to Grotbags).

Grotbags first appeared in  Emu's World in January 1982, and starred alongside various companions including cowardly crocodile Croc, mechanical butler Robot Redford, and fawning manservant Grovel. All of which, at one point were played by Freddie Stevens. In many episodes, Scott would be given a song to sing. In 1991, she was the voice of Grotbags in the cartoon series, Rod 'n' Emu. She was also given her own spin off series, Grotbags – which ran for 29 episodes across three series.

Death

Scott died from  cancer on 4 July 2017 at the age of 74.

Filmography

Television
 Emu's World 1982–1989
 Bullseye (Special Guest) 1984
 Rod 'n' Emu 1991
 Grotbags 1991–1993
 Rod Hull: A Bird in the Hand  2003

Discography

Albums
 In Time (1974)
 Your Place Is Here with Me (1976)

Singles
 "Little Bit of Love" / "You Gotta Believe" (1974)

References

External links

1942 births
2017 deaths
British cabaret performers
English women comedians
People from Bridgwater
Place of death missing
Comedians from Somerset

Carol Lee Scott


The Miracle at Speedy Motors, published in 2008, is the ninth in The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series of novels by Alexander McCall Smith, set in Gaborone, Botswana, and featuring the Motswana protagonist Precious Ramotswe.

Plot summary
It has never occurred to Precious Ramotswe that there might be disadvantages to being the best-known lady detective in Botswana. But when she receives a threatening anonymous letter, she is compelled to reconsider her previously unconquerable belief in a kind world and good neighbours.

While she ponders the identity of the letter-writer, Mma Ramotswe has a further set of problems to solve, both professional and personal. There is an adopted child's poignant search for her true family, and Mr J.L.B. Matekoni's pursuit of an expensive miracle for their own foster daughter Motholeli.

References

2008 British novels
The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency
Little, Brown and Company books

The Miracle at Speedy Motors


Robert Patrick Amell IV (born April 21, 1988) is a Canadian actor and producer. He is known for playing Stephen Jameson in The CW series The Tomorrow People (2013–2014) and Ronnie Raymond / Firestorm in The CW series The Flash (2014–2017).

Amell also played Fred Jones in the movies Scooby-Doo! The Mystery Begins and Scooby-Doo! Curse of the Lake Monster, and Max in The Babysitter (2017) and, its sequel, The Babysitter: Killer Queen (2020). His other TV roles include series such as Life with Derek, True Jackson, VP, Unnatural History and Revenge. His movie other credits The Hunters (2013), The DUFF (2015) and Code 8 (2019).

Amell was born in Toronto, Ontario. He is a first cousin of actor Stephen Amell. He is married to fellow Canadian actor Italia Ricci. The couple have a son. In January 2020, Amell and Ricci became citizens of the United States.

References

Other websites

1988 births
Living people
Actors from Toronto
Canadian child actors
Canadian movie actors
Canadian movie producers
Canadian television actors
Canadian voice actors
Naturalized citizens of the United States
Twitch (service) streamers

Robbie Amell


Kathryn Cave (born 1948 in Aldershot, Hampshire, England) is a British children's book author. She was awarded the very first international UNESCO prize for Children's and Young People's Literature in the Service of Tolerance for Something Else. The book was later made into a TV comic series by TV Loonland. A theatre company, Tall Stories, has adapted Something Else as a children's production, and they ran a UK tour in Autumn 2009.

She has three children, Eleanor, Joseph, and Alice, and six grandchildren. Kathryn has previously worked as an editor for Penguin and Basil Blackwell, and she currently works under contract for Frances Lincoln, an independent publishing house in North London.

She lives in Hampstead, North London.

Books
 Dragonrise (1984)
 Just My Luck (1987)
 Poor Little Mary (1989)
Henry Hobbs, Alien (1990)
 Running Battles (1992)
Andrew Takes the Plunge (1994)
 Best Friends for Ever (1994)
Jumble (1995)
The Emperor's Gruckle Hound (1996)
William and the Wolves (1999)
Septimus Similon, Practising Wizard (2000)
Henry Hobbs, Space Voyager (2001)
Henry Hobbs and the Lost Planet (2002)

Picture books
Out for the Count (1991) illustrated by Chris Riddell
Something Else (1994) illustrated by Chris Riddell
 Horatio Happened (1998) illustrated by Chris Riddell
 W is for World (1998) illustrated by Oxfam
 Henry's Song (2000) illustrated by Sue Hendra
 The Boy Who Became an Eagle (2000) illustrated by Nick Maland
 The Brave Little Grork (2002) illustrated by Nick Maland
 One Child, One Seed (2002) illustrated by Oxfam
 You've Got Dragons (2003) illustrated by Nick Maland
 That's What Friends Do (2004) illustrated by Nick Maland
 Friends (2005) illustrated by Nick Maland

Awards
 1997 Die Kinder- und Jugendbuchliste (RB/SR) in Germany for Something Else
 1997 UNESCO prize for Children's and Young People's Literature in the Service of Tolerance for Something Else

References

Living people
British children's writers
1948 births
Writers from Aldershot

Kathryn Cave


BURS (bottom-up rewrite system) theory tackles the problem of taking a complex expression tree or intermediate language term and finding a good translation to machine code for a particular architecture. Implementations of BURS often employ dynamic programming to solve this problem.

BURS can also be applied to the problem of designing an instruction set for an application-specific instruction set processor.

References
A. V. Aho, M. Ganapathi, and S. W. K. Tjiang. Code generation using tree matching and dynamic programming. ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, 11(4):491-516, October 1989.
Robert Giegerich and Susan L. Graham, editors. Code Generation - Concepts, Tools, Techniques. Workshops in Computing. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, New York, 1992.

External links
http://www.stratego-language.org/Transform/BURG - short description of BURG including additional references to BURS and BURG

Computer languages

BURS


Daf () also known as Dâyere and Riq is a Middle Eastern (mainly Iranian) frame drum musical instrument, used in popular and classical music in South and Central Asia. It is also used in Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Iran, Uzbekistan, many regions of Georgia, Pakistan as well as in parts of India and Russian polar regions. It is also popular among Balkans, Bukharan Jews, Caucasians, Kurds, and Macedonians.

Daf is the national musical instrument of Pakistan and is also depicted on the reverse and obverse of the Azerbaijani 1 qəpik coin and 1 manat banknote respectively, since 2006.

It traditionally has a round wooden frame (although in the modern era it may also be made of metal), jingles, and a thin, translucent head made of fish or goat skin (or, more recently, a synthetic material). The sound is produced by hitting the membrane with either hand – the left hand, which also holds the Daf, strikes the edges, and the right hand strikes the center. The right-hand fingers are fastened about their neighbours and suddenly released (like the action of finger-snapping) to produce loud, rapid, sharp sounds.

History

The Pahlavi (an ancient Iranian language) name of the daf is dap. Some pictures of daf have been found in paintings that date before the Common Era. The presence of the Iranian daf in the 6th–5th century BCE Behistun Inscription suggests that it existed before the rise of Islam and Sufism. Iranian music has always been a spiritual tool. It shows that daf played an important role in Mazdean Iran emerging as an important element during the Sassanian period during the Kâvusakân dynasty. Also, there is a kind of square frame drum in the stonecutting of Taq-e Bostan (another famous monument located 5km northeast of Kermanshah city). These frame drums were played in the ancient Middle East, Greece, and Rome and reached medieval Europe through Islamic culture.

Nowruz (the first day of the Iranian New Year and the national festival of the Iranian people) and other festive occasions have been accompanied by daf in the Sassanid periods (224 AD–651 AD). In this period the daf was played in order to accompany Iranian classical music. Dafs were likely used in the court to be played in the modes and melodies of traditional music. This traditional or classical music was created by Barbod the Great and was named the khosravani after the mythical king Khosrow. Recent research reveals that these modes were used in the recitation of Mazdean (Zoroastrian) prayers. The modes were passed down from master to student and are today known as the radif and dastgah system. Many of the melodies were lost, but most of those that remain date to the Sassanid period. Dafs can be played to produce highly complex and intense rhythms, causing one to go under a trance and reach an ecstatic and spiritually-high state. For this reason, they have always been connected with religion in Iran.

An engraved bronze cup from Lorestān at the National Museum of Iran in Tehran, portrays a double ney (end-blown reed pipes), chang (harp), and a daf in a shrine or court processional, as similarly documented in Egypt, Elam, and the Persian province of Babylonia where music was arranged for performance by large orchestral ensembles.

The Arabs introduced the daf and other Middle Eastern musical instruments to Spain, and the Spanish adapted and promoted the daf and other musical instruments (such as the guitar) in medieval Europe. In the 15th century, the daf was only used in Sufi ceremonies; the Ottomans reintroduced it to Europe in the 17th century.

The daf still functions as an important part of Iranian music (both traditional and classical) as it did in ancient times. It successfully encourages many young Iranians to take up learning this ancient instrument.

Daf, and its smaller version called dafli, is also used across India. It is believed to have arrived along with other Persian influences in the medieval era, and is a popular folk instrument. In southern India, its use became mainstream, especially in protests, during the early half of the 20th century. Since the 1950s, it has also been used prominently in Bollywood.

In Islam
In Islam, Daf holds special importance because some Muslims believe that it is the only musical instrument which is permitted to be used. The Prophet of Islam, Muhammad, did not impose any restrictions on using the daf. It has always been an important part of Islamic Sufi music.

Structure and construction
The jingles, which are thin metal plates or rings, are attached to hooks in three or four rectangular holes in the circular wooden frame. The drumhead is made of fish or goat skin. The width of the frame is  and the depth, . In order to bend the frame, the wood ("buka", "orev") may be softened in water before being bent around a hot metal cylinder. The frame is closed by gluing the ends together. Finally, the skin is attached to the frame by fixing it with another wooden frame or by using nails. Another variation is to have the ring-style jingles arranged around the edge of the inside of the drum the whole way around or to have several tiers half way around the inside edge.

See also

Tar (drum)
Bodhrán
Bendir
Mazhar
Davul
 Innaby, Azerbaijani dance

References

External links

Hand drums
Medicine drums
Asian percussion instruments
Sufi music
Persian words and phrases
Kurdish musical instruments
Persian musical instruments
Iranian inventions
Pakistani musical instruments
Indian musical instruments

Daf


The Chaim Pinto Synagogue (in Arabic : كنيس حاييم بينتو), an historic site in Essaouira, Morocco, formerly known as Mogador, Morocco, was the home and synagogue of Rabbi Chaim Pinto. Although there is no longer a Jewish community in Essaouira, the building is an active synagogue, used when pilgrims or Jewish tour groups visit the city. The synagogue is on the second floor of a three-story, courtyard building inside the walls of the old city that also contained Rabbi Pinto's home and office. The building is of whitewashed plaster over masonry. The synagogue consists of a single large room. There are two women's sections, one across the courtyard and one on the third floor, both with windows looking into the synagogue. The synagogue room underwent a modern renovation, concealing the ceiling and column capitals, and painting the wood of the Torah ark and bimah light blue.

See also
Moroccan Jews
Hiloula of Rabbi Haim Pinto

References

Jews and Judaism in Essaouira
Synagogues in Morocco

Chaim Pinto Synagogue


Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) is a family of language models introduced in October 2018 by researchers at Google. A 2020 literature survey concluded that "in a little over a year, BERT has become a ubiquitous baseline in Natural Language Processing (NLP) experiments counting over 150 research publications analyzing and improving the model."

BERT was originally implemented in the English language at two model sizes: (1) BERTBASE: 12 encoders with 12 bidirectional self-attention heads totaling 110 million parameters, and (2) BERTLARGE: 24 encoders with 16 bidirectional self-attention heads totaling 340 million parameters. Both models were pre-trained on the Toronto BookCorpus (800M words) and English Wikipedia  (2,500M words).

Design
BERT is an "encoder-only" transformer architecture.

On a high level, BERT consists of three modules:

 embedding. This module converts an array of one-hot encoded tokens into an array of vectors representing the tokens.
 a stack of encoders. These encoders are the Transformer encoders. They perform transformations over the array of representation vectors.
 un-embedding. This module converts the final representation vectors into one-hot encoded tokens again.

The un-embedding module is necessary for pretraining, but it is often unnecessary for downstream tasks. Instead, one would take the representation vectors output at the end of the stack of encoders, and use those as a vector representation of the text input, and train a smaller model on top of that.

BERT uses WordPiece to convert each English word into an integer code. Its vocabulary has size 30,000. Any token not appearing in its vocabulary is replaced by [UNK] for "unknown".

Pretraining
BERT was pre-trained simultaneously on two tasks:

language modeling: 15% of tokens were selected for prediction, and the training objective was to predict the selected token given its context. The selected token is

 replaced with a [MASK] token with probability 80%,
 replaced with a random word token with probability 10%,
 not replaced with probability 10%.

For example, the sentence "my dog is cute" may have the 4-th token selected for prediction. The model would have input text

 "my dog is [MASK]" with probability 80%,
 "my dog is happy" with probability 10%,
 "my dog is cute" with probability 10%.

After processing the input text, the model's 4-th output vector is passed to a separate neural network, which outputs a probability distribution over its 30,000-large vocabulary.

next sentence prediction: Given two spans of text, the model predicts if these two spans appeared sequentially in the training corpus, outputting either [IsNext] or [NotNext]. The first span starts with a special token [CLS] (for "classify"). The two spans are separated by a special token [SEP] (for "separate"). After processing the two spans, the 1-st output vector (the vector coding for [CLS]) is passed to a separate neural network for the binary classification into [IsNext] and [NotNext].

 For example, given "[CLS] my dog is cute [SEP] he likes playing" the model should output token [IsNext].
 Given "[CLS] my dog is cute [SEP] how do magnets work" the model should output token [NotNext].

As a result of this training process, BERT learns latent representations of words and sentences in context. After pre-training, BERT can be fine-tuned with fewer resources on smaller datasets to optimize its performance on specific tasks such as NLP tasks (language inference, text classification) and sequence-to-sequence based language generation tasks (question-answering, conversational response generation). The pre-training stage is significantly more computationally expensive than fine-tuning.

Architecture details
This section describes BERTBASE. The other one, BERTLARGE, is similar, just larger.

The lowest layer is the embedding layer, which contains three components: word_embeddings, position_embeddings, token_type_embeddings.

 word_embeddings takes in a one-hot vector of the input token. The one-hot vector input has dimension 30,000, because BERT has a vocabulary size that large.
 position_embeddings performs absolute position embedding. It is like word_embeddings, but on a vocabulary consisting of just the time-stamps 0 to 511, since BERT has a context window of 512.
 token_type_embeddings is like word_embeddings, but on a vocabulary consisting of just 0 and 1. The only type-1 tokens are those that appear after the [SEP]. All other tokens are type-0.

The three outputs are added, then pushed through a LayerNorm (layer normalization), obtaining an array of representation vectors, each having 768 dimensions.

After this, the representation vectors move through 12 Transformer encoders, then they are un-embedded by an affine-Add & LayerNorm-linear.

Performance
When BERT was published, it achieved state-of-the-art performance on a number of natural language understanding tasks:

 GLUE (General Language Understanding Evaluation) task set (consisting of 9 tasks)
 SQuAD (Stanford Question Answering Dataset) v1.1 and v2.0
 SWAG (Situations With Adversarial Generations)

Analysis
The reasons for BERT's state-of-the-art performance on these natural language understanding tasks are not yet well understood. Current research has focused on investigating the relationship behind BERT's output as a result of carefully chosen input sequences, analysis of internal vector representations through probing classifiers, and the relationships represented by attention weights.
The high performance of the BERT model could also be attributed to the fact that it is bidirectionally trained. This means that BERT, based on the Transformer model architecture, applies its self-attention mechanism to learn information from a text from the left and right side during training, and consequently gains a deep understanding of the context. For example, the word fine can have two different meanings depending on the context (I feel fine today, She has fine blond hair).  BERT considers the words surrounding the target word fine from the left and right side.

However it comes at a cost: due to encoder-only architecture lacking a decoder, BERT can't be prompted and can't generate text, while bidirectional models in general do not work effectively without the right side, thus being difficult to prompt, with even short text generation requiring sophisticated computationally expensive techniques.

In contrast to deep learning neural networks which require very large amounts of data, BERT has already been pre-trained which means that it has learnt the representations of the words and sentences as well as the underlying semantic relations that they are connected with. BERT can then be fine-tuned on smaller datasets for specific tasks such as sentiment classification. The pre-trained models are chosen according to the content of the given dataset one uses but also the goal of the task. For example, if the task is a sentiment classification task on financial data, a pre-trained model for the analysis of sentiment of financial text should be chosen. The weights of the original pre-trained models were released on GitHub.

History

BERT was originally published by Google researchers Jacob Devlin, Ming-Wei Chang, Kenton Lee, and Kristina Toutanova. The design has its origins from pre-training contextual representations, including semi-supervised sequence learning, generative pre-training, ELMo, and ULMFit. Unlike previous models, BERT is a deeply bidirectional, unsupervised language representation, pre-trained using only a plain text corpus. Context-free models such as word2vec or GloVe generate a single word embedding representation for each word in the vocabulary, whereas BERT takes into account the context for each occurrence of a given word. For instance, whereas the vector for "running" will have the same word2vec vector representation for both of its occurrences in the sentences "He is running a company" and "He is running a marathon", BERT will provide a contextualized embedding that will be different according to the sentence.

On October 25, 2019, Google announced that they had started applying BERT models for English language search queries within the US. On December 9, 2019, it was reported that BERT had been adopted by Google Search for over 70 languages. In October 2020, almost every single English-based query was processed by a BERT model.

Recognition
The research paper describing BERT won the Best Long Paper Award at the 2019 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL).

References

Further reading

External links
 Official GitHub repository
 BERT on Devopedia

Large language models

BERT (language model)


Wild Animal Ethics: The Moral and Political Problem of Wild Animal Suffering is a 2020 book by the philosopher Kyle Johannsen, that examines whether humans, from a deontological perspective, have a duty to reduce wild animal suffering. He concludes that such a duty exists and recommends effective interventions that could be potentially undertaken to help these sentient individuals.

Summary
Johannsen starts by examining the question of what is good about nature. He puts forward a number of arguments for why wild animals generally do not live good lives, such as the dominance of reproductive strategies which mean that large numbers of offspring are born, of which the great majority experience suffering and die before reaching adulthood. He also highlights different forms of suffering that these sentient individuals experience including predation, weather conditions, starvation, stress, injury and parasitism. Johannsen then explores the value of naturalness and the popularity of a positive view of nature.

In the following two sections, Johannsen asserts that humans have a collective obligation to intervene in nature to reduce the suffering of wild animals and evaluates the risks associated with intervention. He then explores the concept of editing nature, using technologies such as CRISPR and gene drives. The final section investigates how intervention relates to animal rights advocacy.

Reception

Symposium
A symposium was held on the book in April 2021, hosted by Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law, and Ethics (APPLE) at Queens University, featuring commentaries by Nicolas Delon, Bob Fischer, Gary O'Brien, and Clare Palmer; these were later published in the journal Philosophia.

Nicolas Delon's commentary argues that the book largely overlooks the issues of agency and freedom. Despite this, he gives Johannsen credit for considering liberty as an issue and for favoring interventions which minimize infringements of liberty.

Bob Fischer's commentary challenges Johannsen's claims on habitat destruction in two ways. The first questions his calculation of the quantity of animals that experience overall positive lives. The second aspect acknowledges Johannsen's perspective on the balance between lives with positive and negative outcomes, but refutes the notion that this leads to his desired conclusion due to separate justifications.

O'Brien's commentary takes exception with Johanssen's assertion that the non-identity problem has no effect on the reasons to intervene in nature. He argues that large scale interventions in nature will, in turn, change the types of animals that will come into existence and, as a result, enable harms experienced by and inflicted by these individuals. In conclusion, he asserts that "by causing animals to exist, knowing that they will inflict and suffer harms, we become morally responsible for those harms."

Palmer's commentary questions Johannsen's claim that naturalness, or wildness, is not intrinsically valuable and the assertion that the majority of wild animals have terrible lives. On the latter, Palmer asserts that more evidence is needed and for the former she contends that Johannsen mischaracterizes the significance of the value of wildness which could lead to conflicts with his suggested wide-scale interventions. She concludes that if he wants to gain democratic legitimacy for such interventions, he needs to give more serious attention to such conflicts.

Johannsen responds to the commentaries in his paper "Defending Wild Animal Ethics". He defends his arguments regarding intrinsic value and valuing of harmful natural processes, rejecting the notion of intrinsic valuing. Johannsen evaluates intentional habitat destruction as a response to wild animal suffering, contending that it is unjustified within a moderate deontological framework. The article also examines the role of agency in wild animal wellbeing, its connection to exercise of agency, and its impact on quality of life. Furthermore, Johannsen addresses the concept of identity-affecting actions and the potential generation of secondary duties, extending considerations of rectificatory justice to interventions aimed at mitigating harm to wild animals.

Reviews
Jeff Sebo describes the book as "an excellent book that makes a powerful case for reducing wild animal suffering". Jeff McMahan asserts that: "The suffering of animals in the wild is a serious moral issue, to which this book is a sensible, well-argued, and humane response.

Elizabeth Mullineaux is positive about the book in her review, asserting that it presents well-reasoned arguments that are accessible to readers regardless of their background in philosophy, ethics, or animal welfare and contending that the book offers a blend of agreeable insights and thought-provoking ideas, fostering a deeper understanding of wild animal suffering alleviation strategies and warranting a strong recommendation for readers interested in the subject.

References

Further reading

External links
 Reducing wild animal suffering with Kyle Johannsen - Knowing Animals podcast
 Kyle Johannsen, "Wild Animal Ethics: The Moral and Political Problem of Wild Animal Suffering" (Routledge, 2020) - New Books in Philosophy podcast

2020 non-fiction books
Animal ethics books
Books about wild animal suffering
Books in political philosophy
English-language books
Environmental ethics books
Routledge books

Wild Animal Ethics


The Jatiya Sangsad (), often referred to simply as the Sangsad or JS and also known as the House of the Nation, is the supreme legislative body of Bangladesh. The current parliament of Bangladesh contains 350 seats, including 50 seats reserved exclusively for women. Elected occupants are called Member of Parliament, or MP. The 11th National Parliamentary Election was held on 30 December 2018. Elections to the body are held every five years, unless a parliament is dissolved earlier by the President of Bangladesh.

The leader of the party (or alliance of parties) holding the majority of seats becomes the Prime Minister of Bangladesh, and so the head of the government. The President of Bangladesh, the ceremonial head of state, is chosen by Parliament. Since the December 2008 national election, the current majority party is the Awami League led by Sheikh Hasina.

Etymology
The Constitution of Bangladesh designates the official name of the legislature Jatiya Sangsad () in Bengali and House of the Nation in English. The term Sangsad (), a Bengali word for "Parliament", derives from the Sanskrit word  (). The Bengali word Jatiya means National, hence, the name Jatiya Sangsad translates to National Parliament. The legislature is commonly known as Parliament and often referred to simply as the Sangsad or JS.

The term "Member of Parliament" () refers to both the 300 elected members and the 50 nominated women members of the Sangsad. The title is almost always shortened to the initialism "MP" and often referred to simply as the Sāṁsada in Bengali. Members of Parliament are entitled to use the prefix "The Honourable" ().

History

The Constituent Assembly of Bangladesh was established on 10 April 1972 after the Bangladesh Liberation War to prepare a democratic constitution and served as its first parliament as an independent nation. The assembly approved the constitution on 4 November 1972, and it took effect on 16 December and the Constituent Assembly became the Provisional Parliament of Bangladesh until the first elections under the new constitution took place in 1973.

Until 10 July 1981 the Constituent Assembly, and the first and second parliaments held their sittings in the building that now houses the Prime Minister's Office and which is often referred as the old Sangsad Bhaban (old Parliament House). The opening ceremony of the present Parliament House was performed on 15 February 1982. The last session of the second parliament was held in the new house on 15 February 1982.

Constituencies

The maximum strength of the Parliament envisaged by the Constitution of Bangladesh is 350, which is made up by the general election of 300 members to represent 300 parliamentary constituencies and 50 seats reserved for women, which are apportioned on elected party position in the parliament. The electoral districts are referred to as "Nirbācanī ēlākā" () in Bengali, which can be literally translated to English as "electoral area" though the official English translation for the term is "constituency". The term "Nirbācanī ēlākā" is used while referring to an electoral district in general. The constituencies are arranged as to coincide with the administrative Districts of Bangladesh, distributed among the proportion to their population. Numbers may vary from two to twenty members per district. The seats are indicated with the district name suffixed by a number (e.g. Panchagarh-1 or Jessore-6). Each constituency is represented by a single member of Parliament, and is elected by the first-past-the-post system.

Membership
Article 66 of the Constitution makes membership open to any citizen of Bangladesh and only to citizens above the age of 25; dual citizenship is possible for civilians in Bangladesh, but not for MPs who must not hold any other citizenship.

Members are elected by direct polling in their respective constituencies. Whoever wins the most votes, regardless of turnout or proportion, wins the election. Members are elected for a term of 5 years, with the entire Parliament dissolving five years after the swearing-in. Members can be re-elected indefinitely, and so have no term limits. They may be independent or affiliated with a political party.

Members must not have served time in prison for more than two years to be eligible, unless they served this period five years prior to the general election date.

Article 67 states that members absent without leave for 90 consecutive sitting days will lose their membership. Any ambiguity regarding membership will be resolved by the Bangladesh Election Commission. Attending sessions without being a member (even if memberships are cancelled in retrospect) results in a BDT1,000 (US$) fine per day, per Article 69.

Floor crossing
Article 70 of the Constitution makes floor crossing illegal. Members engaging in floor crossing lose their membership immediately.

Floor crossing is described in the Constitution as:
Resignation from the political party that nominated the member,
Voting against the nominating party, or
Abstaining from voting, either by abstention or absence and against the directive of the party Whip.

The only case of floor crossing in Bangladeshi history due the stringent article was when members M.A. Mannan and Mahi B. Chowdhury defected from the Bangladesh National Party to form a new party, Bikolpo Dhara. Fresh by-elections were held soon after the seats were vacated. Mahi B. Chowdhury retained his seat under the new party, whereas Mannan lost.

Debate about the provision
As most candidates are elected by the funding, support and brand name of the party, and resignation from the party is considered to void the choice of the people. The prime objective of banning floor crossing is to prevent members from joining other parties for personal gains or to induce disloyalty. This is crucial in marginal majorities, where a few members voting against the majority essentially changes the government party in power causing political instability.

The negative effects are broad however such as stopping members from speaking out against bad policies pitched by their party or voting against their party on legislation. This is considered harmful for parliamentary democracy, as the ban forces members to agree with their party leaders regardless of their own opinions or the opinions of their constituents.

Double membership
Article 71 of the Constitution allows eligible people to be candidates in more than one constituency. However, if elected from multiple seats, the member must vacate all but one seat.

It is usually the custom for prominent politicians, especially party leaders to stand in multiple constituencies. During the 2008 election Awami League leader Sheikh Hasina, prominent AL figure (and later prime minister of Bangladesh) Zillur Rahman, BNP leader Khaleda Zia and Jatiya Party leader H M Ershad all were candidates in the maximum possible number of constituencies.

Powers and rights

The President of Bangladesh appoints a cabinet with the Prime Minister and other ministers from among the Members. The Prime Minister must be a parliamentarian, and so must at least 90% of the Ministers. The President must appoint a Prime Minister who, in his reasoned opinion, commands the confidence of the majority of the House. The cabinet remains answerable to the Parliament at all times, and the prime minister also to the President as well.

The President of Bangladesh is elected by the Parliament through open ballot voting. As a result, the opposition party seldom nominates a candidate and the governing party nominee is uncontested. Current President Abdul Hamid and previous presidents Zillur Rahman, Iajuddin Ahmed, A. Q. M. Badruddoza Chowdhury and Shahabuddin Ahmed were all elected unopposed. The Parliament can also impeach the President by a two-thirds majority.

The Parliament can form any parliamentary standing committees as it sees fit such as for the purposes of examining bills, reviewing government policy and any other matter of public importance. The de facto power of the committees have always been nominal however; the de jure power too is ambiguous, especially after the Supreme Court ruled that it was not answerable to summons from parliamentary committees and senior civil servants rarely being brought before committees to answer for public administrative decisions.

Various drawbacks has hence led the parliament to be regarded as a rubber stamp body as MPs cannot cross the floor, have free votes (vote against their party whip) or pass motions of no confidence due to Article 70 of the Constitution of Bangladesh. Political scientists, judges in the Supreme Court, public intellectuals, newspapers and journalists, civil rights activists and many members of parliament have demanded reform of the article. Critics argue Article 70 tramples freedom of speech and freedom of conscience and is a violation of the constitution's fundamental rights. Additionally, it significantly limits the checks and balances on the Prime Minister's vast powers, as there are few means by which s/he can be legally dismissed under the constitution or even held to basic scrutiny with repercussions. The checks and balances then formed on the prime minister and their cabinet is by civil servants in the Bangladesh Administrative Service and the courts, which are usually too docile to challenge the executive.

Article 78 of the Constitution provides immunity for the speeches, actions and votes of the Members within parliamentary sessions, and so members are not answerable for any such actions to the courts. The parliament itself is vested with the power to provide indemnity to anybody in service of the nation under Article 46. This allowed the 2nd parliament in 1979 to ratify the Indemnity Ordinance.

Past parliamentary election results

Organisation

Parliamentary groups
The parliamentary groups of the Jatiya Sangsad are groups of Members of Parliament organised by a political party or coalition of parties. The leadership of each groups consists of a parliamentary party leader, deputy leader, whips and a parliamentary working committee. The size of a group determines the extent of its representation on legislative committees, the time slots allotted for speaking, the number of committee chairs it can hold, and its representation in executive bodies of the parliament.
Current Composition
Government coalition
Leader of the House; the post is usually held by the Prime Minister of Bangladesh
Deputy Leader of the House (who leads the day to day business of the government in the Parliament)
Chief Whip (who is supported by 6 additional whips)
Official Opposition
Leader of the Opposition
Deputy Leader of the Opposition
Chief Whip of the Opposition

Executive bodies

The Parliament executive bodies include the Speaker of the Jatiya Sangsad, the House Committee and Parliament Secretariat. The House Committee consists of the Parliament Speaker, Deputy Speaker and Whips. Every major political party appoints a whip who is responsible for the party's discipline and behaviour of its members on the floor of the house. The committee is the coordination hub, determining the daily legislative agenda and assigning committee chairpersons based on parliamentary group representation. The Parliament Secretariat, headed by a Senior Secretary from the Bangladesh Administrative Service, is in charge of all its supporting and advisory duties such as keeping a record of members' voting, speeches, advising on protocol, general clerical, broadcasting and information activities.
Current Composition:
Speaker of the Jatiya Sangsad
Deputy Speaker of the Jatiya Sangsad
House Committee
Parliament Secretariat

Committees
Most of the legislative work in the Parliament is done in the standing committees, which exist largely unchanged throughout one legislative period. The Parliament has a number of committees, with small numbers of Members appointed to deal with particular topics or issues. The Committees on Ministry (CoM) are committees which are set down under the Parliament's standing orders. The number of Committees on Ministry approximates the number of Ministries of Bangladesh, and the titles of each are roughly similar (e.g., defence, agriculture, and labour). There are, as of the current tenth Parliament, 50 standing committees. The distribution of committee chairs and the membership of each committee reflect the relative strength of the various Parliamentary groups in the house.
Current Committees:
Committee on Estimates
Committee on Government Assurances
Standing Committee on Public Accounts
Library Committee
Committee on Petitions
Committee on Private Member's Bills and Resolutions
Standing Committee of Privileges
House Committee
Business Advisory Committee
Standing Committee on Rules of Procedure
Committee on Public Undertakings
39 Committees on Ministry (CoMs)

Structures

Parliament House

The parliament is housed in the Jatiya Sangsad Bhaban (জাতীয় সংসদ ভবন Jatiyô Sôngsôd Bhôbôn), located at Sher-e-Bangla Nagar in the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka. Designed by the American architect, Louis Kahn, the building is one of the largest legislative complexes in the world, comprising . Louis Kahn designed the entire Jatiya Sangsad complex, which includes lawns, lake and residences for the Members of the Parliament (MPs). The main building, which is at the center of the complex, is divided into three parts – the Main Plaza, South Plaza and Presidential Plaza.

Sangsad Library
The Sangsad Library or Parliament Library claims to be the most comprehensive library in Bangladesh, holding over 85,000 books and many more reports, parliamentary debates, government gazettes, journals, magazines and newspapers. The Library is housed in Sangsad Bhaban in Sher e Bangla Nagar, Dhaka. The Library was established in 1972, after the immediate formation of the Constituent Assembly of Bangladesh to support the lawmakers and their staff. The Library is administered by the Parliamentary Librarian, a statutory officer responsible for the control and management of the facility, reporting to the Deputy Speaker and the Library Committee. Although the Library is open to the public, only current and former members of Parliament, secretariat staff, and authorised researchers may check out books and materials.

Sangsad Television

The Sangsad Bangladesh Television (publicly known as Sangsad TV) is a digital television channel in Bangladesh. It broadcasts parliamentary activity following its establishment under a Broadcasting Act 2011. Prior to the establishment of the Sangsad TV, the Sangsad's programming was produced by the Ministry of Information and relayed in its Bangladesh Television.

See also
Politics of Bangladesh
List of Acts of the Jatiya Sangsad
List of legislatures by country

Notes

References

External links

1973 establishments in Bangladesh

Bangladesh
Bangladesh

Jatiya Sangsad


Air Commodore Eric Burchmore,  (18 June 1920 – 11 October 1994) was a Royal Air Force officer with a long and distinguished career. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Burchmore led the introduction of the Hawker Siddeley Harrier aircraft into RAF service.

Early life
Eric Burchmore was born on 18 June 1920, in Thornaby-on-Tees, the son of a steel worker and was educated at the Robert Atkinson School. After leaving school, Burchmore joined the Royal Air Force (RAF) with the ambition of being a pilot, however he was turned down for pilot training due to his defective colour vision and trained to be an aircraft engineer instead. He served for three years as an apprentice at RAF Halton, followed by a posting to RAF Kenley as an aircraft fitter.

Second World War
Burchmore served at Kenley throughout the Battle of Britain. Later in the war, Burchmore was commissioned as an engineering officer and was posted to No. 159 Squadron based in India.

In October 1944, No. 159 Squadron mounted an audacious minelaying raid on the Japanese held port of Penang. The mission entailed a round trip of over 3,000 miles, which at the time was the longest distance bombing raid in history. Burchmore was in charge of the modification and preparation of the Consolidated Liberator aircraft used for the mission. The raid was led by Wing Commander James Blackburn and was a complete success, with the port of Penang completely blocked by mines and all of the aircraft and crews returning safely. Burchmore was appointed a military Member of the Order of the British Empire in recognition of his contribution to the operation, while Wing Commander Blackburn was awarded a Bar to his Distinguished Service Order and was also awarded the United States Distinguished Flying Cross by the United States Air Force.

Postwar career
After being invalided home with amoebic dysentery, Burchmore retrained as an electrical engineer and served in various postings at home and overseas. In 1952 he was posted to the Far East as an engineer responsible for a squadron of flying boats, this was followed by various other postings including Cyprus in 1960–62.

In 1968, Burchmore was appointed head of the RAF project to introduce the Hawker Siddeley Harrier jump jet into RAF service. Burchmore remained in charge of the Harrier programme for more than six years and participated in negotiations with the United States, which led to the Harrier being bought by the United States Marine Corps.

In 1972, Burchmore was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

Burchmore retired from the RAF in 1975 and took up a position as deputy director of housing for the London Borough of Camden. Burchmore resigned from his post five years later following a series of disputes with the Labour controlled council over the sale of council houses, a policy which they opposed, but which Burchmore supported.

In 1981, Burchmore joined a defence company as a manager, where he remained until his retirement in 1984.

During his retirement, Burchmore devoted much of his time to voluntary work and playing golf. He also became secretary of the Batti-Wallahs Society, which is an association of marine electrical engineers. Burchmore qualified for membership due to his work on flying boats.

Eric Burchmore died from a heart attack whilst driving his car on 11 October 1994. He was survived by his wife Margaret and their daughter.

References
The Times newspaper, Obituary of Air Commodore Eric Burchmore, published 9 November 1994.
London Gazette archive

1920 births
1994 deaths
Commanders of the Order of the British Empire
People from Thornaby-on-Tees
Royal Air Force officers
Royal Air Force personnel of World War II

Eric Burchmore


Bertha Eckstein-Diener (18 March 1874, Vienna – 20 February 1948, Geneva), also known by her American pseudonym as Helen Diner, was an Austrian writer, travel journalist, feminist historian and intellectual. Her book Mothers and Amazons (1930), was the first to focus on women's cultural history. It is regarded as a classic study of matriarchy.

She was a member of the "Arthurians," a group of European intellectuals active in the 1930s, each of whom adopted a name from Arthur's Round Table (Diner was Sir Galahad). Each member undertook to research an area of knowledge hitherto little known to Western culture. Diner set out to document a feminist history of women, and infused her book Mothers and Amazons (Mütter und Amazonen) with lyrical and poetic language.

Life
Bertha Diener came from a middle-class family and received a higher education. Against the will of her parents, she married the polymath Friedrich Eckstein, a Viennese scholar and industrialist, in 1898. Like her husband, she was a member of the Vienna Lodge of the Theosophical Society Adyar (Adyar-TG). The couple received in their home at this time such notables as Karl Kraus, Adolf Loos, and Peter Altenberg. In 1904 Bertha left her husband and her son Percy (born 1899) and began her travels which took her to Egypt, Greece, and England. The couple finally divorced in 1909 and Frederick Eckstein died in 1939 at the age of 78.

Her 2nd son, Roger (born 1910) was fathered by Theodore Beer, but was placed with a foster family and did not make contact again with his mother until 1936 by letter and in person only in 1938 in Berlin. From 1919 Diener lived in Lucerne, Switzerland.
Diener initially wrote under the pseudonym Ahasvera (roughly translated as "Perpetual traveler").  Her best-known works were published under the name Sir Galahad, from the knights of King Arthur. Besides her books, she wrote a series of articles for newspapers and magazines and translated three works of American journalists and the esoteric writer Prentice Mulford.

Between 1914 and 1919 she wrote Kegelschnitte Gottes, about the situation of women during that period. From 1925 to 1931, she worked on Mütter und Amazonen, a women-focused cultural history, based on the work of Johann Jakob Bachofen.

She died aged 73 on 20 February 1948 in Geneva, five weeks after an operation. Her last work, a cultural history of England, remained unfinished.

Works

Unless otherwise indicated, the works first appeared under the pseudonym Sir Galahad.
 Im palast des Minos (In the Palace of Minos), Munich: Albert Langen, 1913. 118 pp., 2nd ed., 1924.
 (tr.) Der Unfug des Sterbens: ausgewählte Essays by Prentice Mulford. Munich: Langen, [1920].
 Die Kegelschnitte Gottes; Roman (The Conic Sections of God: Novel), Munich: Albert Langen, 1921. 546 pp. 2nd ed., 1926; 3rd ed., 1932.
 (tr.) Das Ende des Unfugs: ausgewählte Essays by Prentice Mulford. Munich: Albert Langen, 1922.
 Idiotenführer durch die russische Literatur (Idiot's Guide to Russian literature). Munich: Albert Langen, 1925. 163 pp.
 Mütter und Amazone: ein Umriss weiblicher Reiche (Mothers and Amazons: an outline of female empires), Munich: Albert Langen, 1932. 305 pp. Various later eds., from 1981 by Ullstein in paperback, with the subtitle Liebe und Macht im Frauenreich (love and power in the rule of women). . Translated into English by John Philip Lundin as Mothers and Amazons: the first feminine history of culture, New York: Julian Press, 1965. Introduction by Joseph Campbell.
 Byzanz; von kaisern, engeln und eunuchen (Byzantium. Of emperors, angels and eunuchs), Leipzig and Vienna: Tal, 1936. 318 pp. Translated into English by Eden and Cedar Paul as Emperors, angels, and eunuchs: the thousand years of the Byzantine Empire, London: Chatto & Windus, 1938. US edition published as Imperial Byzantium, 1938.
 Bohemund: ein Kreuzfahrer-Roman (Bohemond: a Crusader novel), Leipzig: Goten-Verlag Herbert Eisentraut, 1938. 291 pp.
 (as Helen Diner) Seide: Eine kleine Kulturgeschichte (Silk: a small cultural history), Leipzig: Goten-Verlag H. Eisentraut, 1940. 259 pp., 2nd ed., 1944; 3rd ed., 1949.
 Der glückliche Hügel; ein Richard-Wagner-Roman (The lucky hill: a Richard Wagner novel), Zürich: Atlantis, 1943. 366 pp.

Notes

References
 Helen Diner Entry at the Brooklyn Museum Dinner Party database of notable women. Accessed March 2008
 Works at the German National Library Index
 Eckstein, Bertha at the Aeiou Encyclopedia, Austria. Accessed March 2008
 Sibylle Mulot-Déri: Sir Galahad. Porträt einer Verschollenen, Fischer Taschenbuch, Frankfurt 1987, 283 S. (vergriffen)

Austrian Theosophists
Austrian feminists
Feminist writers
20th-century Austrian historians
Austrian travel writers
20th-century Austrian journalists
Austrian expatriates in Switzerland
Writers from Vienna
1874 births
1948 deaths
Women travel writers
20th-century Austrian women writers
Austrian women historians
Austrian women journalists

Bertha Eckstein-Diener


The extinction cross is an optical phenomenon that is seen when trying to extinguish a laser beam or non-planar white light using crossed polarizers. Ideally, crossed (90° rotated) polarizers block all light, since light which is polarized along the polarization axis of the first polarizer is perpendicular to the polarization axis of the second. When the beam is not perfectly collimated, however, a characteristic fringing pattern is produced.

See also
Polarization (waves)

Further reading

 Mineralogy notes 6 See "6.3.5. Review of Uniaxial Optical Properties"
 Nikon MicroscopyU See Figure 1a

Polarization (waves)
Optical phenomena

Extinction cross


Susan Moller Okin (July 19, 1946 – March 3, 2004) was a liberal feminist political philosopher and author.

Life

Okin was born in 1946 in Auckland, New Zealand. She attended Remuera Primary School and Remuera Intermediate and Epsom Girls' Grammar School, where she was Dux in 1963.

She earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Auckland in 1966, a master of philosophy degree from Somerville College, Oxford in 1970 and a doctorate from Harvard in 1975.

She taught at the University of Auckland, Vassar, Brandeis and Harvard before joining Stanford's faculty.

Okin became the Marta Sutton Weeks Professor of Ethics in Society at Stanford University in 1990. She held a visiting professorship at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at the time of her death in 2004.

Okin was found dead in her home in Lincoln, Massachusetts, on March 3, 2004. She was 57. The cause of death is still unknown, but authorities do not believe there was any foul play.

Works

Okin, like many liberal feminists of her time, highlighted the many ways in which gender-based discrimination defeats women's aspirations; they defended reforms intended to make social and political equality a reality for women.

In 1979, she published Women in Western Political Thought, in which she details the history of the perceptions of women in western political philosophy.

Her 1989 book Justice, Gender and Family is a critique of modern theories of justice.  These theories include the liberalism of John Rawls, the libertarianism of Robert Nozick, and the communitarianism of Alasdair MacIntyre and Michael Walzer. For each theorist's major work she argues that a foundational assumption is incorrect because of a faulty perception of gender or family relations.  More broadly, according to Okin, these theorists write from a male perspective that wrongly assumes that the institution of the family is just.  She believes that the family perpetuates gender inequalities throughout all of society, particularly because children acquire their values and ideas in the family's sexist setting, then grow up to enact these ideas as adults.  If a theory of justice is to be complete, Okin asserts that it must include women and it must address the gender inequalities she believes are prevalent in modern-day families.

Okin discusses two opposing feminist approaches to ending legal sex-based discrimination against women in her 1991 essay "Sexual Difference, Feminism, and the Law". She says that examining the history and current ramifications of sex-based discrimination, and debating the best way to end inequality between the sexes, were prominent topics in that decade of feminist legal theory. Okin contrasts Wendy Kaminer's A Fearful Freedom, which champions an equal rights approach, backing gender-neutral laws and equal, not special treatment for women, with Deborah Rhode's Justice and Gender, which argues that an equal rights approach is insufficient to compensate for the past discrimination against women. In Okin's view, a failure to address whether the differences between men and women are founded in biology or culture is a shortcoming of both arguments. The essay concludes with a call to the feminists on both sides to stop fighting against one another, and work together in improving the disadvantaged situations of many women at the time.

In 1993, with Jane Mansbridge, she summarized much of her own and others' work in the article on "Feminism," in Robert E. Goodin and Philip Petit, eds., A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, 269-290, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), and the next year, also with Mansbridge, published a two-volume collection of feminist writing, entitled  Feminism (schools of thought in politics).[Aldershot, England and Brookfield, Vermont, USA: E. Elgar. ].

In her 1999 essay, later expanded into an anthology, Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? Okin argues that a concern for the preservation of cultural diversity should not overshadow the discriminatory nature of gender roles in many traditional minority cultures, that, at the very least, "culture" should not be used as an excuse for rolling back the women's rights movement.

Selected bibliography

Books

  Originally an essay (pdf).

Chapters in books

Journal articles

See also:

See also
Liberal feminism
Feminist legal theory

References

Sources
 Debra Satz and Rob Reich, Toward a Humanist Justice: The Political Philosophy of Susan Moller Okin (Oxford, 2009).
 Judith Galtry, "Susan Moller Okin: A New Zealand tribute ten years on" (Women's Studies Journal, Volume 28 Number 2, December 2014: 93-102. ISSN 1173-6615) http://www.wsanz.org.nz/journal/docs/WSJNZ282Galtry93-102.pdf

1946 births
2004 deaths
20th-century American philosophers
Alumni of Somerville College, Oxford
American political philosophers
American women philosophers
Critics of multiculturalism
Feminist writers
Harvard University alumni
Liberal feminism
New Zealand philosophers
New Zealand women philosophers
Stanford University Department of Political Science faculty
University of Auckland alumni
Vassar College faculty

Susan Moller Okin


A class ring is a ring worn by students in the United States and Canada to celebrate their graduation. They are most often given out in high schools, colleges, and universities. The first class rings were made in 1835 at the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York.

References

Academia
Traditions

Class ring


The True Slovak National Party, also translated as Real Slovak National Party or Right Slovak National Party (), was a minor extreme far-right political party in Slovakia. At the 20 and 21 September 2002 legislative elections, the party won 3.7% of the popular vote and no seats. Since that time, the party re-merged with the SNS, which elected Ján Slota chairman.

History
In 2000, the internal conflicts within the Slovak National Party (SNS) between Anna Malíková (later known as Anna Belousovová) and Ján Slota finally led to a split, by shutting out Ján Slota and 7 other MPs of the SNS, who founded the True Slovak National Party in late 2001. The founding congress elected unanimously Ján Slota chairman of the party. After the unsuccessful parliamentary elections of 2002, the party formed a coalition with SNS. After the 2004 European Parliamentary elections, where they nominated candidates together, and failed to send any candidates, since they reached only 2,01%. The two parties re-merged on April 4, 2005.

References

Far-right political parties in Slovakia
Defunct political parties in Slovakia

True Slovak National Party