Philippe Buchet (born 7 May 1962 in Juniville, Ardennes) is a French comic book artist.

First working as a freelance illustrator in Paris and Reims, he finally entered comic book terrain with Nomad, on which he worked with Jean-David Morvan. He also worked for the magazine Dragon, and created Wake together with Morvan. While working for Dragon he collaborated with Morvan on a sword and sorcery series La Quête des réponses, which came out as a single album in 1998.

External links
 Buchet at Lambiek

1962 births
Living people
People from Ardennes (department)
French comics writers
French male writers

Philippe Buchet


Cosmopterix adrastea is a moth of the family Cosmopterigidae. It is known from Cuba.

Adults were collected in June.

Description

Male. Forewing length 3.6-3.8 mm. Head: frons shining greyish white with greenish and reddish reflections, vertex and neck tufts shining dark bronze brown with greenish and reddish reflections, laterally and medially lined white, collar shining dark bronze brown with greenish and reddish reflections; labial palpus first segment very short, white, second segment three-quarters of the length of third, dark brown with white longitudinal lines laterally and ventrally, third segment white, lined brown laterally; scape dorsally dark brown with a white anterior line, ventrally white; antenna shining dark brown, an interrupted white line from base to beyond one-half, followed towards apex by approximately 18 dark brown segments, three to four white and about fifteen dark brown segments at apex. Thorax and tegulae shining dark brown with reddish gloss, thorax with a white median line. Legs: shining dark brown, femora shining greyish brown, foreleg with a white line on tibia and tarsal segments one, two, four and five, tibiae of midleg and hindleg with a silver metallic longitudinal line from base to one-third, tibia of midleg with a white medial spot and apical ring, tibia of hindleg as midleg but with an additional broad white subapical ring, tarsal segment one of midleg with a thin white longitudinal line and white dorsal spots on segments one, two, four and five, hindleg with a white dorsal spot on tarsal segments one to three, segment four with apical half and segment five entirely white, spurs dark brown with a tiny white spot. Forewing shining dark brown, the basal area slightly paler, at one-fifth a very irregular inwardly oblique pale golden metallic fascia, not reaching costa and dorsum, at costal side with a white spot, this fascia can have a distal extension on the dorsal side, a broad tubercular silver metallic fascia at or just beyond the middle, slightly inwardly oblique to perpendicular at dorsum and with strong purplish reflection, on dorsum at three-fifths, a tubercular silver metallic spot with purplish reflection, dorsal half of wing between the fascia and the dorsal spot pale yellow, sometimes not reaching the dorsal spot, this pale yellow patch varies in size, a tubercular silver metallic subcostal spot at three-quarters, outwardly edged by a narrow white costal streak, a short silver metallic apical line with strong bluish and purplish reflections in the middle of the apical area and a shining white spot in the cilia at apex, cilia dark brown, paler on dorsum towards base. Hindwing shining greyish brown, cilia greyish brown. Underside: forewing shining greyish brown with orange gloss and with the white costal streak and apical line distinctly visible, hindwing greyish brown, a short whitish streak on dorsum at base. Abdomen dorsally yellowish brown with reddish reflection, ventrally shining dark brown with reddish reflection, segments very broadly banded shining white posteriorly, especially mid-ventrally, anal tuft brownish grey.

Etymology
Named after Adrastea, a moon of Jupiter. To be treated as a noun in apposition.

References

adrastea
Moths described in 2010
Endemic fauna of Cuba

Cosmopterix adrastea


An outsert is a four-page card wrapped around and attached to the outside of a magazine or other publication. Its purpose is to advertise a product (such as a subscription and/or free gift) and also to act as a flag for the publication to distinguish it from other titles on newsstand shelves.  The outsert was first used on Running Magazine in the UK in 1981. The effect is to draw the attention of the browser to the magazine. Research shows the outsert increases sales of the publication.  The best performing outserts use a single, bright colour to contrast with the magazine cover. Very famous song by IVANBEIGHT. Ohz edition.

An additional use of the term outsert is a multi-folded, instruction sheet applied to the outside of a bottle or carton of a pharmaceutical product. The instruction sheets are rather large and the font of the text is small so as to provide all mandated information about the proper use of and warnings about the product. The equipment that applies the outsert is called an outserter or outserting machine.

Scientific use of the term
High-strength magnets such as those at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory are configured with an inner magnet called the insert and an outer magnet called the outsert.

External links
Video showing an outserting machine in action.

Magazine publishing
Advertising

Outsert


Fiddlesticks are traditional instruments used to add percussion to old-time and Cajun fiddle music, allowing two people to play the fiddle at the same time. While the fiddler plays in normal fashion, a second person uses a pair of straws, sticks, or knitting needles to tap out a rhythm on the strings over the upper fingerboard (between the bow and the fiddler's fingering hand).

Also called "beating the straws" or "playing the straws," this technique probably arose in the eastern United States. British folklorist Fred McCormick reports that he has never encountered it among British and Irish fiddlers, and suggests that it may have arisen on American plantations as a substitute for African musical instruments. The technique has become rarer over time as the music has changed,
but numerous examples have been recorded, for example in the "Mardi Gras Jig" by a group led by Cajun fiddler and singer Dewey Balfa, or by Al and Emily Cantrell.

References

External links
Tim Eriksen and Peter Irvine - Sandy Boys on YouTube

String instruments
North American percussion instruments

Fiddlesticks


Man in the Hills is a reggae album by Jamaican musician Burning Spear (Winston Rodney), released in 1976 (see 1976 in music) on Island Records.  Man in the Hills was follow-up to the seminal Marcus Garvey; Man in the Hills is usually considered a worthy follow-up, though less innovative and incendiary.  produced by Jack Ruby, Man in the Hills is a simple and unadorned album, with songs that reminisce about Spear's childhood in St. Anne's Bay, Jamaica.

"Door Peep" was originally recorded in 1969 at Studio One after Spear ran into Bob Marley (also from St. Anne's Bay); Spear later quotes Marley "And Bob was going to his farm. The man was moving with a donkey and some buckets and a fork, and cutlass and plants. We just reason man-to-man and I-man say wherein I would like to get involved in the music business. And Bob say, 'All right, just check Studio One.' "  The single was released but fared poorly on the Jamaican charts.

After Marcus Garvey, Spear's fame had grown considerably, and he was a star in Jamaica and cult sensation in the United Kingdom.  Man in the Hills was a much quieter and more restrained album than its predecessor, and was more pastoral and dreamlike than militant and radical (though songs like "Is It Good" and "No More War" continue to address social issues).

"Man in the Hills", the titular album opener evokes the superiority of rural living over urban.  In Jamaican history, the roots of radical protest, a national identity and the Rastafari movement, grew from communities formed by escaped slaves in the hills and (after emancipation in 1838) the so-called "Free Villages".

Track listing
"Man in the Hills" (Rodney) – 4:00
"It's Good" (Phillip Fullwood, Rodney) – 2:45
"No More War" (Rodney) – 3:19
"Black Soul" (Rodney) – 3:25
"Lion" (Rodney) – 3:14
"People Get Ready" (Rodney) – 3:22
"Children" (Rodney) – 3:44
"Mother" (Rodney) – 3:37
"Door Peep" (Rodney) – 2:40
"Groovy" (Rodney) – 3:53

Credits
Recorded at Randy's Recording Studio, North Parade; and Harry J Studio, Roosevelt Avenue, Kingston, Jamaica
Original album design and illustration: Neville Garrick

Musicians
Winston Rodney – lead vocals and percussion
Delroy Hines – harmony vocals
Rupert Willington – harmony vocals
Robbie Shakespeare – bass
Aston "Family Man" Barrett – bass
Leroy "Horsemouth" Wallace – drums
Bernard "Touter" Harvey – keyboards
Earl "Wire" Lindo – keyboards
Tyrone "Organ D" Downie – keyboards
Earl "Chinna" Smith – lead and rhythm guitar
Tony Chin – rhythm guitar
Bobby Ellis – trumpet
Richard "Dirty Harry" Hall – tenor saxophone
Herman Marquis – alto saxophone
Vincent "Trommie" Gordon – trombone

References

Burning Spear albums
1976 albums
Island Records albums

Man in the Hills


Robert Alexander Little,  (19 July 1895 – 27 May 1918), a World War I fighter pilot, is generally regarded as the most successful Australian flying ace, with an official tally of forty-seven victories. Born in Victoria, he travelled to England in 1915 and learned to fly at his own expense before joining the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS). Posted to the Western Front in June 1916, he flew Sopwith Pups, Triplanes and Camels with No. 8 Squadron RNAS, achieving thirty-eight victories within a year and earning the Distinguished Service Order and Bar, the Distinguished Service Cross and Bar, and the French Croix de guerre. Rested in July 1917, he volunteered to return to the front in March 1918 and scored a further nine victories with No. 3 Squadron RNAS (later No. 203 Squadron RAF) before he was killed in action on the night of 27 May, aged twenty-two.

Early life
Little was born on 19 July 1895 at Hawthorn, a suburb of Melbourne, to Canadian James Little, a seller of medical and surgical books, and his Victorian-born wife Susan. His family heritage was Scottish, and he was educated at Camberwell Grammar School and Scotch College, Melbourne, where he was a swimming medallist. He entered his father's business as a travelling salesman, and was living with his family at Windsor when World War I broke out in August 1914.

World War I
Long interested in aviation, Little decided to apply for pilot training at the Australian Army's Central Flying School in Point Cook, but with only four vacancies, he was rejected along with hundreds of others. He then decided to sail for England in July 1915 and become a qualified pilot at his own expense. Gaining his flying certificate with the Royal Aero Club at Hendon in October, he joined the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) as a probationary flight sub-lieutenant on 14 January 1916. He suffered badly from air sickness early on, most likely brought on by fumes from castor oil that was employed as an engine lubricant in the aircraft he flew in England.

Little arrived in France in June 1916 for service with No. 1 (Naval) Wing at Dunkirk, where he initially flew Sopwith 1½ Strutters in bombing raids. He married Vera Gertrude Field at the Congregational Church, Dover, on 16 September. The next month he was posted to No. 8 Squadron RNAS ("Naval Eight") flying Sopwith Pups on the Western Front, under fellow Australian Stanley Goble.  Little scored his first aerial victory on 23 November, destroying an enemy two-seater north-east of La Bassée. By the following February, he had four victories to his credit and was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross (DSC) for "conspicuous bravery in successfully attacking and bringing down hostile machines". In one action on 4 December, Little and Goble "fought like mad" against a large formation of German fighters, each claiming a Halberstadt; Little did not return to base with Goble and was thought lost, but had only landed near Allied lines to clear his jammed gun before taking off again to continue the fight.

On 24 April 1917, Little engaged a DFW C.V, forcing it to land. He then followed the German aircraft down to claim it as captured and personally take its crew prisoner at gunpoint. The Australian flipped his own plane in a ditch after touching down, prompting the surrendering enemy pilot to suggest: "It looks as if I have brought you down, not you me, doesn't it?" Naval Eight's conversion to the Sopwith Triplane in April saw Little begin to score heavily, eventually registering twenty-four victories in the type to bring his total to twenty-eight by 10 July, including twin victories in a day on four occasions. He was the squadron's top scorer with the Triplane, mostly in one airframe, N5493, that he christened "Blymp" and which also became the nickname of his baby son. The unit then began flying Sopwith Camels, in which he scored a further ten kills in July to make fourteen for the month. When he subsequently rotated back to England for rest, he was ranked flight lieutenant and credited with a total of thirty-eight victories, including fifteen destroyed or captured. A bar to his DSC had been gazetted on 29 June, for "exceptional daring and skill in aerial fighting on many occasions", and he received the French Croix de guerre on 11 July, becoming—along with fellow Australian RNAS ace Roderic (Stan) Dallas—one of the first three British Empire pilots to be so decorated. In August, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order "for exceptional skill and daring", followed by a bar to the decoration in September for "remarkable courage and boldness in attacking enemy machines". He was mentioned in despatches on 11 December, and promoted to flight commander the following month.

Despite Little's prowess in combat, as an aviator he was ordinary at best, making several crash-landings. What gave him his edge as a fighter pilot was his keen eye, excellent marksmanship, and willingness to single-handedly take on entire enemy formations and close in on his prey—down to twenty-five yards on occasion—before opening fire. Fellow No. 8 Squadron member Reggie Soar recalled, "Although not a polished pilot, he was one of the most aggressive ... an outstanding shot with both revolver and rifle ..."; ace Robert Comptson described Little as "not so much a leader as a brilliant lone hand ... Small in stature, with face set grimly, he seemed the epitome of deadliness". His squadron nicknamed him "Rikki", after the mongoose "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi", which outstrikes cobras in the story of the same name by Rudyard Kipling. Soar noted that as well as being skilful with guns, Little was "also a collector of wild flowers". His wife contended that his appearance in photographs belied his sense of humour. Squadron commander Raymond Collishaw, who would finish the war as the RNAS' top-scoring ace, summed up Little as "an outstanding character, bold, aggressive and courageous, yet he was gentle and kindly. A resolute and brave man."

Following a period of rest in England, Little turned down a desk assignment and volunteered to return to action on the Western Front, joining Lieutenant Colonel Collishaw's No. 3 Squadron RNAS in March 1918. The unit evolved into No. 203 Squadron of the new Royal Air Force on 1 April, formed after the merger of the RNAS and the Royal Flying Corps. Now ranked captain, and again flying Sopwith Camels, Little gained a further nine successes, beginning with a Fokker Triplane on 1 April, and concluding with two kills in one day on 22 May, an Albatros and a DFW. During this stretch of victories, on 21 April 1918, he was brought down unharmed by Friedrich Ehmann.

On 27 May, Little received reports of German Gotha bombers in the vicinity, and took off on a moonlit evening to intercept the raiders. As he closed with one of the bombers, his plane was caught in a searchlight beam and he was struck by a bullet that passed through both his thighs. He crash-landed in a field near Nœux, and bled to death before he was discovered the following morning by a passing gendarme. Little's skull and ankle had also been fractured in the impact; his body was identified by his friend and fellow ace, Charles Dawson Booker. Collishaw launched an investigation but it was never established whether the single bullet that hit Little had come from a gunner in the Gotha or from the ground.

Legacy

Little was buried in the village cemetery at Nœux, before his body was moved to Wavans British Cemetery in the Pas de Calais. Aged twenty-two, he left a widow and a son; in accordance with her husband's wishes, Vera travelled back to Australia to raise the boy. Of Little's forty-seven confirmed victories, twenty were credited as destroyed, two as captured, and twenty-five as "out of control"; he was believed to be responsible for many others driven down or forced to land, which were not counted in his official total. As well as the eighth most successful Commonwealth ace of World War I, and the ranking RNAS ace, this score made him the most prolific Australian ace of all time, ahead of Stan Dallas with an official score of thirty-nine, although modern research also credits Dallas with a tally numbering in the fifties.

The propeller blade from Little's Sopwith Triplane was fitted with a clock in its hub by his fellow officers, who presented it to his widow; she transported it back to Australia in three pieces and it later went on display at the Australian War Memorial, along with his awards and the wooden cross of his original burial place at Nœux. The Sopwith Pup he flew with No. 8 Squadron RNAS, N5182, was rebuilt to flying standard and in October 1976 led a flypast to commemorate the squadron's Diamond Jubilee, before going on permanent display at the Royal Air Force Museum, Hendon. One of the buildings of the Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA) in Canberra, opened in 1986, was named in Little's honour.

Notes

References

1895 births
1918 deaths
Military personnel from Melbourne
Australian World War I flying aces
British military personnel killed in World War I
Companions of the Distinguished Service Order
People educated at Camberwell Grammar School
People educated at Scotch College, Melbourne
Recipients of the Croix de Guerre 1914–1918 (France)
Recipients of the Distinguished Service Cross (United Kingdom)
Royal Navy officers
Royal Air Force officers
Royal Air Force personnel of World War I
Royal Naval Air Service aviators
Royal Navy officers of World War I
Australian people of Scottish descent
People from Hawthorn, Victoria

Robert A. Little


Busy work (also known as make-work and busywork) is an activity that is undertaken to pass time and stay busy but in and of itself has little or no actual value. Busy work occurs in business, military and other settings, in situations where people may be required to be present but may lack the opportunities, skills or need to do something more productive. People may engage in busy work to maintain an appearance of activity, in order to avoid criticism of being inactive or idle.

Education and work settings

In business and work settings, people may engage in busy work to maintain an appearance of activity to protect their employment status (to avoid termination or sanctions).

Workers believe that it is more important to maintain a constant appearance of working urgently so that they and others believe that what is being done is important. Constant urgency in workers can lead to disproportionate distribution of actual work, as workers may put off important work by attempting to complete previously designated less important tasks. Maintaining very high levels of constant busyness may actually be detrimental to the operations of a business or organization in which new tasks are not undertaken in a timely manner because workers are always very busy. That can also lead to workers taking shortcuts to accomplish tasks more quickly, which can negatively affect the quality of work results.

Busy work also can be counterproductive in work settings because it may not be aligned with the overall objectives and priorities of an organization's plans for attaining and maintaining success in its ventures. The assumption that activity in the workplace is more important than productivity in the workplace can lead to employees thinking that quantity of work is better than quality of work, which is not productive to the overall functioning of a business.

Military settings
Busy work is used in armed forces to keep servicemembers from becoming bored, inactive and idle. Tasks of this sort include drill, memorizing regulations, getting haircuts, spit and polishing footwear and other cleaning chores such as scrubbing the deck.

See also

 Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, a 2018 book by anthropologist David Graeber
 Parkinson's law
 Boondoggle
 Displacement activity
 Handwaving
 Make-work job
 Pastime
 Penal labour
 Presenteeism
 Red tape
 Underemployment
 Vacuum activity
 Workhouse

References

Sources
 (1909) Education by doing: occupations and busy work for primary classes – Anna Johnson – Google Books
 (2010) Do More Great Work: Stop the Busywork, and Start the Work That Matters - Michael Bungay Stanier - Google Books
 USATODAY.com - Be sure 'busy work' isn't keeping you from growing your business
 (2012) Why Busy Work Doesn't Work - John Kotter

External links

School terminology
Standards-based education
Education reform
Business terms
Labor
Employment

Busy work


Alpine tundra is a type of natural region or biome that does not contain trees because it is at high elevation, with an associated harsh climate. As the latitude of a location approaches the poles, the threshold elevation for alpine tundra gets lower until it reaches sea level, and alpine tundra merges with polar tundra.

The high elevation causes an adverse climate, which is too cold and windy to support tree growth. Alpine tundra transitions to sub-alpine forests below the tree line; stunted forests occurring at the forest-tundra ecotone are known as krummholz. With increasing elevation it ends at the snow line where snow and ice persist through summer.

Alpine tundra occurs in mountains worldwide. The flora of the alpine tundra is characterized by dwarf shrubs close to the ground. The cold climate of the alpine tundra is caused by adiabatic cooling of air, and is similar to polar climate.

Geography
Alpine tundra occurs at high enough altitude at any latitude. Portions of montane grasslands and shrublands ecoregions worldwide include alpine tundra. Large regions of alpine tundra occur in the North American Cordillera and parts of the northern Appalachian Mountains in North America, the Alps and Pyrenees of Europe, the Himalaya and Karakoram of Asia, the Andes of South America, the Eastern Rift mountains of Africa, the Snowy Mountains of Australia, the South Island of New Zealand, and the Scandinavian mountains

Alpine tundra occupies high-mountain summits, slopes, and ridges above timberline. Aspect plays a role as well; the treeline often occurs at higher elevations on warmer equator-facing slopes. Because the alpine zone is present only on mountains, much of the landscape is rugged and broken, with rocky, snowcapped peaks, cliffs, and talus slopes, but also contains areas of gently rolling to almost flat topography.

Averaging over many locations and local microclimates, the treeline rises  when moving 1 degree south from 70 to 50°N, and  per degree from 50 to 30°N. Between 30°N and 20°S, the treeline is roughly constant, between .

Climate

Alpine climate is the average weather (climate) for the alpine tundra. The climate becomes colder at high elevations—this characteristic is described by the lapse rate of air: air tends to get colder as it rises, since it expands. The dry adiabatic lapse rate is 10 °C per km (5.5 °F per 1000 ft) of elevation or altitude. Therefore, moving up  on a mountain is roughly equivalent to moving 80 kilometers (45 miles or 0.75° of latitude) towards the pole. This relationship is only approximate, however, since local factors such as proximity to oceans can drastically modify the climate.

In the alpine tundra, trees cannot tolerate the environmental conditions (usually cold temperatures, extreme snowpack, or associated lack of available moisture). Typical high-elevation growing seasons range from 45 to 90 days, with average summer temperatures near . Growing season temperatures frequently fall below freezing, and frost occurs throughout the growing season in many areas. Precipitation occurs mainly as winter snow, but soil water availability is highly variable with season, location, and topography. For example, snowfields commonly accumulate on the lee sides of ridges while ridgelines may remain nearly snow free due to redistribution by wind. Some alpine habitats may be up to 70% snow free in winter. High winds are common in alpine ecosystems, and can cause significant soil erosion and be physically and physiologically detrimental to plants. Also, wind coupled with high solar radiation can promote extremely high rates of evaporation and transpiration.

Quantifying the climate

There have been several attempts at quantifying what constitutes an alpine climate.

Climatologist Wladimir Köppen demonstrated a relationship between the Arctic and Antarctic tree lines and the 10 °C summer isotherm; i.e., places where the average temperature in the warmest calendar month of the year is below 10 °C cannot support forests. See Köppen climate classification for more information.

Otto Nordenskjöld theorized that winter conditions also play a role: His formula is W = 9 − 0.1 C, where W is the average temperature in the warmest month and C the average of the coldest month, both in degrees Celsius (this would mean, for example, that if a particular location had an average temperature of  in its coldest month, the warmest month would need to average  or higher for trees to be able to survive there).

In 1947, Holdridge improved on these schemes, by defining biotemperature: the mean annual temperature, where all temperatures below 0 °C are treated as 0 °C (because it makes no difference to plant life, being dormant). If the mean biotemperature is between , Holdridge quantifies the climate as alpine.

Flora

Since the habitat of alpine vegetation is subject to intense radiation, wind, cold, snow, and ice, it grows close to the ground and consists mainly of perennial grasses, sedges, and forbs. Perennial herbs (including grasses, sedges, and low woody or semi-woody shrubs) dominate the alpine landscape; they have much more root and rhizome biomass than that of shoots, leaves, and flowers. The roots and rhizomes not only function in water and nutrient absorption but also play a very important role in over-winter carbohydrate storage. Annual plants are rare in this ecosystem and usually are only a few inches tall, with weak root systems. Other common plant life-forms include prostrate shrubs; tussock-forming graminoids; cushion plants; and cryptogams, such as bryophytes and lichens.

Relative to lower elevation areas in the same region, alpine regions have a high rate of endemism and a high diversity of plant species. This taxonomic diversity can be attributed to geographical isolation, climate changes, glaciation, microhabitat differentiation, and different histories of migration or evolution or both. These phenomena contribute to plant diversity by introducing new flora and favoring adaptations, both of new species and the dispersal of pre-existing species.

Though tundra covers only a minority of the earth's surface (17-20%), the biodiversity of plant species is important to human nutrition.  Of the 20 plant species that make up 80% of human food, 7 of them (35%) originated in this region.

Plants have adapted to the harsh alpine environment. Cushion plants, looking like ground-hugging clumps of moss, escape the strong winds blowing a few inches above them. Many flowering plants of the alpine tundra have dense hairs on stems and leaves to provide wind protection or red-colored pigments capable of converting the sun's light rays into heat. Some plants take two or more years to form flower buds, which survive the winter below the surface and then open and produce fruit with seeds in the few weeks of summer. In various areas of alpine tundra, woody plant encroachment is observed.

Alpine areas are unique because of the severity and complexity of their environmental conditions. Very small changes in topography – as small as 1 foot (0.3 m) or less – may mean the difference between a windswept area or an area of snow accumulation, changing the potential productivity and plant community drastically. Between these extremes of drought versus saturation, several intermediate environments may exist all within a few yards of each other, depending on topography, substrate, and climate. Alpine vegetation generally occurs in a mosaic of small patches with widely differing environmental conditions. Vegetation types vary from cushion and rosette plants on the ridges and in the rock crannies; to herbaceous and grassy vegetation along the slopes; dwarf shrubs with grasses and forbs below the melting snowdrifts; and sedges, grasses, low shrubs, and mosses in the bogs and along the brooks.

Alpine meadows form where sediments from the weathering of rocks has produced soils well-developed enough to support grasses and sedges. Non-flowering lichens cling to rocks and soil. Their enclosed algal cells can photosynthesize at any temperature above , and the outer fungal layers can absorb more than their own weight in water. The adaptations for survival of drying winds and cold may make tundra vegetation seem very hardy, but in some respects the tundra is very fragile. Repeated footsteps often destroy tundra plants, allowing exposed soil to blow away; recovery may take hundreds of years.

Fauna

Because alpine tundra is located in various widely separated regions of the Earth, there is no animal species common to all areas of alpine tundra. Some animals of alpine tundra environments include the kea, marmot, mountain goat, bighorn sheep, chinchilla, Himalayan tahr, yak, snow leopard, and pika.

See also
 Montane grasslands and shrublands
 Urals montane tundra and taiga
 Polonyna (montane meadow)
 Montane ecosystems
 Tundra

References

External links

Climate by mountain range
Tundra
Montane grasslands and shrublands
Mountain meteorology
Natural regions
Tundra

Alpine tundra


Ralph Nelson Elliott (28 July 1871 – 15 January 1948) was an American accountant and author whose study of stock market data led him to develop the Wave Principle, a description of the cyclical nature of trader psychology and a form of technical analysis. It identifies trends and reversals in financial markets. These cyclical patterns in price movements are known among practitioners of the method as Elliott waves.

Personal life and career
Elliott was born in Marysville, Kansas, and later moved to San Antonio, Texas. He entered the accounting field in the mid-1890s and worked primarily in executive positions for railroad companies in Central America and Mexico. In 1903, Elliott married Mary Elizabeth Fitzpatrick (1869–1941), who accompanied him during his extended time working as an expatriate in Mexico. Civil unrest there brought the couple back to the United States and eventually to a residence in New York City, where Elliott started a successful consulting business.  In 1924, the United States Department of State appointed Elliott to the post of Chief Accountant for Nicaragua, which was under American control at the time.  Not long afterward, Elliott wrote two books based on his professional experiences: Tea Room and Cafeteria Management
and The Future of Latin America.

Elliott Wave Principle
In the early 1930s, Elliott began a systematic study of seventy-five years of stock market data, including index charts with increments ranging from yearly to half-hourly prices.  In August 1938, he detailed his results by publishing his third book in collaboration with Charles J. Collins, entitled The Wave Principle.  Elliott stated that, while stock market prices may appear random and unpredictable, they actually follow predictable, natural laws, and can be measured and forecast using Fibonacci numbers. Soon after the publication of The Wave Principle, Financial World magazine commissioned Elliott to write twelve articles under the book title, describing his method of market forecasting.

In the early 1940s, Elliott expanded the theory to apply to all collective human behavior. His final major work was his most comprehensive:  Nature's Law –The Secret of the Universe published in June, 1946, two years before he died.

In the years after Elliott's death, other practitioners, including Charles Collins, Hamilton Bolton, Richard Russell, and A.J. Frost continued to use the wave principle and provide forecasts to investors. Robert Prechter discovered Elliott's work as a market technician at Merrill Lynch, and used it as a basis for the book Elliott Wave Principle, coauthored with Frost in 1978. Prechter's prominence as a forecaster during the bull market of the 1980s helped bring the wave principle its greatest exposure up to that time.

See also
 The Elliott Wave Theorist
 Behavioral finance
 Daniel Kahneman

References

1871 births
1948 deaths
People from Marysville, Kansas
American accountants
Technical analysts

Ralph Nelson Elliott


Pretty Wild is an American reality television series that premiered on E! on March 14, 2010 and ran for one season. The series chronicles the lives of sisters Alexis Neiers and Gabby Neiers along with their now estranged unofficially adopted "sister" Tess Taylor as they make their way into the Hollywood social scene. The girls and their family initially resided in Westlake Village, California but eventually moved to Hollywood Hills West, Los Angeles.

In mid-2009, after the pilot was filmed, Alexis was arrested for being involved with a group known as the "Bling Ring" that broke into the homes of many celebrities, including Orlando Bloom, Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and Rachel Bilson. Pretty Wild partly chronicles Alexis's trial. On May 10, 2010, Alexis pleaded no contest to felony burglary and was sentenced to six months in Los Angeles County Jail. Her sentence was scheduled to begin June 24, 2010.

In the London Review of Books, Andrew O'Hagan wrote about the series' principals: "If real fame is a mask that eats into the face, then pseudo-fame, the current kind, might be a decoy that eats into the brain. You often meet those people in California, people who have forgotten that you are real, that you watch the news, that you know who they really are. They begin to lie to journalists and themselves with the same grim hope: if I say this and no one contradicts me it might be true. A sense of entitlement stands in for personal values. They don't mind if they're fooling you and fooling themselves, so long as they can keep the show on the road."

A feature film, The Bling Ring, was released in the mid-2013. The movie is based on the burglaries committed by the eponymous group.

Cast
 Tess Taylor is the adopted daughter of Andrea Arlington. She is pursuing a modeling career and is a Playboy Cyber Girl.
 Alexis Neiers is also pursuing a modeling career, she tries to clear her name after an arrest related to "Bling Ring" thefts.
 Gabby Neiers is the younger sister of Alexis.
 Andrea Arlington is the mother of Tess, Alexis and Gabby. She is a former 1980s lingerie model who manages Tess' and Alexis' modeling careers.
 Jerry Dunn is Andrea's husband and stepfather of Alexis, Gabby and Tess.

Episodes

References

General references

2010s American reality television series
2010 American television series debuts
2010 American television series endings
English-language television shows
E! original programming
Television shows set in Los Angeles

Pretty Wild


The Nikkatsu Corporation (日活株式会社, Nikkatsu Kabushiki-gaisha) is a Japanese entertainment company known for its film and television productions. It is Japan's oldest major movie studio, founded in 1912 during the silent film era. The name Nikkatsu amalgamates the words Nippon Katsudō Shashin, literally "Japan Motion Pictures".

Overview
Nikkatsu's history dates back as early as 1912 when 4 companies merged to form Nippon Katsudo Shashin Corporation, the first film conglomerate in the region to produce, distribute and exhibit theatrical films. In 1952 Chofu Studio was built in Tokyo as the largest modern film studio in the Asia Pacific Region at the time; the studio even had a permanent set of Ginza city. It quickly became the cornerstone of the company's Golden Era, together with its string of attractive stars who were then all exclusive to Nikkatsu; the legendary superstar Yujiro Ishihara, handsome young actors under the "Nikkatsu New Face" banner including Akira Kobayashi and Joe Shishido; actresses such as Sayuri Yoshinaga and Ruriko Asaoka; and directors Seijun Suzuki and Shohei Imamura. Nikkatsu was the leading studio in Japan, enjoying box office mega-hits with its action films starring Ishihara ("Crazed Fruit"), teenage love stories starring Yoshinaga ("Cupola, Where the Furnaces Grow"), and "Branded to Kill" starring Joe Shishido, works with a continuing international appeal to this day - the films were so successful that Ishihara and Yoshinaga are still regarded as icons of the Showa period.

When cinema attendance began to drop, Japanese studios slashed their annual film production. Nikkatsu, however, took a unique turn in 1971 when it launched the "Nikkatsu Roman Porn" brand, namely films for the adult audience. As one director recalls, "I had total creative freedom, as long as I kept some nudity in the film", the brand enabled Nikkatsu to be the only major studio in Japan at the time to continue producing films and hire young film makers. Thus, Nikkatsu soon became the hub for upcoming innovative talents, and many of the directors who were given this rare opportunity, later became dominant film makers in Japan; amongst them are Oscar winner Youjiro Takita ("Departure"), multi-time Japanese Academy winners Masayuki Suo ("Shall We Dance?"), Yoshimitsu Morita, Youichi Sai, Shinji Soumai, and many more. The brand continued until 1988.

In 2005, Naoki Sato was appointed President of the company. Originally a producer himself, Nikkatsu's recent array of titles under his leadership includes cutting-edge genre films by Sion Sono and Takashi Miike, and dramatical masterpieces. They have been highly acclaimed, including numerous Japanese Academy winners and nominees such as "Rebirth", "Cold Fish" and "The Devil's Path".

Today
Today, Nikkatsu's  business activities include operation of the production studio, overseas film acquisition, distribution, a cable TV channel (Channel NECO) and a Film Course at Josai International University. It is also a member of the Yomiuri-Nippon TV group, the leading media conglomerate in Japan.

In today's fast evolving market, Nikkatsu has a focus on international activities - in 2014, the company established Kantana Japan, a JV with a Thai production group - and seeks to work more closely with partners outside the industry and around the globe.

Japanese entertainment companies
1912 establishments in Asia

Nikkatsu


Alpine transhumance is transhumance as practiced in the Alps, that is, a seasonal droving of grazing livestock between the valleys in winter and the high mountain pastures in summer (German  from the term for "seasonal mountain pasture", ). Transhumance is a traditional practice that has shaped much of the landscape in the Alps, as without it, most areas below  would be forests.
While tourism and industry contribute today much to Alpine economy, seasonal migration to high pastures is still practiced in Bavaria, Austria, Slovenia, Italy, France and Switzerland, except in their most frequented tourist centers. In some places, cattle are taken care of by local farmer families who move to higher places. In others, this job is for herdsmen who are employees of the cooperative owning the pastures.

Most Alpine pastures are below ; all are below .
The higher regions not suitable for transhumance are known as the High Alps.

Etymology
The German word Alp or Alm (meaning "seasonal mountain pasture", from Old High German alpa, alba) is originally identical to the name of the Alps (German Alpen) itself, probably a pre-Roman (and possibly pre-Indo-European) term for "mountain".
In French, the corresponding word for "alpine pasture" is alpage.

History

Evidence survives of a transhumance economy in the Alps dating to the later Neolithic period (c. 3000 BCE),
with evidence for pastures above the treeline reported for the Bronze Age (17th to 11th centuries BCE)  in the Northern Limestone Alps.

The transhumance system in the Alps has remained virtually unchanged since at least the High Middle Ages, with a document referring to a summer pasture from 1204.
Along the edge of the Alps, starting around 1300  in west and central Switzerland and a little later in eastern Switzerland, cattle production became the primary agricultural activity.  A number of specialized cattle markets grew up in Arona, Bellinzona, Como and Varese in the south and Villeneuve in the west.  In these communities on the edge of the Alps, transhumance included both the vertical movement of cattle to the alpine pastures as well as horizontal movement to the cattle markets.  In the communities located in the central Alps, the herds were more diverse.  Generally there were large herds of sheep with much smaller cattle herds and other animals such as pigs and goats.

While the inhabitants of the Alps had practised transhumance for thousands of years, during the Late Middle Ages it became increasingly important as the population decreased following the Black Death and the wars of this era.  Cattle production was much less manpower-intensive than farming, which was ideal with the reduced population.  However, cattle production is much more capital- and especially land-intensive.  Cattle production became an investment opportunity for monasteries and citizens of nearby cities.  The investors would purchase the cattle and then rent the beasts out to small farmers or to herders for the summer.  The smaller alpine communities generally did not want "foreign" cattle pastured in their alpine pastures, which led to conflicts between the alpine farming communities and the neighboring cities and monasteries.  Conflicts over grazing rights and ownership of the alpine meadows led to several wars within what is now Switzerland, including the pivotal Battle of Morgarten (1315), which started due to a long-simmering feud between Schwyz and Einsiedeln Abbey.

In 2011, the UNESCO declared Alpine transhumance in the Bregenz Forest as intangible cultural heritage.

Agriculture near the Alps
In the valleys along the edge of the Alps, cattle production with associated transhumance was generally the rule.  However, in the inner alpine valleys the climate was drier which allowed farming even at higher elevations.  These areas tended to be mixed between farming and animal husbandry, with the animals being kept mainly for fertilizer and plowing rather than food.

However, in both regions the yearly movement was generally similar. Throughout the year, most of the population of the village remained on the valley floor and farmed the surrounding land for grains and hay.  In the spring the herdsmen took the animals up to the middle pastures on the mountain slopes. In the summer, pigs were left in the middle pastures while the rest of the animals were moved to the high alpine pasture. At the end of September the animals were moved back to the lower pastures and cattle were stabled in the following month. Sheep and goats were stabled in December, unless the winter was mild, then they remained at the middle pastures with the pigs.

In the regions where breeding dominated, the farms were relatively large and isolated from each other.  Where both breeding and farming were mixed, the plots were generally smaller and common fields were shared between the community. During the Middle Ages many fields were converted into meadows, because of the prevalence of the breeding.  In the north the fields were rotated without a fallow period. They were cultivated for 2 to 5 years, then used as a meadow (and fertilized by the animals) for 3 to 10 years before going back under cultivation. However, in the mountain valleys, the fields near the communities were cultivated every year (sometimes producing two crops a year in Ticino) while the outer fields and alpine pastures were more often allowed to lie fallow or used as a meadow.

Cheese production

Alpine transhumance has a strong impact on the production of cheese in the Alps. It ensures that cows, sheep and goats produce high-quality aromatic milk, the so-called Heumilch ("hay milk"), based on their special diet of natural meadow grasses. The use of hay milk in cheese production contributes to the distinctive flavour that determines more than 30 Alpine cheeses, including Alpkäse, Bergkäse and Sura Kees. The chief shepherd in charge of the Alp and responsible for the cheese production is known as the Senn.

The Käsestraße Bregenzerwald (Bregenz Forest cheese trail) in Vorarlberg is an association of farmers which aims at contributing to the maintenance of small scale agriculture and the diversity of local products in the Bregenz Forest. Members of the association include dairymen who will inform tourists about artisan cheese production.

Culture and folklore

Some people spent the winters isolated in the high pastures. In Johanna Spyri's novel Heidi, the "Alp-Öhi"" ("high-pasture grandfather") is such a person, despising and despised by the villagers.

Transhumance contributes a great deal to traditional Alpine culture, such as Yodel, Alphorn or Schwingen.
Swiss folklore also records many traditional tales about mythological creatures such as dwarves (Barbegazi, etc.) inhabiting the Alpine pastures, either helpful or causing mischief; in particular, this is to punish the cruelty or discourtesy of a bad Senn. In many cases, the stories tell about curses on specific Alps, appearances of the devil or spirits of earlier Sennen, etc.

Statistics
In 1997, Austria had over 12,000 sites where 70,000 farmers took care of about 500,000 cattle. Alpine pastures amount to a quarter of the farmland.

Bavaria had 1,384 sites hosting 48,000 cattle, about half of them in Upper Bavaria and the other half in the Allgäu.

In Switzerland, about 380,000 cattle including 130,000 milk cows as well as 200,000 sheep are in summer on high pastures. Milk from cows here is usually made into local cheese specialities, handmade using traditional methods and tools. Alpine pastures amount to 35 percent of Swiss farmland and 13 percent of the entire country. The total population of mountain farmers has decreased to about 43,000 (in 1980) from 160,000 (in 1910).  The farmers that are involved in mountain farming only make up about 15% of the total farming population in Switzerland.

See also
History of the Alps
List of valleys of the Alps
Animal husbandry
Lyoba
Pastoralism
Livestock transportation
Droving
Swiss folklore
Pre-Christian Alpine traditions

References

External links

 AINSA - Verein für alpine Forschung
 Research programme on Swiss summer farms (in German, French, Italian)
 Swiss Federal Statistical Office map of land use
 What you can learn by following the herd in Italy, by Alexis Marie Adams, National Geographic, April 23, 2020.

Alps
History of the Alps
Alps
Ecology of the Alps
Economy of Europe

de:Alm (Bergweide)#Almwirtschaft

Alpine transhumance


Marie-Lætitia  de Solms née Bonaparte-Wyse (25 April 1831 – 6 February 1902), was a French author and literary hostess.

Biography
She was born in Waterford, Ireland, a granddaughter of Lucien Bonaparte (making her Emperor Napoleon I's great-niece) by his second wife, through the marriage of his daughter Letizia to Sir Thomas Wyse, an Irishman, British plenipotentiary at Athens, and Member of Parliament. However, she was born after her mother had been separated from Wyse for three years, and her biological father was British Army officer Captain Studholme John Hodgson.

She was educated in Paris. In December 1848, aged seventeen, Marie (secretly called Marie-Studholmine) married Frédéric Joseph de Solms (1815–63), a rich gentleman from Strasbourg who soon left her to go to America. Marie, known as the "Princess de Solms", remained with her mother, who kept a brilliant salon in Paris frequented by Victor Hugo, Eugène Sue, the younger Alexandre Dumas, and other writers.

In the early 1850s Marie had an affair with Count Alexis de Pommereu that produced a son in 1852. In February 1853, French authorities ordered her expulsion from the Empire, after accusations that she had illegally borne the name Bonaparte and had stirred up "scandalous disorders". There were however reports that Emperor Napoleon III had secretly paid his beautiful young cousin a number of visits, that the jealous Empress Eugenie had learned of the visits and told her husband that Marie maintained a salon of subversives, and that he had thereafter ordered her expulsion.

In August 1853 Marie settled at Aix-les-Bains in Savoy, then part of the Kingdom of Sardinia, where her lover (Pommereu) built her a chalet that soon became the center of a new literary salon. She went often to Turin, the kingdom's capital, where she established yet another salon at the Hôtel Feder. She maintained friendships with Hugo, Sue, Dumas and others, including Lajos Kossuth, Alphonse de Lamartine, Félicité Robert de Lamennais, Henri Rochefort, Tony Revillon, and the United States minister to Sardinia, John Moncure Daniel.

In 1859 Napoleon III's profligate cousin, Prince Napoleon, was betrothed to Clotilde, the fifteen-year-old daughter of King Vittorio Emanuele II of Sardinia. This was done as part of an agreement concluded by the king's prime minister, Count Cavour, to guarantee French support for Sardinia in the oncoming war to free northern Italy from Austrian occupation. (The king, openly unhappy with the betrothal, was secretly pleased.) Turin society was scandalized when the Princess de Solms flouted the emperor by appearing at the betrothal ball on the arm of U.S. Minister Daniel.

She was an early woman journalist, and through Sainte-Beuve, Marie contributed to Le Constitutionnel under the pen name "Baron de Stock". She also wrote for the Pays and the Turf. After Savoy was annexed to France (1860) as another part of the agreement between Napoleon III and Cavour, Marie went back to Paris where she played a prominent part in the literary and social events of the time. She gathered in her salon men of all shades of opinion. In 1863, her husband having died, she remarried the Piedmontese statesman Urbano Rattazzi, and lived with him in Italy where she was known as "Divina Fanciulla". After his death in June 1873, Madame Rattazzi returned to Paris, and a few months later married her Spanish friend, under-secretary Don Luis de Rute y Ginez (1844–89), whom she also outlived. Marie died a widow in 1902 in Paris.

She had one son, Alexis de Solms (1852–1927), fathered by her lover, Count Alexis de Pommereu; one daughter, Romana Rattazzi (1871–1943), by her second husband; and two adopted daughters, Teresa de Rute (1883–89) and Dolores de Rute (1885–88), with her third husband.

She was buried in Aix-les-Bains (France).

Writings
Her writings consist of miscellaneous sketches, verses, plays, and novels, such as Si j'etais reine (1868) and Les mariages de la créole (1866), reprinted under the title La chanteuse (1870). Her 1867 novel Bicheville, a thinly disguised attack on the society of Florence, capital of the new Kingdom of Italy, caused serious embarrassment to Rattazzi, who was serving as prime minister of the recently established kingdom. She also wrote L'Aventurier des colonies (1885), a drama; and the volume of tales Enigme sans clef (1894).

In 1881 she edited Rattazzi et son temps, and in the last two or three years of her life published two volumes of her own memoirs, and edited the Nouvelle revue internationale, to which she also contributed a significant amount.

References

Literature
 Bridges, Peter.  Pen of Fire: John Moncure Daniel (Kent, Oh.: Kent State University Press, 2002)
 Dictionnaire du Second Empire (Paris: Librairie Artheme Fayard, 1995), 1205
 Grand Dictionnaire Universel du XIX Siecle (Larouse) (Paris: Slatkine, 1982), 13:730
 Grierson, Parisian Portraits (New York, 1913)

External links

1831 births
1902 deaths
19th-century French women writers
French editors
French salon-holders
French journalists
Marie
House of Solms
French women novelists
French women memoirists
Writers from Waterford (city)
19th-century French novelists
19th-century French memoirists

Marie Bonaparte-Wyse


Allen Weinstein (September 1, 1937 – June 18, 2015) was an American historian, educator, and federal official who served in several different offices. He was, under the Reagan administration, cofounder of the National Endowment for Democracy in 1983. He served as the Archivist of the United States from February 16, 2005, until his resignation on December 19, 2008. After his resignation, he returned to the International Foundation for Electoral Systems as a senior strategist and was a visiting faculty member at the University of Maryland.

Early life and education
The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Weinstein was born in New York City in 1937, the youngest of three children. His parents owned several delis in the Bronx and Queens. He graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School and City College of New York, then received a Ph.D. in American studies from Yale University.

Career

Professor and editor
He taught at Smith College from 1966 to 1981. Briefly, in 1981, he served on the editorial staff for The Washington Post and was an executive editor of The Washington Quarterly from 1981 to 1983. In 1981, he moved to Georgetown University, where he was a professor until 1984. In 1982, he was a member of the U.S. delegation to the UNESCO World Conference on Cultural Policies, and in 1983 he served on the U.S. delegation to the UNESCO-sponsored International Program for the Development of Communication. He was a professor of history at Boston University from 1985 to 1989. In 2009, after he resigned from the position of Archivist of the United States, he taught history at the University of Maryland.

During his career in education, Weinstein received two Senior Fulbright Lectureships, a fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and a fellowship at the American Council for Learned Societies.

International elections
In 1985 Weinstein founded The Center for Democracy, where he served as president until the organization merged with the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES) in 2003. At the request of Senators Lugar and Pell of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the Center for Democracy organized a bipartisan group of election lawyers to oversee the preparations for the February 1986 elections in the Philippines. At Ronald Reagan's request, Weinstein returned to the Philippines to continue to monitor the election procedures. The Center drafted the official report of the U.S. Observer Delegation, and went on to work with President Aquino's government on matters of electoral procedure. While president he also chaired the organization's observation missions to  El Salvador (1991), Nicaragua (1989–90, 1996), Panama (1988–89), and Russia (1991, 1996, 2000). After the organizations merged, Weinstein remained on staff at IFES as their senior adviser until he was selected as the Archivist of the United States. He returned to IFES in 2009.

For his work in international elections work, Weinstein received the United Nations Peace Medal (1986) and the Council of Europe's Silver Medal (1990 and 1996).

Board and advisory positions
Weinstein was a founding member in 1985 of the board of directors of the United States Institute of Peace and chairman of its education and training committee, remaining a director until 2001, and now serves on the chairman's advisory council. He was a founding officer of the Strasbourg-based International Institute for Democracy from 1989 to 2001. He chaired the judging panel for the annual International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award from 1995 to 2003. He served on the advisory council of the LBJ School of Public Affairs (University of Texas-Austin). He was chairman of the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library's advisory council. He chaired the annual "Global Panel" in the Netherlands from 1993 to 1998. From 1982 to 1991 he was a member of the Foreign Policy Association's editorial advisory board.

Death
Weinstein died of pneumonia on June 18, 2015, aged 77, in a nursing home in Gaithersburg, Maryland, after suffering from Parkinson's disease.

Legacy

Alger Hiss case
In 1970, Weinstein began researching the Alger Hiss case for a book. Reviewing the case, John Ehrman wrote at the official CIA website that initially, Weinstein "believed that Hiss had not been a Communist or a spy."
Weinstein's extensive research included interviews with former Soviet intelligence officers who had worked with Chambers and a Freedom of Information request that eventually yielded 30,000 pages of FBI and CIA files. Ehrman continues "Hiss also cooperated with Weinstein, granting him six interviews and access to the defense's legal files. After plowing through the data, however, Weinstein did what no previous Hiss defender had done: he changed his mind."

Controversy resulted when Weinstein indicated in a 1976 book review that he now believed that Hiss was guilty, and grew with the publication in 1978 of Weinstein's book, Perjury: The Hiss–Chambers Case. The book and the conclusions expressed in it have aroused some controversy; The Nation has since published a series of articles critical of Weinstein. In 1997, editor Victor Navasky published what he claimed as evidence that Weinstein had misquoted, misrepresented, or misconstrued several of his interview subjects for Perjury. One of these subjects, Samuel Krieger, sued Weinstein for libel in 1979 for misquoting him and incorrectly identifying him as a fugitive murder suspect, leading Weinstein to settle out of court by issuing a public apology and paying Krieger $17,500.
In 2004, Jon Wiener accused Weinstein in The Nation of breaching professional ethics by paying for exclusive access to Soviet archives for his 1999 book The Haunted Wood, and of refusing to allow other researchers access to his personal archives.

Other sources, including Harvard professor Daniel Aaron, Sidney Hook, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin and Garry Wills, support Weinstein's scholarship. Ellen Schrecker has "explicitly acknowledge[d] that the 1999 publication of Allen Weinstein's The Haunted Wood finally convinced me of the guilt of the major communist spies." In 2009, historian Eduard Mark wrote that "The declassification of Venona excepted, no development since the end of the Cold War has affected the study of Soviet espionage in the United States as much as the work jointly written by Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood."

National Archives

In his obituary, National Archivist David Ferriero noted the following achievements by Weinstein:
 Restoration of public trust through declassification and release of interagency agreements with audit and other procedures
 Establishment of National Declassification Initiative to address challenges in policies, procedures, structure, and resources
 Expansion of public outreach with Foundation for the National Archives via Digital Vaults and Boeing Learning Center
 Creation of "First Preservers" program to preserve vital records

Another change at the Archives that Weinstein affected, albeit indirectly, was the creation of an anti-harassment policy by Ferriero in 2010, partially in response to complaints about Weinstein's conduct at the Archives.  The policy was further codified and strengthened in 2013.

Sexual assault allegations
In 2018, it came to light that Weinstein's resignation from the National Archives was forced.  An investigation by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) found credible complaints of sexual harassment, sexual assault, or both from six female employees from 2005–2007.  Weinstein's defense was that the medication he was taking for Parkinson's disease was at fault.  Eventually, despite resistance from the White House Counsel, he agreed to resign, but the reasons why were not publicly disclosed until FOIA requests were made in 2017–2018.  During his tenure as a professor at the University of Maryland afterward, according to anonymous sources quoted in an article in The Daily Beast, Weinstein allegedly sexually assaulted a graduate student in 2010.  The real reason for Weinstein's departure two weeks afterward was the administration firing him after hearing the complaint, rather than health reasons.

Publications
 Prelude to Populism: Origins of the Silver Issue, 1867–1878 (Yale University Press, 1970) ()
 Freedom and Crisis: An American History (Random House, 1974) ()
 Perjury: The Hiss–Chambers Case (Knopf 1978) ()
 The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—The Stalin Era (with Alexander Vassiliev) (Random House, 1999) ()
 The Story of America: Freedom and Crisis from Settlement to Superpower (with David Rubel) (DK Publishing, 2002) ()

References

External links

Bio, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)
"Testimony of Allen Weinstein Regarding His Nomination as Archivist of the United States" July 22, 2004
Allen Weinstein Becomes Ninth Archivist of the United States, The American Historical Association.

Interviewer of E.L. Doctorow, part of the Archives' "American Conversation" series (September 25, 2008)

1937 births
2015 deaths
American archivists
City College of New York alumni
Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni
Smith College faculty
Georgetown University faculty
Boston University faculty
American people of Russian-Jewish descent
Jewish American historians
American male non-fiction writers
American historians of espionage
Historians from New York (state)
DeWitt Clinton High School alumni
National Archives and Records Administration
George W. Bush administration personnel
People with Parkinson's disease
Deaths from pneumonia in Maryland

Allen Weinstein


Wood Street is a street in the City of London, the historic centre and primary financial district of London. It originates in the south at a junction with Cheapside; heading north it crosses Gresham Street and London Wall. The northernmost end runs alongside The Postern, part of the Barbican estate, stopping at Andrewes House. Today Wood Street lies within the wards of Bassishaw (north of Gresham Street) and Cheap (south of Gresham Street).

The street was originally the main north–south route through the Roman Fort, which was discovered after World War II bombing. The north gate of the fort became Cripplegate, the south gate of the fort was just south of the junction with Love Lane, and the road diverts slightly to the east suggesting that the gate was blocked up or in use, and they had to knock through the Roman fort wall to allow Wood Street to continue.

It has been suggested that this was an early road after the so-called Alfredian restoration of the City in around 886 AD. The road led from the main port at Queenhithe (Bread Street) to the main market street at Cheapside and then on north to Cripplegate and out of London to the north.

Wood Street was formerly the location of the headquarters of the City of London Police, at its corner with Love Lane, before leaving the site in 2020. There is a tower on a traffic island in the middle of the street, which is all that remains of the church of St Alban, Wood Street. Other notable buildings include 88 Wood Street, and the hall of the Worshipful Company of Pewterers on nearby Oat Lane.

See also
Aldermanbury
Basinghall Street
Wood Street Counter

References

External links

Streets in the City of London

Wood Street, London


The coronavirus recession, also known as the Great Lockdown or Great Shutdown, was a major global economic recession affecting the world economy in 2020 during and as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Background
The recession caused the largest economic downturn since the Great Depression. On 14 April 2020, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) reported that all of the G7 nations had already entered or were entering into what was called a "deep recession". The IMF has stated that the economic decline is "far worse" than that of the Great Recession in 2009.

The numbers
The pandemic has led to more than a third of the world's population being placed on lockdown to stop the spread of COVID-19. This has caused severe economic downfalls for economies across the world, following soon after a global economic slowdown during 2019 that saw a lowering numbers in stock markets worldwide.

The United Nations (UN) predicted in April 2020 that global unemployment will wipe out 6.7 per cent of working hours globally in the second quarter of 2020—equivalent to 195 million full-time workers.

Other effects
The recession saw the fall of the price of oil caused by the 2020 Russia–Saudi Arabia oil price war, the collapse of the tourism industry, hospitality industry, energy industry, and a large decrease in consumer activity.

Global stock markets crashed around 20 to 30% during late February and March 2020. During the crash, global stock markets had many swings, mainly due to uncertainty in the markets.

References

COVID-19 pandemic

COVID-19 recession


Robert Allan was a Scottish trade unionist who served as leader of the Scottish Trades Union Congress (STUC).

Allan worked as a compositor in Edinburgh, and joined the Social Democratic Federation.  He was active in the Scottish Typographical Association (STA) and the Edinburgh Trades Council.  He attended the STUC from its foundation, always taking a prominent part in debates.

Allan was first elected to the General Council of the STUC in 1899, and on the council he championed the creation of a Scottish Labour Representation Committee, to stand Parliamentary candidates on behalf of the socialist, trade union and co-operative movements.  This was formed as the Scottish Workers' Representation Committee, and Allan became its first secretary, although in 1902 he was replaced by leader of the STUC, George Carson.

In 1913, Allan stood to become general secretary of the STA, but he took third place with only 581 votes, behind Charles Jackson and the winner, James Brown.  He was re-elected to the Parliamentary Committee of the STUC in 1912, and in this role gave some support to the Red Clydeside movement, arguing that its actions were "hasty and unwise", but that the committee should not ignore it, but instead try to give it guidance.

By 1917, Carson was seventy years old and looking to reduce his involvement in the STUC.  Allan had developed a strong working relationship with Carson, and was also the STUC President that year.  He was seen as the natural choice to become his assistant secretary.  The following year, he succeeded Carson as Secretary of the Parliamentary Committee of the STUC, its leading figure.  Allan believed that the organisation was ineffective, and gave too much power to small unions.  At the 1919 Congress, he proposed adopting a block vote system similar to that used by the Trades Union Congress, but this was opposed by a majority of unions.

Carson persuaded the Parliamentary Committee to found a Labour Institute in Glasgow, as a fitting base for the STUC.  He purchased a site, with the STUC meeting monthly repayments, but it was only in 1922 that affiliated unions became aware of the deal.  With union memberships falling as unemployment rose, the deal became unaffordable, and Allan was suspended.  A couple of days later, he was seriously injured at Carlisle railway station and lost both his legs.  In sympathy, he was allowed to stand down on good terms, but never again played a leading role in the trade union movement.

References

Year of birth missing
Year of death missing
General Secretaries of the Scottish Trades Union Congress
Trade unionists from Edinburgh
Social Democratic Federation members

Robert Allan (trade unionist)


Georg Bohlmann (23 April 1869 – 25 April 1928) was a German mathematician who specialized in probability theory and actuarial mathematics.

Life and career

Georg Bohlmann went to school in Berlin and Leipzig and took his Abitur at the Wilhelms-Gymnasium in Berlin in 1888. After that, he began studying mathematics at the University of Berlin under Leopold Kronecker, Lazarus Fuchs, and Wilhelm Dilthey. As he advanced in his studies, Lie groups became the focus of his interest. Since this area was poorly represented at Berlin, he moved to the University of Halle, where he obtained his doctorate in 1892 under Albert Wangerin with a dissertation on the topic Ueber eine gewisse Klasse continuierlicher Gruppen und ihren Zusammenhang mit den Additionstheoremen ("On a certain class of continuous groups and their relation to addition theorems"). After that, he worked at the Meteorological Institute of Berlin, where presumably his interest in applied mathematics developed.  At the invitation of Felix Klein, he moved to the University of Göttingen, where he habilitated in 1894. In 1895, he was involved in starting a seminar on actuarial science at Göttingen.  However, since he held no permanent position there, he went to Berlin in 1903 to work as the Chief Actuary for the German subsidiary of the New York Mutual Life Insurance Company.

In 1901, he wrote the entry on life insurance mathematics in the Enzyklopädie der mathematischen Wissenschaften ("Encyclopaedia of Mathematical Sciences") in which he gave axioms for probability theory long before Andrey Kolmogorov did so in 1933. In particular, he was the first to give the modern definition of statistical independence. Compared to the current structure of probability theory, his work only lacked the technical condition of sigma additivity. However, in contrast to Kolmogorov, Bohlmann failed to prove significant theorems within his axiomatic framework. As a result, his fundamental contributions to probability theory gained very little attention. In particular, though Kolmogorov had visited Göttingen several times in the late 1920s, he had no knowledge of Bohlmann's work.

Bohlmann was an invited speaker in the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1908 at Rome.

Publications

 Lebensversicherungsmathematik (Life Insurance Mathematics), Enzyklopädie der Mathematischen Wissenschaften, 1901
 Continuierliche Gruppen von quadratischen Transformationen der Ebene (Continuous groups of quadratic transformations of the plane), Göttinger Nachrichten, 1896, pp. 44–54
 Ein Ausgleichungsproblem (A stabilization problem), Göttinger Nachrichten, 1899, pp. 260–271
 Die Grundbegriffe der Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung in ihrer Anwendung auf die Lebensversicherung (The basic concepts of probability theory and its applications to life insurance), Atti del IV Congresso internazionale dei Matematici III, Rome 1909, pp. 244–278
 Anthropometrie und Lebensversicherung (Anthropometry and life insurance), Zeitschrift für die gesamte Versicherungs-Wissenschaft 14, 1914, pp. 743–786

References

 Ulrich Krengel, 100 Jahre Versicherungsmathematik an den Universitäten (100 years of actuarial science at universities), Blätter der deutschen Gesellschaft für Versicherungsmathematik 22, 1996, p. 663
 Ulrich Krengel, On the contributions of Bohlmann to probability theory (PDF: 6.4 MB), Electronic Journal for History of Probability and Statistics, 2011
 Peter Koch, Geschichte der Versicherungswissenschaft in Deutschland (History of actuarial science in Germany), Verlag Versicherungswirtschaft, Karlsruhe 1998,

External links
 Geschichte der Stochastik in Göttingen (History of Stochastics in Göttingen), Ulrich Krengel and Axel Munk

20th-century German mathematicians
19th-century German mathematicians
Probability theorists
1869 births
1928 deaths
Mathematicians from the German Empire

Georg Bohlmann


Operating certificate is a category of license issued by a government agency allowing an individual or company to provide a controlled type of service.  These certificates are generally issued for a limited time period.  Certificates can have intrinsic value and in some cases can be sold.

The term can be used to describe the document issued to operate any of the following:

Airline; (known as an Air Operator's Certificate) the authority to operate an airline
Airport; in the United States, the authority to operate an airport
Adult care facility; generally issued by a local authority
Transportation company; generally issued by a local authority

References

Licenses

Operating certificate


KBIM-TV (channel 10) is a television station licensed to Roswell, New Mexico, United States, affiliated with CBS and Fox. It is a satellite of Albuquerque-based KRQE (channel 13), which is owned by Nexstar Media Group. KBIM-TV's offices are located on Main Street in Roswell, and its transmitter is located in southeast Chaves County atop the Caprock Escarpment; its parent station maintains studios on Broadcast Plaza in Albuquerque.

KREZ-TV (channel 6) in Durango, Colorado, also serves as a satellite of KRQE. These satellite operations provide additional news bureaus for KRQE and sell advertising time to local sponsors.

History
On June 24, 1963, Taylor Broadcasting Company, owner of KBIM (910 AM), filed an application with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for a construction permit to build a new commercial television station on channel 10 in Roswell.  Taylor's was the second attempt at building Roswell's channel 10 allocation; the New Mexico Telecasting Company had previously obtained a construction permit for KRNM-TV in 1961. After a hearing, the Taylor permit was granted on November 4, 1964, and construction began the next year at a transmitter site on the Caprock,  east of Hagerman. The  tower was the tallest in New Mexico and the world's fourth-tallest at completion.

KBIM-TV began broadcasting as a CBS affiliate on February 24, 1966. However, the station's fortunes took a hard crash little more than a month after signing on. On April 1 at 6:53 a.m., general manager and 50-percent owner W. C. "Bill" Taylor received a call informing him that the station's new tower on the Caprock had collapsed. He believed it to be an April Fool's Day joke; however, it was not. The top  of the mast, which housed KBIM-TV and KBIM-FM, fell to the ground. A new tall tower was in service by September. The license was transferred to a related company, Holsum, Incorporated, in 1970.

Tragedy struck the KBIM stations for a second time on the morning of May 31, 1977, when a fire gutted the shared studios on Main Street. The television station was out of service for 10 days. New studios were set up at 214 North Main Street, still used by the television station today. Holsum sold off the radio properties to King Broadcasting in 1981; it then acquired KCBD-TV in Lubbock, Texas, in 1983. KCBD also owned KSWS-TV, Roswell's other commercial station, which was spun off to KOB in Albuquerque; a challenge to the sale held up the acquisition until 1985.

KBIM-TV presented CBS network programs on Central Time, an hour ahead of the local Mountain Time, until 1986; local news was seen at 5 and 9 p.m. local time. This was originally done because its main competitor, KSWS-TV, was tied to KCBD-TV in Lubbock and also aired network programming on Central Time. After KOB acquired KSWS-TV, that station converted to Mountain Time scheduling, and the decision was made to switch at KBIM-TV.

Purchase by KGGM-TV
In February 1989, the New Mexico Broadcasting Company—owner of KGGM-TV, Albuquerque's CBS affiliate—announced it had reached an agreement to purchase KBIM-TV from Holsum. Holsum had opted to sell instead of carrying out a merger, which was contemplated, because of the depressed regional economy. The Hebenstreit family, majority owners of New Mexico Broadcasting Company, had previously expressed interest in Roswell; their proposal for a new channel 8 TV station was the reason for the delay in KOB purchasing KSWS-TV earlier in the decade.

For KGGM-TV, buying the Roswell station also came with a perk that would benefit every other Albuquerque station. The two television ratings agencies, Arbitron and Nielsen, had reckoned Roswell as a separate media market. Not only would KGGM have access to Roswell's households for the first time, but the Roswell market would be folded into Albuquerque, resulting in the market nearing the national top 50.

That fall, after the $5 million purchase closed, KBIM-TV began airing some of KGGM-TV's newscasts. At 6 and 10 p.m. weeknights, viewers continued to see full newscasts from Roswell; statewide newscasts from Albuquerque were offered at 5 p.m. and on weekends. In 1991, a cost-cutting move saw six people laid off and the 10 p.m. newscasts discontinued, leaving local 5:30 a.m., noon and 6 p.m. newscasts; Within three months, however, and after KOAT-TV began to increase its southeastern New Mexico presence, the station instead decided to sacrifice its noon newscast and air a local 10 p.m. program.

The KBIM-TV acquisition ended up being significant to the Hebenstreits in one other way: it signaled the beginning of the end for one of the nation's last major-market family-owned TV stations. Citing the financial strain of the expansion, in July 1991, the Hebenstreits sold their 58 percent share in New Mexico Broadcasting Company to Lee Enterprises of Davenport, Iowa, which had owned the remainder for five years. KGGM-TV became KRQE the next year.

In 1998, Lee rebranded the combination of KRQE, KBIM-TV, and KREZ-TV in Durango, Colorado (which it had purchased), as "CBS Southwest" and revamped the Roswell and Durango stations' news services to produce inserts into KRQE's early evening newscasts. Two years later, Lee exited broadcasting and sold KRQE, KBIM-TV, and most of its other television properties to Emmis Communications; in 2005, Emmis, in its own exit from television, sold its New Mexico outlets to LIN TV Corporation. Local newscasts from Roswell ended on December 12, 2008, as part of further budget cuts and to reinvest money into technology improvements. KRQE continued to maintain a news presence in Roswell, stationing a reporter there.

Technical information

Subchannels
The station's digital signal is multiplexed:

Analog-to-digital conversion
KBIM-TV shut down its analog signal, over VHF channel 10, on June 12, 2009, the official date on which full-power stations in the United States transitioned from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate. The station's digital signal relocated from its pre-transition UHF channel 41 to VHF channel 10.

Translators
 Alamogordo
 Clovis
 Dora
 Ruidoso

References

Television channels and stations established in 1966
1966 establishments in New Mexico
BIM-TV
CBS network affiliates
Fox network affiliates
Nexstar Media Group
Mass media in Roswell, New Mexico

KBIM-TV


A Town Like Alice (United States title: The Legacy) is a romance novel by Nevil Shute, published in 1950 when Shute had newly settled in Australia. Jean Paget, a young Englishwoman, becomes romantically interested in a fellow prisoner of World War II in Malaya, and after liberation emigrates to Australia to be with him, where she attempts, by investing her substantial financial inheritance, to generate economic prosperity in a small outback community—to turn it into "a town like Alice" i.e. Alice Springs.

Plot summary
The story falls broadly into three parts.

In post-World War II London, Jean Paget, a secretary in a leather goods factory, is informed by solicitor Noel Strachan that she has inherited a considerable sum of money from an uncle she never knew. But the solicitor is now her trustee and she only has the use of the income until she inherits absolutely, at the age of thirty-five, several years in the future.  In the firm's interest, but increasingly with personal interest, Strachan acts as her guide and advisor. Jean decides that her priority is to build a well in a Malayan village.

The second part of the story flashes back to Jean's experiences during the war, when she was working in Malaya at the time the Japanese invaded and was taken prisoner together with a group of women and children. As she speaks Malay fluently, Jean takes a leading role in the group of prisoners. The Japanese refuse all responsibility for the group and march them from one village to another. Many of them, not used to physical hardship, die.

Jean meets an Australian soldier, Sergeant Joe Harman, also a prisoner, who is driving a lorry for the Japanese and they strike up a friendship. He steals food and medicines to help them. Jean is carrying a toddler, whose mother has died, and this leads Harman to believe that she is married; to avoid complications, Jean does not correct this assumption. On one occasion, Harman steals five chickens from the local Japanese commander. The thefts are investigated and Harman takes the blame to save Jean and the rest of the group. He is beaten, crucified, and left to die by the Japanese soldiers. The women are marched away, believing that he is dead.

When their sole Japanese guard dies, the women become part of a Malayan village community. They live and work there for three years, until the war ends and they are repatriated.

Now a wealthy woman (at least on paper), Jean decides she wants to build a well for the village so that the women will not have to walk so far to collect water: "A gift by women, for women". Strachan arranges for her to travel to Malaya, where she goes back to the village and persuades the headman to allow her to build the well. While it is being built, she discovers that, by a strange chance, Joe Harman survived and returned to Australia. She decides to search for him. On her travels, she visits the town of Alice Springs, where Joe lived before the war, and is much impressed with the quality of life there. She then travels to the (fictional) primitive town of Willstown in the Queensland outback, where Joe has become manager of a cattle station. She soon discovers that the quality of life in "Alice" is an anomaly, and life for a woman in the outback is elsewhere very rugged. Willstown is described as "a fair cow".

Meanwhile, Joe has met a pilot who helped repatriate the women, from whom he learns that Jean survived the war and that she was never married. He travels to London to find her, using money won in the Golden Casket lottery. He finds his way to Strachan's office, but is told that she has gone travelling in the Far East. Disappointed, he gets drunk and is arrested, but is bailed out by Strachan. Without revealing Jean's actual whereabouts, Strachan persuades Joe to return home by ship and intimates that he may well receive a great surprise there.

While staying in Willstown, awaiting Joe's return, Jean learns that most young girls have to leave the town to find work in the bigger cities. Having worked with a firm in Britain that produced crocodile-leather luxury goods, she gets the idea of founding a local workshop to make shoes from the skins of crocodiles hunted in the outback. With the help of Joe and of Noel Strachan, who releases money from her inheritance, she starts the workshop, followed by a string of other businesses; an ice-cream parlour, a public swimming pool and shops.

The third part of the book shows how Jean's entrepreneurship gives a decisive economic impact to develop Willstown into "a town like Alice"; also, Jean's help in rescuing an injured stockman breaks down many local barriers.

A few years later, an aged Strachan visits Willstown to see the results of Jean's efforts. He reveals that the money which Jean inherited was originally made in an Australian gold rush, and he is satisfied to see the money returning to the site of its making. Jean and Joe name their second son Noel and ask Strachan to be his godfather. They invite Strachan to make his home with them in Australia, but he declines the invitation and returns to Britain.

Characters
Jean Paget – a young Englishwoman who is taken as a prisoner of war by the Japanese during their invasion of Malaya in 1941 and later finds love with an Australian man she first met as a prisoner in Malaya and with whom she eventually settles in the Australian outback.
Joe Harman – an Australian cattleman who is a prisoner of war in Malaya; he survives torture and crucifixion in the hands of Japanese Captain Sugamo and eventually gets back to his home in Australia.
Noel Strachan – the narrator; he is firstly Douglas MacFadden's solicitor and responsible for drafting his will which names Jean Paget as a beneficiary, and establishes him as the eventual co-trustee of the significant estate that Douglas MacFadden leaves to Jean.
Donald Paget – Jean Paget's brother who lived and worked in Malaya before the war, and who died as a prisoner of war of the Japanese, working as a slave labourer on the "Death Railway" of The Bridge over the River Kwai fame. His death leaves Jean as the sole beneficiary of her uncle's estate.
Douglas MacFadden – Jean and Donald Paget's uncle, a resident of Ayr, Scotland, whose death in 1948 initiates the chain of events that form the basis of the book's narrative.

Historical accuracy
In a note to the text, Shute wrote that a forced march of women by the Japanese did indeed take place during World War II, but the women in question were Dutch, not British as in the novel, and the march was in Sumatra, not Malaya.  Jean Paget was based on Carry Geysel (Mrs J. G. Geysel-Vonck), whom Shute met while visiting Sumatra in 1949. Geysel had been one of a group of about 80 Dutch civilians taken prisoner by Japanese forces at Padang, in the Dutch East Indies in 1942. Shute's understanding was that the women were forced to march around Sumatra for two-and-a-half years, covering , with fewer than 30 people surviving the march. However, the Nevil Shute Foundation states that this was a misunderstanding, and that the women were merely transported from prison camp to prison camp by the Japanese. "Shute, fortunately misinformed about parts of her experience, mistakenly understands that the women were made to walk. This was possibly the luckiest misunderstanding of his life..." says the Foundation.

Shute based the character of Harman on Herbert James "Ringer" Edwards, whom Shute met in 1948 at a station (ranch) in Queensland. Edwards, an Australian veteran of the Malayan campaign, had been crucified for 63 hours by Japanese soldiers on the Burma Railway. He had later escaped execution a second time, when his "last meal" of chicken and beer could not be obtained. Crucifixion (or haritsuke) was a form of punishment or torture that the Japanese sometimes used against prisoners during the war.

The fictional "Willstown" is reportedly based on Burketown and Normanton in Queensland, which Shute visited in 1948. (Burke and Wills were well-known explorers of Australia.)

Adaptations

Cinema
The novel was adapted to film in 1956 as A Town Like Alice. It starred Virginia McKenna and Peter Finch, directed by Jack Lee. This film was known as  Rape of Malaya in U.S. cinemas, and by various other titles in non-English-speaking countries. It was shown in Japan under the title Malay Death March: A Town Like Alice(Maree shi no koshin: Arisu no yo na machi ().

Television
In 1981 it was adapted into a popular television miniseries called A Town Like Alice, starring Helen Morse and Bryan Brown (with Gordon Jackson as Noel Strachan). Broadcast internationally, in the United States it was shown as part of the PBS series Masterpiece Theatre.

Radio
In 1997 a six-part radio version of A Town Like Alice was broadcast on BBC Radio 2 starring Jason Connery, Becky Hindley, Bernard Hepton and Virginia McKenna who had starred as the novel's heroine, Jean Paget, in the 1956 movie version. It was dramatised by Moya O'Shea, produced by Tracey Neale and David Blount and directed by David Blount. It won a Sony Award in 1998.

See also

Margaret Dryburgh – an English missionary held captive by the Japanese in World War II
Tenko (TV series) – a 1981–84 BBC and ABC TV series based on the female prisoners of war in Singapore during World War II
Paradise Road – a film based on the female prisoners of war in Sumatra in World War II

References

External links

1950 British novels
Alice Springs
Novels by Nevil Shute
British novels adapted into films
Love stories
Novels set during World War II
Novels set in the Northern Territory
Novels set in Malaysia
Heinemann (publisher) books
British novels adapted into television shows
Novels set in Queensland
Australian outback
Australian novels adapted into films

A Town Like Alice


Tristes Tropiques (the French title translates literally as "Sad  Tropics") is a memoir, first published in France in 1955, by the anthropologist and structuralist Claude Lévi-Strauss. It documents his travels and anthropological work, focusing principally on Brazil, though it refers to many other places, such as the Caribbean and India. Although ostensibly a travelogue, the work is infused with philosophical reflections and ideas linking many academic disciplines, such as sociology, geology, music, history and literature.  The book was first translated into English by John Russell as A World on the Wane.

Contents
The book consists of 36 chapters, organised into nine sections.

Parts 1 to 3 detail Lévi-Strauss' reflections on leaving Europe and visiting the New World and the Tropics, comparing his first impressions with subsequent visits, relating aspects of his academic training as well as his work as a professor during the founding years of University of São Paulo.

Part 4 'The Earth and its Inhabitants' sets out a geographical analysis of the development of South American settlements, as well as an aside into social structure in India and what is now Pakistan.

Parts 5 through 8 each focus on a Native Brazilian culture group: Caduveo (or Guaycuru), Bororó, Nambikwara and Tupi-Kawahib respectively, while touching on many other topics.

Part 9 'The Return' closes the book with reflections on, among other themes, the nature and purpose of anthropology, the effects of travel on the mind, the roles of Buddhism and Islam in global culture, humankind's place in the universe and our connections to the world and to one another.

Style
The opening sentence, 'I hate traveling and explorers', is notable for its irony. In general, the narrative is highly reflexive, often critiquing itself or the author's and reader's assumed pretensions, such as a thirst for the 'exotic'.

Though the writing style is fluid, almost conversational at times, the structure of the text is extremely complex, linking together numerous places, times and ideas. For example, Part One: 'An End to Journeying' connects Lévi-Strauss' first trip to Brazil in 1935 with his escape from France to New York City in 1941 and his later visits to South America, in a stylistic imitation of memory.

Lévi-Strauss frequently makes connections between ostensibly diverse entities or ideas to underline a point. For example, in Chapter 14, he compares the ancient cities of the Indus valley with those of the US in the mid-20th century, implying that Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa could be imagined as foreshadowing contemporary Chicago or São Paulo 'after a prolonged period of involution in the European chrysalis'.

The work maintains an elegiac and poetic tone, lamenting a 'lost' New World but is tempered by a strong ambivalence, perhaps a product of the paradoxical idealized status of the anthropologist as a 'detached observer' who nevertheless remains engaged as a human participant.

Lévi-Strauss provides assessments of the impact of development on the environment, the 'shrinking' of the world through travel and tourism and the consequent emergence of a form of 'monoculture'.

Critical reception and influence
The book was well-received on its publication. The organizers of the Prix Goncourt lamented that they were not able to award Lévi-Strauss the prize because Tristes Tropiques was technically non-fiction. Georges Bataille wrote a favourable review and Susan Sontag classed it as one of the 20th century's 'great books'.

See also
Le Monde 100 Books of the Century

References

External links

 —full text of 1961 English translation by John Russell
 List of works by Claude Lévi-Strauss
 Claude Lévi Strauss' profile on the Académie française site

Video
 Documentaire 52': About "Tristes Tropiques" 1991 - Film Super 16

1955 non-fiction books
Anthropology books
Books about Brazil
French memoirs
Works by Claude Lévi-Strauss

Tristes Tropiques


In the leadup to the November 2015 general election, various organisations carried out opinion polling to gauge voting intention. Results of such polls are displayed in this article. These polls only include Turkish voters nationwide and do not take into account Turkish expatriates voting abroad.

The results tend to vary widely (see opinion polls in Turkey for further information). Opposition parties tend to regard such polls as unreliable and have presented legislation to Parliament tightening restrictions on how opinion polls conduct their research. After the previous election in June 2015, the polling company ORC issued a written statement apologising for the inaccuracies in their pre-election polls. KONDA, another polling company, made an apology for similar reasons after their predictions varied widely with the actual result after the 2014 presidential election.

Polling accuracy
The following table shows the most accurate polling companies based on the last opinion polls conducted by each company before the June 2015 vote (held on 7 June 2015), taking into account the domestic-only vote shares won in the election.

Controversies
According to media reports, Turkey's Justice and Development Party (AKP) government has attempted to suppress polling companies who publish polls predicting that the AKP will lose seats in the election.

Gezici Research and Polling Company have had some of their pollsters arrested in February and September 2015, after predicting that the AKP will lose power in the next election.

Vote share polling

Graphical summary

Poll results

Seat predictions

See also
Opinion polling for the Turkish general election, June 2015

References

Turkey
2015 2
November 2015 Turkish general election

Opinion polling for the November 2015 Turkish general election


Karel Šmirous (1890 in Český Krumlov – 1981 in Prague) was Czech scientist and the only Czech photographer who specialized in color photography using the autochrome process.

Karel Šmirous took his first black-and-white photographs at the age of 12. After leaving high school, he wanted to become a painter; however, his father decided that he should study chemistry. During his studies at Czech Technical University in Prague from 1908–1912, he became aware of autochrome, and began his lifelong interest in color photography. His photograph of Český Krumlov, taken in 1908, and published by Minerva in 1910, was the first known Czech color postcard using autochrome.

Back in Český Krumlov, Šmirous worked with local photographer Josef Seidel. With him, he photographed Český Krumlov and the mountain area of Šumava (Bohemian Forest), where he photographed nature in color, especially the Boubín primeval forest. His sense of art composition was also influenced by his mother, who had herself studied painting with Amálie Mánesová, sister of famous painter Josef Mánes.

Šmirous gained further experience in Germany and France, and his chemistry studies, specializing in color dyes, allowed him to experiment with color printing techniques. In 1913 he met the Lumière brothers, and because of all their common interests, they became firm friends, and he remained in contact with them till end of their lives.

After gaining his Doctorate in Chemistry, Šmirous worked as assistant to Prof. Votočka. During the period 1913 – 1918, he made first experiments with color printing, and after the war, he was sent by the Czech Academy of Sciences to visit the laboratory of the Lumière brothers in France. He worked there several times in his career, and in 1931, he solved the problem of enlarging color photographs under artificial light.

Šmirous' long research into color printing culminated in his discovery and patent of the Hydrotype process in 1921. For this invention, and the photographs printed by it, he was given a gold medal at the World Expo in Paris in 1937. Despite interest in the invention from Kodak, his technique was not widely adopted, partly because of WWII, and partly due to the introduction of modern color photographic paper. Karel Šmirous is the author of three Czechoslovak patents in the area of color photography.

In parallel with his scientific career, Karel Šmirous was also a very successful photographer. His photographs are not only technically excellent, but are also notable for their composition and use of color. From his early experiments with color, he developed a style with careful choice of colors, often using only variants of a single dominating color. His work is very rich thematically – he photographed in still life, portraits, nudes, landscapes, reportages, advertisements and scientific photography.

Šmirous published color postcards of excellent technical quality, and presented lectures and exhibitions with color photographs and 18×24 cm autochrome slides. He also published a number of books, and prepared a representative booklet, "Czechoslovakia", for the 1958 World Expo in Brussels.

Further reading
 Catalogue of exhibition at National Technical Museum in Prague "Karel Šmirous Autochromy z let 1908 -1955" – 1993

External links
  Biography at webpage of historian of photography Pavel Scheufler
 Selection of autochromes by Karel Šmirous from exhibition at Šechtl and Voseček Museum of Photography

Czech photographers
Czech chemists
People from Český Krumlov
Scientists from Prague
1890 births
1981 deaths
Czech Technical University in Prague alumni
Artists from Prague

Karel Šmirous