Confraternities in Nigeria are secretive student groups within Nigerian higher education that have been involved in violence and organized crime since the 1980s. The exact death toll of confraternity activities is unclear.  One estimate in 2002 was that 250 people had been killed in campus cult-related murders in the previous decade, while the Exam Ethics Project lobby group estimated that 115 students and teachers had been killed between 1993 and 2019.

History

Origin

In 1952, author Wole Soyinka (later a Nobel Prize winner) and a group of six friends formed the Pyrate Confraternity at the elite University College, Ibadan, then part of the University of London. They dubbed themselves "Magnificent Seven"(G7). Soyinka and his confraternity peers observed that the university was dominated by wealthy students associated with the colonial government and a few poorer students who often mimicked the wealthy students; meanwhile, campus social life was dictated by tribal affiliation.

Soyinka would later note that the Pyrates wanted to differentiate themselves from "stodgy establishment and its pretentious products in a new educational institution different from a culture of hypocritical and affluent middleclass, different from alienated colonial aristocrats".  The organization adopted the motto "Against all conventions", used the skull and crossbones as their logo, while members adopted pirate-themed confraternity names such as "Cap'n Blood" and "Long John Silver".

When fellow students protested a proposal to build a railroad across the road leading to the university, fearing that easier transportation would make the university less exclusive, the Pyrates successfully ridiculed the argument as elitist.  Roughly analogous to the fraternities and sororities of North America, the Pyrates Confraternity proved popular among students, even after the original members moved on.  Membership was open to any promising male student, regardless of tribe or race, but selection was stringent and most applicants were denied.  For almost 20 years, the Pyrates were the only confraternity on Nigerian campuses.

Schism
In the late 1960s, campuses were roiled by the Nigerian Civil War. Details are contested, but it appears that in 1972 former Provost of Adeniran Ogunsanya College of Education, Dr Bolaji Carew, and Kunle Adigun discontinued their membership to the Pyrates confraternity. Reasons gathered are that the Pyrates failed to practice what they stood for and failed to uphold the creed, and several illegal activities went unchecked. In 1972, at the University of Ibadan, orders had ceased to be orders, each and every creed of the Pyrates Confraternity was turned upside down with corruption and nepotism assuming exalted positions therein. The whistle of disintegration which had started to blow within the Pyrates Confraternity reached a crescendo. A cadre of supposed Super Pyrates were violating the confraternity's creed with impunity, tribalism, clannishness and petty alliances were being enshrined in the confraternity. These excesses gave rise to chaos, anarchy, ridicule, suspension  and expulsion.

Two young gentlemen concluded that the Pyrates confraternity had failed them, leaving to form a new brotherhood to reverse the wrongdoings of the Pyrates. These gentlemen - Dr. Bolaji Carew and Kunle Adigun - chose the name of their new confraternity with specific intent. Referring to the book "Fanny", they knew that Buccaneers were meant to be society`s roving policemen, who are naturally and morally superior to all seafaring creatures - Hence, the name SEALORD. In reaction to this and other events, the Pyrates registered themselves under the name National Association of Seadogs (NAS) and, at least one source states, pulled the confraternity out of the universities. Dr Bolaji Carew et al. found the Supreme Buccaneers Confraternity.

A major impetus for the creation of new confraternities was the fact that members of the new groups simply did not meet the high academic and intellectual standards, although not necessarily true as sources claimed that prospective members of The Buccaneer Confraternity must demonstrate high academic performances, must uphold high intellectual standards and be of good conduct. However, more fingers were pointed at failed leadership within the Pyrate's fraternal order, with the conclusion that the original organization had lost its core values and purpose of creation. Many Pyrates later denounced their membership and joined the Buccaneers for failed leadership reasons. Subsequently, Soyinka would later point to individuals who became accustomed to exerting power in the rigidly hierarchical confraternity, and were unwilling to give it up, as to blame for the initial schism.  As new groups formed, inter-group tensions led to fighting, though these were initially limited to fistfights.

The Supreme Eiye Confraternity 1958 later metamorphosed into National Association of Airlords (NAA) in 1963 was formed in the University of Ibadan, making it the second oldest confraternity after the Pyrate Confraternity. In the 1980s confraternities spread throughout the over 300 institutions of higher education in the country.  The Neo-Black Movement of Africa (also called Black Axe) emerged from the University of Benin in Edo State. In 1983 students at the University of Calabar in Cross River State founded the Eternal Fraternal Order of the Legion Consortium (the Klan Konfraternity), the Supreme Vikings Confraternity (the Adventurers) the following year.
In May 1978 The Green Circuit Association International (also known as the Maphite) emerged from the University of Benin in Edo State.

This time period saw a drastic change in the role of the confraternities.  The coup of Ibrahim Babangida in 1983 caused a large degree of political tension.  Military leaders, beginning in the 1980s, began to see the confraternities as a check on the student unions and university staff, who were the only organized groups opposing military rule.  The confraternities were thus provided payment and weapons to use against student activists, though the weapons were often used in deadly inter-confraternity rivalries.

Sociologist Emeka Akudi noted that some university vice-chancellors protected confraternities which were known to be violent and used them to attack students deemed troublesome.  During this period the confraternities introduced a new tradition of carrying out traditional religious practices, including Vodun, before any other activity.  Perhaps in reaction to the changes, in 1984 Wole Soyinka declared that the Seadogs should not operate on any university campuses.

Expansion from the universities
In the early 1990s, confraternity activities expanded dramatically in the Niger Delta as confraternities engaged in a bloody struggle for supremacy. The Family Confraternity (the Campus Mafia or the Mafia), which modeled itself after the Italian Mafia emerged. Shortly after their arrival, several students were expelled from Abia State University for cheating and "cultism", a reference to the voodoo-practicing confraternities, which marked the beginning of a shift of confraternity activities from the university to off campus.

The consolidation of confraternity activities outside Nigerian University campuses was boosted by the nationwide renouncement of cultism by university students and the breakdown of traditional campus cults all over the country as a result of amnesty granted to all renounced cultists at the onset of the present democratic government. This led to migration of cultists from the campuses to residential neighborhoods and streets as campuses were no longer a safe haven for them.

Incompetence of government officials and inadequate facilities to police campuses by University Authorities led to the resurgence of cultism in the campuses as renounced cultists who could not be protected by the law, went back to their cult groups to seek protection from rival groups who had discerned their identity as a result of the renouncement ceremony. This resulted in a situation where cult groups were now well established in- and outside the campuses.

The Brotherhood of the Blood (also known as Two-Two (Black Beret)), another notorious confraternity, was founded at Enugu State University of Science and Technology. Another cult, the Victor Charlie Boys, was established by Augustine Ahiazu when he was vice-chancellor of the Rivers State University of Science and Technology. The cults established in the early 1990s are legion; they include Second Son of Satan (SSS), Night Cadet, Sonmen, Mgba Mgba Brothers, Temple of Eden, Trojan Horse, Jurists, White Bishops, Gentlemen Clubs, Fame, Executioners, Dreaded Friend of Friends, Eagle Club, Black Scorpion, Red Sea Horse and Fraternity of Friends.

The Klansmen Konfraternity expanded its influence by creating a "street and creek" wing, Deebam, to fight for and control territory outside of the universities through violence and crime. In response, the Supreme Vikings Confraternity (SVC) established its own street and creek group, Deewell. When Deewell was unable to match Deebam, the SVC created a second confraternity wing, the Icelanders (German), which would eventually be led by militia leader Ateke Tom. The Outlaws, another well-known street and creek confraternity, began as a splinter group of the Icelanders (German).

In the late 1990s, all-female confraternities began to be formed. These include the Black Brazier (Bra Bra), the Viqueens, Daughters of Jezebel, and the Damsel. Female confraternities have supplied spies for allied male confraternities as well as acting as prostitution syndicates.

In the past few years, members of confraternities such as the Neo-Black Movement have been investigated by law enforcement in different countries around the globe, i.e. Canada, the UK and Italy.

Obafemi Awolowo University murders

On July 10, 1999, one of the most notable single attacks occurred at Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU) in Ife.  OAU had been considered one of the safest universities in the country, largely due to student-organized resistance to the confraternities.  After one cult member was shot and killed during an attempted kidnapping in 1991, the confraternities appeared to stay away from the university.  In February 1999, student leaders organized a campus-wide search, which found eight secret cult members who were stockpiling machine guns and other weapons in their dorm room.  This enraged the Black Axe confraternity, who organized a murder squad that hacked the student union secretary-general to death in his bed and targeted other student leaders.

In a student assembly called the following day, the president of the Students' Union, who had escaped the killers by leaping from his window, demanded the resignation of Vice-Chancellor Wole Omole, who was seen as obstructing efforts to fight confraternities, such as by refusing to expel the eight cultists who had been found stockpiling weapons.  A bounty of 10,000 naira (US$30) was offered for his capture and one vigilante group reportedly abducted Omole's wife as ransom for his surrender. Students also manned checkpoints and carried out searches for cult members still on campus, arresting suspects.  In one case, students worried about police leniency stormed a police station to re-seize a suspect they had previously turned over.

Nigerian Education Minister Tunde Adeniran later dismissed Omole and ordered university administrators to eradicate confraternities from their campuses by September 1999.  In response, hundreds of cult members publicly renounced their confraternity and cult-associated violence temporarily subsided.

Current situation
During the first weeks of the school year, confraternity alumni and members swarm campuses recruiting new members.  Initiation ceremonies normally involve severe beatings, in order to test their endurance, as well as ingestion of a liquid mixed with blood.  Male initiates may sometimes be required to pass an additional hurdle before becoming full members, including raping a popular female student or a female member of the university staff.  Among the all-female Jezebels or Amazons, prospective members may be required to undergo six rounds of rough sexual intercourse or fight with a group of women or against a much stronger man.  Cults also charge annual membership fees of between 10,000 (US$80) and 30,000 naira.

Frequent criminal activity for cults include intimidating professors into giving high grades, including by burning their cars or briefly abducting their children.  Since the 1980s, confraternities have murdered people who are thought to have 'stolen' a member's girlfriend, or "sugar daddy" in the case of female groups.  Female groups began operating as prostitution rings relatively early. The majority of confraternities, as of 2005, were engaged in a variety of money-making criminal activities, ranging from cybercrime to armed robbery and kidnapping.  Cult members may also get money from political figures, who wish to intimidate their opponents.

The exact death toll of confraternity activities is unclear.  One estimate in 2002 was that 250 people had been killed in campus cult-related murders in the previous decade, while the Exam Ethics Project lobby group estimated that 115 students and teachers had been killed between 1993 and 2003. However those figures pale into insignificance when compared with recent cult activities in Benin city, the Edo state capital in 2008 and 2009, with over 40 cult related deaths recorded monthly.

In the Niger River delta, confraternities are deeply enmeshed in the conflict in the oil-rich delta.  Most of the campus cults have been accused of kidnapping foreign oil workers for ransom, while many of the militant groups, such as the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), employ confraternity members as combatants; Soboma George, head of street and creek confraternity The Outlaws, is also a MEND commander.

Campus cults also offer opportunities to members after graduation.  As confraternities have extensive connections with political and military figures, they offer excellent alumni networking opportunities.  The Supreme Vikings Confraternity, for example, boasts that twelve members of the Rivers State House of Assembly are cult members.

See also
 Crime in Nigeria
 Operation Wetie

References

 ,
 Rotimi, Adewale. , Nordic Journal of African Studies 14(1): 79–98 (2005)

External links
Social movement or international criminal network? Investigation on the Neo-Black Movement
nbmarena.org, official website
Archived news articles on Nigerian campus cults religionnewsblog.com
Discussion board on Nigerian death fraternities
Video of documentary on Nigerian campus cults by Wole Soyinka
Story of a former cult member
Cult War I
Cult War II
Campus Cults I
Campus Cults II
Campus Cults III
UNHCR about NBM
Movie about Nigerian Cults on YouTube

Organized crime groups in Nigeria
Student societies in Nigeria
Confraternities
African secret societies

Confraternities in Nigeria


James Harris (born 1948) is an American communist politician and member of the National Committee of the Socialist Workers Party. He was the party's candidate for President of the United States in 1996, receiving 8,463 votes, and again in 2000, receiving 7,378 votes. Harris also served as an alternate candidate for Róger Calero in 2004 and 2008 in states where Calero could not qualify for the ballot due to being born in Nicaragua. More recently Harris was the SWP candidate in the 2009 Los Angeles mayoral election, receiving 2,057 votes (0.89%).

Harris served for a time as the national organization secretary of the SWP. He was a staff writer for the socialist newsweekly  The Militant  in New York. He wrote about the internal resistance to South African apartheid and in 1994 traveled to South Africa to attend the Congress of South African Trade Unions convention. In July 2012, Harris was named the Socialist Workers Party nominee for president, with Maura DeLuca as the vice presidential nominee.

Life and career
Born into a working-class, African American family in Cleveland, Ohio, Harris first became politically active in the civil rights movement. With growing protests against racist discrimination, tens of thousands of Black families in the city staged a school strike in the early 1960s, setting up "Freedom Schools" to study African-American history.

On graduating from high school, Harris attended Cleveland State University, where he was a founding member of the Black Student Union. He organized fellow students into demonstrations opposing the Vietnam War as well as actions against racist practices of the college, which then had only a small percentage of Black students. He became a member of the Student Mobilization Committee Against the War in Vietnam and later served on its national staff in Washington, D.C.

Through these experiences he joined and later became a leader of the Young Socialist Alliance. He ran for school board in Cleveland on the Socialist Workers ticket in 1969, and soon after joined the Socialist Workers Party.

A supporter of the Cuban revolution, Harris participated in the second Venceremos Brigade to Cuba in 1969 along with hundreds of other youth from the United States. Brigade members cut sugar cane for a couple of months in an expression of solidarity with the efforts by millions of working people in Cuba to maximize sugar production. Working alongside Cuban workers and meeting volunteers from Vietnam, Korea, and elsewhere deepened his sense of internationalism.

Harris moved to Atlanta in the early 1970s, and joined in the struggles of the Black community against police brutality. At the time, a number of young Blacks had been killed by police SWAT squad units. Later Harris helped mobilize supporters of Black rights in Atlanta to join actions in Boston in the battle for busing and school desegregation in that city.

In 1977 Harris moved to New York City to join the staff of the National Student Coalition Against Racism, which had helped lead mobilizations for school desegregation. He became a national chairperson of the coalition.

Harris later worked in a garment factory in Los Angeles, as the SWP deepened its industrial base by building units of party members in the garment unions. In Los Angeles he was the chairperson of the SWP in the city.

He also participated in brigades to defend the Nicaraguan revolution in the mid-1980s, and joined a delegation to visit revolutionary Grenada in the early 1980s.

In 1988 Harris was the Socialist Workers Party candidate in New York for the United States Senate. Harris finished seventh with 11,239 votes.

Harris lived and worked in Detroit in the early 1990s and was a member of the United Auto Workers there. He helped broaden solidarity with labor struggles such as those of workers on strike against Caterpillar. Harris spent several months in Peoria, Illinois, helping establish a branch of the Socialist Workers Party there in response to the battle by members of the UAW against Caterpillar.

Harris is a strong critic of the death penalty and he has been active in a struggle against police brutality in Valdosta, Georgia, and has participated in activity with the People's Tribunal, an organization centered on death of Willie James Williams, killed while in police custody in that southern Georgia town.

References

External links
The Militant, weekly paper of the Socialist Workers Party
Pathfinder Books, the bookstore of the Socialist Workers Party

1948 births
Living people
African-American candidates for President of the United States
American anti–Vietnam War activists
American anti-war activists
Cleveland State University alumni
Politicians from Cleveland
Socialist Workers Party (United States) presidential nominees
Candidates in the 1996 United States presidential election
Candidates in the 2000 United States presidential election
20th-century American politicians
Candidates in the 2004 United States presidential election
Candidates in the 2008 United States presidential election
Candidates in the 2012 United States presidential election
21st-century American politicians
20th-century African-American politicians
African-American men in politics
21st-century African-American politicians

James Harris (Socialist Workers Party politician)


Hurricane Earl was an intense and long-lived hurricane that was also the first such storm to threaten New England since Hurricane Bob nineteen years earlier. The storm's center passed eighty six miles east of North Carolina on September 3, 2010. The storm then moved northeast, eventually being downgraded to tropical storm status and then becoming a hurricane again shortly before the storm made landfall in Nova Scotia. Before lashing the eastern United States, the hurricane passed extremely close to the Leeward Islands; the damage there totaled $40 million (2010 USD).

2010 Atlantic hurricane season
Category 4 Atlantic hurricanes
Hurricanes in the United States

Hurricane Earl (2010)


A dietary mineral is a chemical element that a living thing needs to be part of what they eat, other from the four elements carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen which are already very common in living things.

One example of a dietary mineral is calcium, which humans and many other animals need to build strong bones and teeth, among other things. Iron is another mineral, which you can find in red meat. It is important for us to have iron as it creates red blood cells. Other common minerals include potassium and phosphorus.

Related pages
Vitamin
Essential fatty acid
Essential amino acid

Nutrients

Dietary mineral


The Yangtze Plain (Chinese: 長江中下游平原/长江中下游平原; Wade-Giles: Ch'ang Chiang P'ing-yüan; Pinyin: Chang Jiang Pingyuan) is made up of a series of alluvial plains along the Yangtze River and its major tributaries.

The Yangtze Plain starts east of Yichang (Hubei province), China. The Middle Yangtze Plain is made up of parts of the north-eastern and south-eastern Hunan, Hubei, and north-central Jiangxi provinces, and includes the Dongting, Poyang, and Hong lakes.

The Middle-Lower Yangtze Plain stretches eastward from Mount Wu to the coast. It is made up of alluvial deposits from the Yangtze River and its tributaries. The plain is somewhat swampy, made up of many lakes and rivers, making it suitable for rice growing and freshwater fish, and it is therefore known as the "land of fish and rice".  The area also produces tea, silk, rapeseed, broad beans, and tangerines.

The Lower Yangtze Plain includes the Yangtze River Delta.

See also
 Jiangnan

References
"Land and Resources" — Chinese Embassy in Sweden Web pages (retrieved 9 February 2006)
"Natural Condition" — China Facts and Figures 2005 (retrieved 9 February 2006)

Plains of China
Yangtze River
Landforms of Hubei
Landforms of Hunan
Landforms of Jiangxi
Central China

Yangtze Plain


Joel Rosenberg (May 1, 1954 – June 2, 2011) was a Canadian American science fiction and fantasy author best known for his long-running "Guardians of the Flame" series.  Rosenberg was also a gun rights activist. He is the oldest brother of Miami Herald reporter Carol Rosenberg.

Writing career
Rosenberg began publishing in 1978 with an op-ed piece in The New York Times favoring nuclear power. His stories appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, Amazing Science Fiction, and TSR's The Dragon. His novels have been published by Roc, Avon, Berkley, Tor and Baen Books.

Fantasy
His first published fiction, "Like the Gentle Rains", appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine in 1982.  The following year, he published his first novel, The Sleeping Dragon, which was the first in his long-running Guardians of the Flame series.  This series placed a group of college students into a fantasy setting similar to a role-playing world.  Throughout the series' ten novels, Rosenberg traced these characters, their descendants, and the changes they made to society.  He showed no compunction about killing off popular characters.

The "Keepers of the Hidden Ways" trilogy similarly placed people from the real world into a fantasy setting, making heavy use of Norse mythology.  A third fantasy series, consisting of the novels D'Shai (1991) and Hour of the Octopus (1994) (both lightly humorous mysteries), was set in an Asian-influenced fantasy world with very strict cultural standards and etiquette.

Paladins, the first in his "Mordred's Heirs" series, was published by Baen Books in September 2004; the second, Knight Moves, was published in November 2006.  This series, an "alternate fantasy history", takes place in a world where Mordred defeated King Arthur, establishing the Pendragon Dynasty.

Science fiction
In addition to fantasy, Rosenberg wrote a number of science fiction novels.  Although dealing with different characters, Ties of Blood and Silver (1984) and Emile and the Dutchman (1986) both take place in the same setting.  Two other books in this setting, Not for Glory (1988) and Hero (1990), focus on family members of the Metzadan Mercenary Corps from the Jewish- (and others-) settled World of Metzada (Masada).

Mysteries
In the early years of the 21st century, Rosenberg turned his hand to mysteries, publishing Home Front, the first of his "Sparky Hemingway" mysteries in 2003; the second, Family Matters, was published in early 2004.

Themes and influences
Rosenberg's novels frequently featured the theme of freedom, particularly in the Guardians of the Flame series, where the initial characters make it their life's goal to abolish slavery in their new world, and the right to keep and bear arms. Other themes included protecting children at all costs, and the message that people can overcome hardships and abuse suffered as children.

His heroes also frequently find inspiration in the heroic figures of the Greek classics and of American folklore and history.

Gun rights advocate
Outside of science fiction, Rosenberg was best known as a handgun instructor, gun rights advocate, and author of a manual for people wanting to get a handgun carry permit in Minnesota, Everything You Need to Know About (Legally) Carrying a Handgun in Minnesota, and a similar book for Missouri, Everything You Need to Know About (Legally) Carrying a Handgun in Missouri.  His wife recounted that Rosenberg's experience with gun rights was inadvertent. In an interview following his death, she said a neo-Nazi threatened Rosenberg and his family via emails—specifically enough to describe his home—and Rosenberg decided to seek a permit to carry to protect himself.

Rosenberg once suspected that the threats might have something to do with his Metzada novels—"I do write about Jews in space with big guns." But to this day, he doesn't know anything about his stalker, except that he or she is violently anti-Semitic, and unlikely to win any spelling bees.

The legal back and forth between Rosenberg and the Minneapolis police department prompted him to push for a change in the law, from a "may issue" statute to a "shall issue" statute.

While his books of the Guardians of the Flame series have detailed descriptions of firearm technology, he began seriously dealing with self-defense issues after he thwarted a break-in into his house with a .22 LR pistol he kept in his home.

Arrest for carrying a handgun
In November 2010, Rosenberg openly wore a holstered handgun when coming into the Minneapolis city hall for a meeting with a representative of the city's police chief after providing prior notification as required by state law. After arrival, he was told that a court order prohibited people from carrying a gun anywhere in the building, which houses family and small claims courtrooms on the third floor. He objected, citing the state gun laws, and avoided arrest when he agreed to carry his gun (which the police had confiscated, emptied of ammunition, and returned to him) back to his car. He subsequently filed a complaint against the police sergeant, and posted a YouTube video displaying how many weapons can be concealed on one's body.

In December 2010, he was charged with possession of a dangerous weapon in a courthouse, a felony, and contempt of court, a misdemeanor, arrested, and jailed in lieu of $100,000 bond.  Rosenberg was scheduled to stand trial in August for the incident at Minneapolis City Hall, however the case was still pending at the time of his death.

Personal life and death
A native of Winnipeg, he grew up in Northwood, North Dakota, and later moved with his parents and family to Connecticut.  He had a Canadian mother and American father—he enjoyed dual Canadian and American citizenship.

He attended the University of Connecticut, where he met and married Felicia Herman. He studied to be a social worker and counselor, but took to writing after discussing the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons with a friend. Rosenberg's occupations, before settling down to writing full-time, included truck driving, care work, bookkeeping, gambling, motel desk-clerking, and cooking. Hobbies included backgammon, poker, bridge, as well as cooking.

In an interview following his death, his wife recalled how he came to write his most famous novel series, The Guardians of the Flame:

Herman said Rosenberg was a diabetic, but otherwise in good health. She said he suddenly collapsed and never really recovered, despite efforts to resuscitate him. Rosenberg died June 2, 2011, after a sudden respiratory depression caused a heart attack, brain damage and major organ failures.

His wife, Felicia G. Herman, posted on her blog, "In accordance with his wishes, he shared the gift of life through organ and tissue donation." He is survived by his children, Judith and Jimbo, and his wife Felicia.

Bibliography

Guardians of the Flame
The Sleeping Dragon (1983)
The Sword and the Chain (1984)
The Silver Crown (1985)
The Heir Apparent (1987)
The Warrior Lives (1988)
The Road to Ehvenor (1991)
The Road Home (1995)
Not Exactly the Three Musketeers (1999)
Not Quite Scaramouche (2001)
Not Really the Prisoner of Zenda (2003)

Keepers of the Hidden Ways
The Fire Duke (1995)
The Silver Stone (1996)
The Crimson Sky (1998)

Thousand Worlds
 Ties of Blood and Silver (1984)
 Emile and the Dutchman (1985)
 Not for Glory (1988)
 Hero (1990)

D'Shai
D'Shai (1991)
Hour of the Octopus (1994)
The Last Assassin (not yet published)

Mordred's Heirs (incomplete series)
Paladins (2004)
Knight Moves (November 2006)

Sparky Hemingway
Home Front (2003)
Family Matters (2004)

RiftWar
 Murder in LaMut: Legends of the Riftwar, Book II with Raymond E. Feist (2003)

References

External links
 Rosenberg's personal blog
 Bibliography on SciFan

1954 births
2011 deaths
20th-century American novelists
20th-century Canadian male writers
21st-century American novelists
21st-century Canadian male writers
American fantasy writers
American gun rights activists
American male novelists
American science fiction writers
Canadian fantasy writers
Canadian science fiction writers
Jewish American writers
Jewish Canadian writers
Novelists from Minnesota
University of Connecticut alumni
20th-century American male writers
21st-century American male writers
21st-century American Jews

Joel Rosenberg (science fiction author)


Elaine "Ray" Barkin née Radoff (December 15, 1932 – February 22, 2023) was an American composer, writer, and educator.

Early life
Elaine Radoff was born in The Bronx, New York City, lived in the Amalgamated Houses, attended Bronx High School of Science, Third Street Music School Settlement, and Queens College (BA in 1954), where she studied composition and theory with Karol Rathaus, Sol Berkowitz, Leo Kraft, and Saul Novack. At Brandeis University (MFA in 1956, PhD in 1971), her mentors in composition and theory were Irving Fine, Harold Shapero, Arthur Berger, and Seymour Shifrin. In the Summer of 1955 she worked with Boris Blacher at Tanglewood and then in 1956 and 1957 at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik on a Fulbright fellowship.

In 1963, Barkin was asked by Benjamin Boretz, founding editor of the composers' journal Perspectives of New Music, to join as editor, a post she held until 1985. In 1972 she served as co-editor and when John Rahn became editor in 1984, she remained on for a year as advisory editor.

Career
Barkin taught music appreciation, music theory, and composition at Queens College (1964–69), the University of Michigan (1970–74), Princeton University (Spring 1974, Council of the Humanities Fellowship), and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), 1974–97. She also taught at Sarah Lawrence College (1969); National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan (May 1989); Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand (Spring 1994); and the Institute for Shipboard Education's Semester at Sea (Fall 1996). Barkin's compositional output includes works for: solo instruments, chamber ensembles, and orchestra; 4-track tape collages; solo voice and chorus; Balinese and Javanese gamelan; dancers and multi-media theater, including a chamber opera; graphic scores and scenarios for improvisation; symphonic wind ensemble; electronic-MIDI media.

In the 1980s, Barkin's interests turned to collaborative endeavors, real-time interactive music-making, out of which emerged UCLA's Experimental Workshop. She joined UCLA's Javanese and Balinese Gamelan ensembles and made five trips to Bali and Java to study new music for gamelan under the auspices of a University of California Pacific Rim Research Grant with colleagues Linda Burman-Hall, Sue Carole DeVale, and David Cope. In 1989 Barkin, Benjamin Boretz and James K. Randall co-founded the Open Space music publications series.

Barkin has published books and professional articles in journals including Perspectives of New Music.

Personal life
In 1957 she married writer, editor, and computer programmer George J. Barkin (1928–2020). They have three sons: Victor, Jesse, and Gabriel.

Works

Principal compositions
Four Short Pieces for Piano (1955)
Chaconne Variations for Orchestra (MFA thesis, 1956)
Essay for Orchestra (1957)
Refrains, flute, clarinet, violin, viola, violoncello, celeste (1967)
Six Compositions for Piano (1968)
String Quartet (PhD thesis, 1969)
Plus ça change, string orchestra and percussion (1971)
PRIM Cycles, flute, clarinet, violin, violoncello (1972)
Sound Play, solo violin (1974)
Mixed Modes, bass clarinet, violin, viola, violoncello, piano (ISCM-NYSCA commission) (1975)
For Suite's Sake, harpsichord (for Fred Hammond) (1975)
Inward & Outward Bound, chamber orchestra (1975)
String Trio (1976)
Plein Chant, solo alto flute (for Anahid Nazarian) (1977)
EbbTide, two vibraphones (1977)
Two Emily Dickinson Choruses for Donn Weiss and the UCLA Madrigal Singers (1977)
"...the supple suitor...", song cycle, Emily Dickinson texts; mezzo-soprano, flute, oboe, violoncello, harpsichord/piano, vibraphone/bells (NEA commission) (1978)
"...the sky...", SSA and piano; e. e. cummings' texts for Robert Tusler and the UCLA Women's Choral Society (1978)
De Amore, mini-opera based on love texts from the 12th to the 20th century, 4 female, 4 male speaker-singers, viola, guitar, harp, contrabass, slides Rockefeller Foundation Study Center, Bellagio, Italy and MacDowell Colony Residencies (April, May 1980)
Media Speak, theater piece about nuclear technology, 9 speakers, tape, saxophone, masks and slides – Millay Colony for the Arts (1981)
N.B. Suite, flutes, contrabass – UCLA College of Fine Arts commission; for Nancy and Bertram Turetzky (1982)
At the piano, solo piano – written for Gloria Cheng (1982)
"...to piety more prone...", theater piece, 4 women readers, 4-track tape collage (1982)
Anonymous was a woman, 4-track tape collage, for dancer Annamaura Silverblatt (1984)
Still Life :CPEBS, jazz baritone saxophone, vibraphone – for Carl Pritzkat (1984)
On the way to becoming, 4-track tape collage on original text (1985)
Past is part of, 4-track tape collage on original text (1985)
3 Rhapsodies, flutes, clarinet – for Catherine Schieve and Robert Paredes (1986)
OutBack, 4-track tape collage – for Peggy Circerska and 2 dancers (1987)
Anything Goes – in memoriam Abraham Schwadron; 4-track tape collage (1987)
Encore for Javanese gamelan (1988)
"...out of the air...", basset horn, tape – written for Georgina Dobrée (1989)
To Whom It May Concern #2 4-track tape collage; textline by Benjamin Boretz (1989)
Legong Dreams, solo oboe (1990)
Social Contracts, theater piece, texts, five improvising players (1990)
Exploring the Rigors of In Between & Coming Apart at the Seams, flute, French horn, violin, viola, violoncello (Southern California Music Librarians Association commission) (1991)
Kotekan Jam, conceived for the University of Oregon's Pacific Rim Balinese Gamelan (1991)
continuous, texts designed to stimulate interactive music-making (1992)
Gamelange, harp, mixed gamelan, hand percussion – written for Sue DeVale and the UCLA New Music Gamelan Band (1993)
"...for my friends' pleasure...", harp and soprano – written for Sue DeVale and Amy Catlin-Jairazbhoy, texts by Sappho, Sue DeVale, bell hooks, Santal girl, Emily Dickinson (1995)
Touching all Bases/Di Mana-mana, collaboratively composed with I Nyoman Wenten for Basso Bongo & Gamelan; Meet the Composer Commission (1996)
Lagu Kapal Kuning (Song of the Yellow Boat) for Balinese gamelan angklung (1996)
Poem for Tom Lee and the UCLA Symphonic Wind & Percussion Ensemble (1999)
Song for Sarah solo violin – written for and with Mark Menzies (2001)
Ode, 16 woodwinds and percussion (2001–02)
Ballade, solo violoncello and voice (2002–04)
Tambellan Suite for Ron George and his Tambellan (2003–04)
Warna/Colors for Balinese and Javanese Gamelan, in memoriam Leonard Stein (2003)
Purnama, Cut Short, Step by Step, From the Abbeys, MIDI pieces (2004)
Faygele's Footsteps, MIDI dulcimer, sitar, gamelan, harp, piano (2005)
Inti Sari for Loyola Marymount's gamelan angklung (2005)
Easy Pieces for Harp for Sue Carole DeVale (2005–06)
Piano Suite [Prelude, Umbrella Steps, Sara's Dance, When the Wind Blows] (2007)
5 Little Machine Pieces [Barely There, Whorl, IF, ShadowPlay, Ending] (2007–08)
Violin Duo & 3 Little Violin Duets (2007)
6 Pieces for Piano (2008)
XTET: Last Dance for Milton, MIDI pianos, celesta, harpsichord, organ, drum set – for the Open Space/Perspectives of New Music Milton Babbitt Memorial CD (2011)
Fidl Trio (+1) (in memoriam Paul Des Marais), 2 violins, contrabass + (2012)

Publishers: Mobart Music; Association for the Promotion of New Music; American Gamelan Institute; Yelton-Rhodes Music < www.yrrmusic.com >

Recordings: cassettes, CDs, videos
String Quartet, Composers Recordings, Inc./New World Records, NWCRL 338 (American Composers Alliance Recording Award, 1974).
Two Dickinson Choruses, Composers Recordings, Inc./New World Records, NWCRL 482.
Plein Chant, Composers Recordings, Inc./New World Records, NWCRL 513. Participant on two Interplay tape cassettes: #10 & #32.
5 Tape Collage Pieces, Anonymous was a Woman, on the way to becoming, past is part of, Out Back, & To Whom it May Concern #2, Open Space CD 3.
ee2: A Sound Album: Sounds Words Music Collages by Elaine Barkin, Tildy Bayar, Renee Coulombe, and collaborators, Open Space CD 12.
Electronic, Instrumental and Vocal Music by Elaine Barkin, Emma Carle, Judith Exley, Mara Helmuth, Open Space CD 16.
4 MIDI Pieces on JK Randall 3-CD set, Open Space CD 21.
Elaine Barkin: Blanc, MIDI Suite, Violin Duo; Dorota Czerner, reading her own poetry, Open Space CD 24.
Song for Sarah, XTET, Aria for harp, ERB for AVB's 65th; poetry of / read by Dorota Czerner; music of Benjamin Boretz, Open Space CD 29.
New Music in Bali (a video featuring rehearsals and performances of music of 3 Balinese composers, edited by ERB & Grace M) (1993)
New Music in Bali; cassette with music of 3 Balinese Composers, produced by Elaine Barkin and Linda Burman-Hall, (UC Pacific Rim Grant) (1994).
I Wayan Ssuweca: "It All Comes from Inside", Balinese Master Musician (a video edited by ERB & Grace M) (1994)

Books and articles
File: a collection (texts, photos, graphics by Elaine Barkin, JK Randall, Robert Paredes, Jane Coppock, Benjamin Boretz), 1987.
e : an anthology : music texts & graphics (1975–1995) (endpaper by Benjamin Boretz), Open Space, 1997.
Audible Traces: gender, identity and music. Edited by Elaine Barkin & Lydia Hammesley. Carciofoli Press, 1999.
e2 : an anthology : music texts & graphics 1980–2020] : 'Are we nearly there?''', edited by Mark So, Open Space, 2020.

Barkin has published reviews, analyses, speculative texts, interviews, commentaries, and graphics in: Perspectives of New Music, The Musical Quarterly, Music Review, Contemporary Music Newsletter, Journal of Music Theory, Balungan, Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute, American Music, Grove Dictionary of American Music and Grove Online, Sonus, Intercultural Music, News of Music, G.E.M.S. Online Journal, the Journal of the International Alliance for Women in Music, and The Open Space Magazine.

References

Further reading
Edwards, J. Michelle (1984; 2011). Grove Dictionary of American Music, 1984; 2012.
Rahn, John, 1989, "New Research Paradigms", Music Theory Spectrum, xi/1, 84–94
Sobaskie, James William, Review of OS CD 3, Computer Music Journal 25.1, 2001.
"Writings and Reflections for Elaine Barkin", Open Space Magazine'', issue 6, 2004, pp. 67–153.

1932 births
Living people
20th-century classical composers
21st-century classical composers
American women classical composers
American classical composers
American music educators
American women music educators
Musicians from New York City
People from the Bronx
The Bronx High School of Science alumni
Queens College, City University of New York alumni
Queens College, City University of New York faculty
University of Michigan faculty
Princeton University faculty
Pupils of Irving Fine
UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music faculty
Sarah Lawrence College faculty
Academic staff of Victoria University of Wellington
American women in electronic music
21st-century American composers
20th-century American women musicians
20th-century American musicians
20th-century American composers
21st-century American women musicians
Classical musicians from New York (state)
20th-century women composers
21st-century women composers
American women academics

Elaine Barkin


Kate Miner (born Pamela Kate George) is an American singer and songwriter.

Miner began singing publicly at the age of four in the San Diego area. At the age of ten, she was singing music for television commercials. By 21, Miner had moved to Los Angeles and was signed to a recording contract with Word Records, which included a co-publishing/development deal with Sony Music Publishing.

In the late 1980s, still known as Pam Dwinell, Miner toured with Phil Keaggy and Mark Heard. She went on to perform and record with artists like Tonio K, Pierce Pettis, Christopher Williams, Michele Pillar, Randy Stonehill, The Choir, and FunderburkMiner.

In 1992, Miner shared the stage with Heard during his final performance at the Cornerstone Festival. Heard had a heart attack and died the following month. Miner would go on to record a tribute to Heard for the albums Strong Hand of Love and Orphans of God. Also that year, she was named Female Acoustic Artist of the Year by the National Academy of Songwriters.

Through the community found in the Malibu Vineyard Christian Fellowship, Miner realized her true calling to pursue a career exclusively focusing on Christian worship music.  Two years later, in 1995, Miner recorded her own album, Sacred, enlisting help from musicians including singer Julie Miller. Old Hymns My Mom Loves followed in 1999, a tribute to her mother, diagnosed with terminal brain cancer.  Hymns featured, just as the name suggests, Miner's renditions of traditional hymns including How Great Thou Art and "It Is Well With My Soul." Also recorded that year was a live album, Live From The Sunset Strip, which found Miner performing at the Roxy in West Hollywood, California, backed by Walter Rodriguez, Ron Aniello, Derri Daugherty, Scott Docherty and David Miner.

From December 2001 to February 2003, Miner spent time in The Green Room in Huntington Beach, California, The Music Room in Woodland Hills, California, and The Homestead in Leipers Fork, Tennessee, recording a followup to Old Hyms My Mom Loves, this time appropriately entitled Old Hymns My Dad Loves. This time Miner was backed by Ramy Antoun, Troy Dexter, Danny Donnelly, Mike Holden, and Phil Madeira.

After being diagnosed with polyps on her vocal cords and the prospect of never singing again, Miner channeled her time of physical silence into the creation of a new record, Prodigal Martha, which was released in 2005.  Of the record, Miner says, "[Prodigal Martha is] my return back to the stillness. Ironically, it's this hard driving rock record. But it starts in that really broken place. The chorus of the title track goes 'Father I know it's here. It's been so long since I've sat at your feet, will you recognize me?' It's a great journey."

Discography
 Strong Hand of Love, 1994
 Sacred, 1995
 Orphans of God, 1996
 Old Hymns My Mom Loves, 1999
 Live from the Strip, 1999
 These Could've Been My Greatest Hits, 2000
 Old Hymns My Dad Loves, 2001
 Making God Smile: An Artists' Tribute to the Songs of Beach Boy Brian Wilson, 2002
 Prodigal Martha, 2005
  Songs, 2009

References

Living people
Musicians from San Diego
Year of birth missing (living people)
Singers from California
20th-century American women singers
20th-century American singers
21st-century American women singers
21st-century American singers

Kate Miner (musician)


Electrical conductivity is the measure of a material's ability to allow the transport of an electric charge. Its SI is the siemens per meter, (A2s3m−3kg−1)  (named after Werner von Siemens) or, more simply,  Sm−1.

It is the ratio of the current density to the electric field strength. It is equivalent to the electrical conductance measured between opposite faces of a 1-metre cube of the material under test.

The symbol for electrical conductivity is κ (kappa), and also σ (sigma) or γ (gamma).

Electrical conductance is an electrical phenomenon where a material contains movable particles with electric charge (such as electrons), which can carry electricity. When a difference of electrical potential is placed across a conductor, its electrons flow, and an electric current appears.

A conductor such as a metal has high conductivity, and an insulator like glass or a vacuum has low conductivity. A semiconductor has a conductivity that varies widely under different conditions.

Electrical conductivity is the reciprocal (or inverse) of electrical resistivity.

Electricity
Materials science

Electrical conductivity


Willem Pieterszoon Buytewech (1591/92 – September 23, 1624) was a Dutch Golden Age painter, draughtsman and etcher.  He is one of the early specialists in the merry company type of subject in Dutch genre painting.  His contemporaries named him "Gheestige Willem" (Jolly or spirited William).

Life
Buytewech was born and died in Rotterdam.   He was the son of Pieter Jacobsz, a cobbler and candlemaker. He learned his trade in Haarlem, where he became a member of the artists' guild (Haarlem Guild of St. Luke) in 1612, together with Hercules Segers and Esaias van de Velde. Frans Hals, who was a member of this guild since 1610, had much influence on Buytenwech's work, as shown by the many drawings that the latter made after Hals's paintings. After his marriage on November 10, 1613, with Aeltje van Amerongen, of a patrician family, he returned to Rotterdam. There Hendrik Martenszoon Sorgh was one of his pupils.

Buytewech was primarily a graphic artist, mostly of landscapes and genre pieces, but occasionally also of biblical and allegorical themes. Of his paintings only eight have survived to this date, all genre pieces, most depicting merry companies. Merry Company on a Terrace (1616) is in the collection of the Mauritshuis, the Hague. Merry Company (1620) is in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam.

He died at age 32 or 33 of unrecorded causes. His son Willem Willemsz Buytewech (1625–1670), born after his death, would become a painter as well. It is suggested that Herman van Swanevelt could have been his pupil.

References

External links

 Gary Schwartz on the Merry Companies
 http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/bio/b/buytewec/biograph.html
 About his son
 The Maps of Willem Buytewech
 Works and literature at PubHist

Dutch Golden Age painters
Dutch male painters
1590s births
1624 deaths
Painters from Rotterdam
Painters from Haarlem

Willem Pieterszoon Buytewech


Speculation has a special meaning when talking about money. The person who speculates is called a speculator. A speculator does not buy goods to own them, but to sell them later. The reason is that he wants to make a profit from the change in price.

One tries to buy the goods when they are cheap and to sell them when they are expensive. There is a good chance to profit as long as the market price of a good changes often in different directions.

Speculation includes the buying, holding, selling, and short-selling of stocks, bonds, commodities, currencies, collectibles, real estate, derivatives or any valuable financial instrument. It is the opposite of buying because one wants to use them for daily life or to get income from them (as dividends or interest).

Speculation is one of the biggest market roles in western financial markets. The others are hedging, long term investing and arbitrage.  Speculators do not plan to keep an asset for a long time.

References

Finance

Speculation


Pitaya fruit, pitahaya fruit, commonly known as the dragon fruit, is a fruit from Central America, South America, and Asia. It has a light sweet taste, an intense shape and colour, and has a texture of between that of a kiwi and an apple. In addition to being tasty and refreshing, it contains a lot of water and other important minerals with varied nutritional ingredients.

Occurrence
It is also known as "pitaya" if it comes from the very closely related Stenographers genus. The actual dragon fruit is the fruit of the cactus genus Hylocereus. Occuring in Mexico, South America, as well as Central America. It is possible it was introduced to Southeast Asian nations through Vietnam, alongside trade with the French during the 1800s. Cambodia, Thailand, Taiwan, Vietnam, and the Philippines, where it still holds as an important part of their diet.

Yellow Pitaya
The dragon fruit in the photo above. The yellow skin has white flesh. It has the highest sugar content among dragon fruits. In Chinese, it is called giraffe family and is commonly found in Hong Kong. The ripe ones are really sweet like sugar.

References

Fruits
Cactaceae

https://www.producebluebook.com/know-your-commodity/dragon-fruit/

Dragonfruit


Werner Leich (born January 31, 1927 in Mühlhausen) is a Protestant clergyman. From 1978 to 1992 he was the bishop of the Evangelical Church in Thuringia, for the greater part during the era of the German Democratic Republic.

Life
From 1942 to 1945 Leich was a voluntary member of the German Luftwaffe with the rank of Fahnenjunker. He volunteered to "battle for the salvation of Germany". After World War II he finished his school and from 1947 he started studying theology at the University of Marburg and Heidelberg University.

In 1951 he started his career as a clergyman. A year later he married Trautel, with whom he has a son and daughter. Since 1960 he was a member of the Synod of the Evangelical Church. He was vice-president of the synod from 1967 to 1978 and bishop of the state of Thuringia from 1978 to 1992. In that year he retired.

During a lot of his career, he had to deal with being able to worship God in an environment of anti-religious communism. He described it as "a lot of times we did hide being Christians".

Autobiography
 1992: Wechselnde Horizonte. Mein Leben in vier politischen Systemen.

References

1927 births
East German people
German Lutheran pastors
German military personnel of World War II
German theologians
Lutheran bishops
People from Thuringia
2022 deaths

Werner Leich


The Starving Time at Jamestown in Virginia Colony was a period of starvation during the winter of 1609–1610. During this time, all but 60 of the 500 colonists died. Lack of rain and access to water had crippled the agricultural production during the summer. Also, the water that the colonists drank was brackish and only drinkable half the year.

According to historical accounts, the colonists ate dogs, snakes, cats, rats, horses, books and shoe leather through the winter. There is forensic evidence of at least one instance of cannibalism. The remains of a teenage girl ( 1595–1609), named "Jane" by researchers, showed signs of being butchered (cut up for eating). Examination of Jane's shin bone indicates she was probably 14 years old at the time of her death. Based on studies of the isotopes in a tooth, she was probably from southern England. She was possibly the daughter of a gentleman or a maid in a gentleman's home because she had consumed generous amounts of protein (meat). Jane likely arrived in Virginia in August 1609.

It is almost certain Jane was removed from her grave before being butchered and eaten. She was not murdered. In 1625, George Percy, president of Jamestown during the starvation period, wrote that the hunger was so intense "thatt notheinge was Spared to mainteyne Lyfe and to doe those things which seame incredible, as to digge upp deade corpes outt of graves and to eate them." Five other accounts refer to cannibalism during the bitter winter.

Only 10 percent of Jane's remains have been recovered by researchers. The remains were found about 2.5 feet (0.8 m) down in a trash pit in the cellar of a building built in 1608 inside the James Fort site. Historical accounts indicate cannibalism was widespread at Jamestown during the winter. Modern historians were reluctant to credit these accounts without other evidence. Jane however is the first forensic evidence that confirms the existence of the practice during that winter.

References

Other websites
New Discoveries at Jamestown by John L. Cotter and J. Paul Hudson, (1957) at Project Gutenberg

History of Virginia
Cannibalism
1609
1610

Starving Time


The Belgae were a group of tribes living in northern Gaul.  They were on the west bank of the Rhine, in the 3rd century BC.  Later they were also in Britain, and possibly even Ireland. They gave their name to the Roman province of Gallia Belgica, and very much later, to the modern country of Belgium.

The Belgae came to Britain as raiders and settled in southern Britain shortly before the Romans came. They occupied the area later called Hampshire.

References

Ancient history
Ethnic groups in Europe

Belgae


Carolus Seymour (1885 - 1963) fuit rerum gestarum scriptor, anno 1919 legatus C. F. A. apud Deliberationem de pace componenda Lutetiae factam, inter annos 1937 et 1951 praeses Universitatis Yalensis.

Opera
 (cum Donald Paige Frary) How the World Votes: The Story of Democratic Development in Elections, 1918
 (editor) What really happened at Paris; the story of the Peace Conference, 1918-1919, by American delegates; ed. E. M. House, C. Seymour. New York: Scribner, 1921.
Bok, E. W. In explanation. - House, E. M. Foreword. - Mezes, S. E. Preparations for peace. - Day, C. The atmosphere and organization of the Peace Conference. - Haskins, C. H. The new boundaries of Germany. - Lord, R. H. Poland. - Seymour, C. The end of the empire: remnants of Austria-Hungary. - Johnson, D. W. Fiume and the Adriatic problem. - Bowman, I. Constantinople and the Balkans. - Westermann, W. L. The Armenian problem and the disruption of Turkey. - Hudson, M. O. The protection of minorities and natives in transferred territories. - Scott, J. B. The trail of the Kaiser. - Lamont, T. W. Reparations. - Young, A. B. The economic settlement. - Gompers, S. The labor clauses of the treaty. - Hoover, H. The economic administration during the armistice. - Mayo, H. T. The Atlantic Fleet in the Great War. - Bliss, T. H. The problem of disarmament. - Miller, D. H. The making of the League of Nations. - House, E. M. The Versailles Peace in retrospect.
 Letters from the Paris Peace Conference (1965)

 Participantes deliberationis de pace componenda (1919)

Nexus externi
 Nuntius mortis "Charles Seymour of Yale Dies at 78,"

Nati 1885
Mortui 1963
Professores Universitatis Yalensis
Historici Civitatum Foederatarum
Auctores Anglici

Carolus Seymour


Vekoslav Grmič (4 June 1923 – 21 March 2005) was a Slovenian Roman Catholic bishop and theologian, known for his sympathy towards socialist ideas.

Biography
He was born in the Lower Styrian village of Sveti Jurij ob Ščavnici in what was then the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. He studied at a Roman Catholic priest seminary in Maribor. Already as a young man, he became influenced by the social thought of Janez Evangelist Krek, Edvard Kocbek and the German philosopher Romano Guardini. After the invasion of Yugoslavia and the Nazi occupation of northern Slovenia in April 1941, Grmič started collaborating with the Communist-led Liberation Front of the Slovenian People.

In 1950, he was ordained priest and between 1952 and 1958 he worked as a parish priest of Vransko. In 1961 he graduated from the Theological Faculty in Ljubljana with a thesis on the theological elements in the existentialist concept of angst. From 1962 until his retirement in 1991 he taught dogmatic theology at the same faculty.

In 1968 he was appointed auxiliary bishop of Maribor by Pope Paul VI. In 1980, he was removed from office by Pope John Paul II, although he nominally maintained the title of bishop and continued to teach at the Theological Faculty in Ljubljana.

Grmič was a strong supporter of the Liberation Theology and of the political-religious thought of the Swiss reformist theologian Hans Küng. Together with the fellow Slovene Roman Catholic theologian Janez Janžekovič, he became one of the supporters of a closer collaboration between Roman Catholics and Marxist in Yugoslavia. During his lifetime, Grmič published more than 40 books and several translation from German.

In the last decade of his life, he often voiced his opinion in public, thus becoming a somewhat controversial figure. He often held very different views from other members of the local Roman Catholic hierarchy on several issues of social and political matters.

He died in Maribor at the age of 82.

Main works
 O Bogu (On God, Ljubljana, 1966)
 Vprašanja našega časa v luči teologije: sodobna evangelizacija (The Issues of Our Time in the Light of Theology: Modern Evangelization. Tinje/Tainach, Carinthia], 1978)
 Med vero in nevero (Between Faith and Infidelity, Celje, 1969)
 Resnica iz ljubezni (Truth from Love, Ljubljana, 1979)
 Teologija v službi človeka (Theology in the Service of Man, Tinje/Tainach, 1975)
 Življenje iz upanja (Life from Hope, Ljubljana, 1981)
 Humanizem problem našega časa (Humanism and the Problem of Our Time, Trieste, 1983)
 V duhu dialoga: za človeka gre (In the Spirit of Dialogue: It's about Man, Ljubljana, 1986)
 Kocbekova odločitev za OF in (njegov) krščanski etos (Kocbek's Decision for the Liberation Front and (His) Christian Ethos, Ljubljana, 1994)
 Ušeničnikovo razumevanje umetnosti in literature (Ušeničnik's Conception of Art and Literature, Ljubljana, 1994)
 Izzivi in odgovori (Challenges and Answers, Ljubljana, 2000)
 Poslednji spisi: misli o sodobnosti (Last Writings: Thoughts on Modernity, Ljubljana, 2005)

See also
 Christian left
 Christian socialism

External links
Obituary in the daily newspaper Delo (in Slovenian, with picture)

1923 births
2005 deaths
People from Maribor
People from Sveti Jurij ob Ščavnici
Slovenian Christian socialists
20th-century Roman Catholic bishops in Slovenia
20th-century Roman Catholic titular bishops
Slovenian theologians
Slovene resistance members
Catholic resistance to Nazi Germany
Catholic socialists
Christian socialist theologians
Yugoslav Catholics
20th-century Slovenian Roman Catholic priests

Vekoslav Grmič


Kurt Wüthrich (born 4 October 1938 in Aarberg, Canton of Bern) is a Swiss chemist/biophysicist and Nobel Chemistry laureate, known for developing nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) methods for studying biological macromolecules.

Education and early life
Born in Aarberg, Switzerland, Wüthrich was educated in chemistry, physics, and mathematics at the University of Bern before pursuing his PhD supervised by Silvio Fallab at the University of Basel, awarded in 1964.

Career
After his PhD, Wüthrich continued postdoctoral research with Fallab for a short time before leaving to work at the University of California, Berkeley for two years from 1965 with Robert E. Connick.  That was followed by a stint working with Robert G. Shulman at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey from 1967 to 1969.

Wüthrich returned to Switzerland, to Zürich, in 1969, where he began his career there at the ETH Zürich, rising to Professor of Biophysics by 1980. He currently maintains a laboratory at the ETH Zürich, at The Scripps Research Institute, in La Jolla, California and at the  of ShanghaiTech University. He has also been a visiting professor at the University of Edinburgh (1997–2000), the Chinese University of Hong Kong (where he was an Honorary Professor) and Yonsei University.

During his graduate studies Wüthrich started out working with electron paramagnetic resonance spectroscopy, and the subject of his PhD thesis was "the catalytic activity of copper compounds in autoxidation reactions". During his time as a postdoc in Berkeley he began working with the newly developed and related technique of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy to study the hydration of metal complexes. When Wüthrich joined the Bell Labs, he was put in charge of one of the first superconducting NMR spectrometers, and started studying the structure and dynamics of proteins. He has pursued this line of research ever since.

After returning to Switzerland, Wüthrich collaborated with, among others, Nobel laureate Richard R. Ernst on developing the first two-dimensional NMR experiments, and established the nuclear Overhauser effect as a convenient way of measuring distances within proteins. This research later led to the complete assignment of resonances for among others the bovine pancreatic trypsin inhibitor and glucagon.

In October 2010, Wüthrich participated in the USA Science and Engineering Festival's Lunch with a Laureate program where middle and high school students will get to engage in an informal conversation with a Nobel Prize–winning scientist over a brown-bag lunch. Wüthrich is also a member on the USA Science and Engineering Festival's Advisory Board and a supporter of the Campaign for the Establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, an organisation which campaigns for democratic reform in the United Nations.

Awards and honors
He was awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University in 1991, the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine in 1993, the Otto Warburg Medal in 1999 and half of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2002 for "his development of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy for determining the three-dimensional structure of biological macromolecules in solution". He received the Bijvoet Medal of the Bijvoet Center for Biomolecular Research of Utrecht University in 2008. He was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 2010. He was also awarded the 2018 Fray International Sustainability Award at SIPS 2018 by FLOGEN Star Outreach.

Personal details
On 2 April 2018, Dr. Wüthrich established permanent residency in Shanghai, China, after obtaining a Chinese permanent residence card.

Bibliography
 NMR in Biological Research: Peptides and Proteins, American Elsevier Pub. Co, 1976
 NMR of proteins and nucleic acids, Wiley, 1986
 NMR In Structural Biology: A Collection Of Papers By Kurt Wuthrich, World Scientific Publishing Co Pte Ltd, 1995

References

External links

  including the Nobel Lecture NMR Studies of Structure and Function of Biological Macromolecules

1938 births
Living people
People from Aarberg
Academic staff of ETH Zurich
Duke University faculty
Academics of the University of Edinburgh
Nobel laureates in Chemistry
Nuclear magnetic resonance
Swiss chemists
Swiss biophysicists
Swiss Nobel laureates
Swiss Protestants
Scripps Research faculty
Members of the European Molecular Biology Organization
Foreign associates of the National Academy of Sciences
Members of the French Academy of Sciences
Foreign Members of the Royal Society
Foreign Fellows of the Indian National Science Academy
Bijvoet Medal recipients
Kyoto laureates in Advanced Technology
University of Bern alumni

Kurt Wüthrich


A Nazi concentration camp was one of the death camps and labor camps operated by the Nazis during the Second World War throughout the occupied territories of the Third Reich for the imprisonment, enslavement and extermination of Jews and others that Nazi party considered undesirable. These facilities were the culmination of the final solution that became the Holocaust. Most inmates were brought to the camps in cattle cars. Upon arrival, they were stripped of all possessions, made to undergo Selection (where the Nazis would determine who lives and who dies), had their hair cut off, etc. Conditions were extremely inhumane.

Some of the main concentration camps were:
Auschwitz - The largest and most "productive" of them all.
Sobibor
Chelmano

Related pages
Extermination camp
Nazi concentration camps in Norway

Nazi concentration camp


Becoming Jane is a movie directed by Julian Jarrold in 2007. The setting of this movie is Hampshire, England in the 1700s. The movie's story was based on a fictional biography written by Jon Spence. Anne Hathaway played Jane Austen. James McAvoy played Thomas Lefroy. This movie won the 2007 People's Choice Award for "Favorite Independent Movie". It was nominated for 2008 Ivor Novello Award for Best Original Film Score.

Plot
Jane (played by Anne Hathaway) is a writer. She lives in a rural area. Her father is a pastor of small church. Her her family is poor. She is under a lot of stress since her mother wants her to marry Mr. Wisley (Laurence Fox). He is the nephew of the wealthy Lady Gresham (Maggie Smith).

Meanwhile, Thomas Lefroy (played by James McAvoy) is working with his uncle as a lawyer in London. He is ordered to go Hampshire due to his dissipated life. When they meet the first time, Tom criticizes Jane's works and she becomes angry about that. Both of them have hostile feelings toward each other. However, the feelings changes into affection as they meet several times. Finally they decide to marry. With a lot of expectation, they visits Tom's uncle Judge Langlois. The uncle does not approve of the marriage due to Jane's poverty. They break up, but since they love each other deeply, they elope. But after knowing about the fact that Tom is the only hope of his family, Jane gives up their elopement and leaves to go home.

Twenty years later, Jane becomes famous writer and after a gathering, Jane and Tom meet again. There, Tom is with his daughter who likes Jane's book a lot. His daughter asks Jane to read the novel. To stop her Tom called his daughter's name – Jane. Knowing that Tom named his daughter after her, Jane accepts her request and reads her book, Pride and Prejudice.

Jane Austen
2007 movies
Movies based on books
English-language movies
People's Choice Award winners

Becoming Jane


Alter Echo is a third-person action-adventure video game developed by Outrage Games and published by THQ. It was released for the PlayStation 2 and Xbox on August 19, 2003 in North America, and on October 3, 2003 in Europe.

Plot
Alter Echo tells the story of a futuristic world where psychics, known as shapers, can use a special substance called Plast to form anything from weapons to buildings. The world's greatest shaper, Paavo, has made a breakthrough on a faraway planet, creating a new, more powerful Plast called EchoPlast. The player, a young shaper named Nevin, is stranded on the planet with his two friends when Paavo shoots their ship down. The EchoPlast, having achieved sentience, gives Nevin a new EchoPlast suit and tasks him with stopping Paavo from wiping out the entire human race.

Gameplay
Alter Echo is an action-adventure where the player controls Nevin from a third-person perspective. Battle is primarily focused on melee combat, though there is some emphasis on long-range weapons.

In battle, the player can morph Nevin's EchoPlast suit into three different forms. The primary form is the Sword form, which is merely Nevin holding a sword. The Sword form focuses on close-range combat. The second form is the Gun form, which morphs Nevin into a massive, slow-moving, gun-toting humanoid. In this form, Nevin can fire various forms of laser blasts and grenades. The Gun form also possesses an unwieldy melee attack. The final form is the Stealth form, which transforms Nevin into a frog-like creature which walks on all fours. This form can use its tongue in order to grab opponents or items and bring them closer to Nevin. This form also has an optional (though brief) cloaking feature to avoid detection, and Nevin can climb certain kinds of walls. Finally, he can latch onto enemies and unleash devastating melee attacks with his claws.

The game revolves around Nevin trying to free the EchoPlast from Paavo by taking control of various Master Nodes and Sync Nodes. To take control of them, the player must complete a puzzle.

A short period into the game, the player gains access to a time dilation power. By activating it in the presence of one or more enemies, a blank version of the node puzzles is presented to the player. The longer the player can keep the puzzle active, the more damage they will deal when it completes.

As the game progresses, the player earns experience points to improve their combat forms, health, and other attributes. Experience is earned through defeating enemies. Larger experience totals are rewarded when the player is able to string many hits in succession, known as combos. A multiplier is recorded at the top portion of the screen and applied when the player waits too long between attacks. It is applied automatically after reaching a certain point (40 for the Sword form, 35 for the others).

Reception

Alter Echo received "mixed" reviews on both platforms according to the review aggregation website Metacritic. Jeff Gerstmann, writing for GameSpot, commented: "It would have been nice to have seen some more variety in the environments, and the instances of backtracking through areas you've already visited are disappointing. But the game's exciting, free-form combat makes up for those deficiencies."

References

External links

2003 video games
PlayStation 2 games
PlayStation Network games
Science fiction video games
THQ games
Video games scored by Jerry Berlongieri
Xbox games
Action-adventure games
Single-player video games
Video games developed in the United States
Outrage Games games

Alter Echo


A contrabass guitar is a low-register bass guitar with four, five or six strings. It is often called, simply, a six string bass guitar. The five string bass guitar is rarely called a contrabass guitar, even though it typically has the same lowest note.

History
Contrabass guitars have been around since 1899, when a "Grand Concert Contra Bass Guitar" was listed in Joseph Bohmann's catalogue. Bohmann, a violin, mandolin, guitar and zither  manufacturer from Chicago, developed a large 6-string guitar. While some logically speculate that this instrument was tuned one octave lower than a standard guitar (basically an Acoustic Bass VI), no reliable information is available about its tuning.

A "classical contrabass guitar" (aka Acoustic Bass VI) is tuned E1–A1–D2–G2–B2–E3, like the classical guitar, but one octave lower. It is popular in Fado bands in Portugal and South America. In this sense, it may actually be considered as an acoustic bass guitar, for it shares the same low-end range.  Although called a contrabass guitar, the fact that it is tuned only an octave lower than a normal guitar makes it—in modern terminology—more an acoustic bass guitar than a contrabass instrument. Its strings are much thinner than a conventional acoustic bass guitar, so it lacks the "thick" tone of those instruments.

Contrabass guitars from the 1970s are often tuned B0–E1–A1–D2–G2–C3 (B0 being the lowest B on a standard 88-key piano). Some players prefer B0–E1–A1–D2–F2–B2, which preserves the intervals of a standard guitar tuning (lowered by a twelfth) and makes the top and bottom notes the same pitch. They are usually electric instruments with a solid wooden body. After guitar maker Carl Thompson made a first, arguably non-satisfying attempt to create such an instrument in 1974, Ken Smith built the first entirely usable electric contrabass guitar in 1982. This was again at the request of bassist Anthony Jackson, who later asked Vinnie Fodera and Joey Lauricella of Fodera Guitars to build several instruments according to his ideas. The contrabass guitar influenced the development of the six-string electric bass.

See also
 Extended-range bass
 Fender Bass VI

References

Bass guitars
Guitar family instruments
Contrabass instruments
Bass (sound)
Rhythm section

Contrabass guitar


Koenigsegg Automotive AB is a Swedish company that makes cars. They make "super cars", a mixture of sports cars and a fast cars. The main office is in Ängelholm, Sweden.

History
The creator and manager of Koenigsegg is Christian E. H. von Koenigsegg. In 1994 he created Koenigsegg as a small company, after years of planning. The designer David Crafoord designed the concept car for Koenigsegg's original drawings. Then, they built a prototype that could be driven. They tested the car for several years and developed it further. In 2002, the company started the series production of the model CC 8S. Koenigsegg CC 8S was named by the Guinness Book of Records for the world's most powerful car with its 1,050 horsepower.

Cars
Koenigsegg's fastest car is Koenigsegg 2013 Agera R. It can go up to 440 km/h (273 mph). In 14,5 seconds the car can go up to 300 km/h (186 mph).

Other websites

References
 Koenigsegg website

Automobile companies of Sweden

Koenigsegg


The Taikyoku series is a series of kata in use in several types of karate. The name Taikyoku (太極) refers to the Chinese philosophical concept of Taiji. The Taikyoku kata were developed by Yoshitaka Funakoshi and introduced by Gichin Funakoshi as a way to simplify the principles of the already simplified Pinan/Heian series.  The embusen, or pattern of the kata's movements, are the same as in Heian shodan.  Students of karate systems that use the Taikyoku kata series are often introduced to them first, as a preparation for the Pinan/Heian kata. Gōjū Kai developed five of its own Taikyoku kata, based on the Shotokan katas and retaining the I-shaped embusen.
The embusen (pathway) of all the Taikyoku kata is simple (here, the # represents the starting and ending point):

                *--!
                |
                |
                |
                |
             !--#

On each turn, a block is executed, followed by a step and a strike. Up and back the middle, then there are three punches.

Shotokan

Taikyoku (First Cause)
Gichin "Shoto" Funakoshi Sensei named the set of three Taikyoku kata developed by his son Yoshitaka "Gigō" Funakoshi Sensei. In his book "Karate-do Kyohan" Funakoshi, he explains the development of the kata and why he named them Taikyoku, which translates as First Cause.

He also wrote: "Because of its simplicity, the kata is easily learned by beginners. Nevertheless, as its name implies, this form is of the most profound character and one to which, upon mastery of the art of karate, an expert will return to select it as the ultimate training kata"  (page 42, 'Karate-Do Kyohan').  (a side note:- The Chinese kanji used for the name Taikyoku (太極) are pronounced as "Tai Chi" in Chinese, which translated as "Grand Ultimate").

Some people say that Sensei Funakoshi created 10 Taikyoku kata, but this statement may be false. On page 42 ('Karate-Do Kyohan: The Master Text'), Sensei Funakoshi stated, "There are three Taikyoku forms (numbered by the ordinal terms: Shodan, Nidan, and Sandan)."

Taikyoku Shodan (First Cause, First Level)
Taikyoku Shodan, often simply referred to as "kihon" is the first of the series, and involves only two basic moves: the gedan barai or low block, and chudan (middle) oi zuki (sometimes "oi tsuki"), or lunge punch.  All stances, except at the beginning and end, are zenkutsu dachi (forward stance). There are 20 steps to this kata and you only turn inwards to the embusen.

Taikyoku Nidan (First Cause, Second Level)
The second kata of the series, Taikyoku Nidan, is similar to Taikyoku Shodan, except that the chudan punches are all replaced with upper-level (jodan) punches.

Taikyoku Sandan (First Cause, Third Level)
The third kata of the series, Taikyoku Sandan, is similar to Taikyoku Shodan, except that moves 1, 3, 9, 11, 17 and 19 are replaced with middle level arm blocks (uchi uke) executed in back (kokutsu) stance.

Taikyoku Yondan (First Cause, Fourth Level)
Practically the same as Taikyoku Shodan except after moves 1, 3, 9, 11, 17 and 19 a mae-geri is executed

Taikyoku Godan (First Cause, Fifth Level)
This is quite different from Taikyoku Shodan as after moves 1, 3, 9, 11, 17 and 19 instead of striking chudan the moves executed are age uke and then reverse punch and on moves 5 and 13 after the gedan-barai a mae-geri is executed before each strike.

Taikyoku Rokudan (First Cause, Sixth Level)
The final of the taikyoku series is also the most different of the previous five as each move is a gedan barai in kiba dachi (horse riding stance).

Shitō-ryū

Juni No Kata
Juni No Kata (十二の型, twelve attack step kata) is the version of Taikyoku taught in Shitō-ryū. It follows the same embusen as the Shotokan Taikyoku, and has the same 20 separate 'moves' with the block/punch combinations as 1 count each resulting in a 12 count kata. Typically, three version of this kata are taught: Juni No Ichi, Juni No Ni, and Juni No San. Juni No Ichi includes gedan-barai (low block) in zenkutsu-dachi (forward stance) and oi-zuku (lunge punch) in moto-dachi (high stance), Juni No Ni replaces low blocks with middle blocks, and Juni No San - with high blocks in neko ashi dachi (cat stance).

Gōjū Kai
These kata are performed largely the same, changing the stances and strikes to teach students the basics of moving and striking before moving on to more difficult kata.

The first in the series is taikyoku gedan. It employs the same strikes and blocks as Shotokan's taikyoku shodan, but employs the shiko dachi ("straddle-leg stance", similar to the "horse stance") in half facing position (hanmi) instead of the front stance. The second in the series, taikyoku chudan, alternates between front stance and sanchin dachi ("hourglass stance") and the low blocks have been replaced with soto uke (outer mid-level block). The third kata, taikyoku jodan, is identical to chudan but replaces the soto uke with jodan age uke (high block). The fourth, taikyoku tora guchi, is named after the trapping technique/block it teaches: the double handed hooking block, tora guchi. The fifth, taikyoku kake uke is exactly the same as taikyoku tora guchi, but teaches the hook block, kake uke.

Go-Kan-Ryu

Taigyoku Shodan (GKR spelling)
Almost identical to Shotokan's Taikyoku Shodan except that a look over the left shoulder is performed with moves 3, 11 and 19 where the right foot is moved back (behind) for the 180 degree (about face) turns.
The GKR open and close ceremonies are also different from Shotokan's, notably the use of parallel ready stance (heiko dachi) instead of open V stance (soto hachiji dachi).

Taigyoku Nidan
Based on Taigyoku Shodan with simple punch/kick and kick/punch combinations replacing some single technique counts.
Moves 2, 4, 10, 12, 18 and 20 are an in-place chudan gyaku-zuki then moving forward with a chudan mae-geri keage.
Moves 6, 7, 8 and 14, 15, 16 are (a moving forward) chudan mae-geri keage and landing with a chudan oi-zuki. The look over the left shoulder is not performed in Taigyoku Nidan.

Kyokushin

Taikyoku sono ichi
Taikyoku sono ichi is first kata in the series. On every turn, a gedan barai is executed. Every punch is seiken oi tsuki chudan.
It is in effect identical to the Taikyoku Shodan as done in shotokan.

Taikyoku sono ni

The second kata in the series. It is performed the same way as taikyoku sono ichi, except that all punches are jodan instead of chudan.
It is in effect identical to the Taikyoku nidan as done in shotokan.

Taikyoku sono san

The third kata in the series. All movements are the same as Taikyoku Sandan with the strikes on moves 6,7,8,14,15, and 16 being performed at high level (jodan-zuki).

Sokugi taikyoku sono ichi

The first sokugi (kicking) kata in the series. On every turn, kansetsu geri (yoko geri gedan) is executed, while on the following step or the three steps over the middle, mae geri keage is executed. In some schools, a kake wake uke is performed between the kansetsu geri and the mae geri keage.

Sokugi taikyoku sono ni

The second sokugi (kicking) kata in the series. Instead of kansetsu geri being executed on every turn, yoko geri is executed, which is the same technique but going to chudan or jodan instead of gedan. On each step and the three steps over the middle, mae geri is executed. Again, in some schools, a kake wake uke is performed between the yoko geri and the mae geri.

Sokugi taikyoku sono san

The third sokugi (kicking) kata in the series. On each turn, a yoko geri is executed. The following steps on the short sides are haisoku mawashi uchi keage, while the three kicks executed over the long side are teisoku mawashi soto keage. In some interpretations, an ura mawashi geri is performed instead of an haisoku mawashi uchi keage, and a mawashi geri instead of a teisoku mawashi soto keage, and a kake wake uke is performed between the yoko geri and the following keage.

Ura

The taikyoku series can also be done "in Ura" denoting that each step is reversed, meaning that every other step one steps in circle to reach the target, then performs the technique. The round steps are always performed on the strikes, not the blocks

Tate

The series can also be performed "in Tate" a variation invented by Yoshikazu Matsushima and unique to IKO3. In this variation the steps are performed in a straight line, starting by stepping directly forward, then the turns being 180 degrees rather than ninety. On the last step, one turns to where one was originally facing rather than stepping forward.

Shuri-ryū

In Shuri-ryū, Taikyoku Ichi is performed at gedan level, Taikyoku Ni is performed at chudan level, and Taikyoku San is performed at jodan level. All performed in the typical "H" or "I" pattern.

Korean Martial Arts

Korean schools of Tang Soo Do and Tae Kwon Do began teaching the Taikyoku Kata under the name Kicho Hyung. The embusen used are the same, the stances and blocks are similar, and the strikes are virtually identical. A common symbol used in Korean arts for the Kicho Hyung is a human baby learning to walk.

See also
Karate kata

External links

Overview all Kyokushin Katas, videos including step-by-step written instructions

Karate kata

Taikyoku


Matoke, locally also known as matooke, amatooke in Buganda (Central Uganda), ekitookye in southwestern Uganda, ekitooke in western Uganda, kamatore in Lugisu (Eastern Uganda), ebitooke in northwestern Tanzania, igitoki in Rwanda, Burundi and by the cultivar name East African Highland banana, is a starchy triploid banana cultivar originating from the African Great Lakes. The fruit is harvested green, carefully peeled, and then cooked and often mashed or pounded into a meal. In Uganda and Rwanda, the fruit is steam-cooked, and the mashed meal is considered a national dish in both countries.

Matoke bananas are a staple food crop in Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and other Great Lakes countries. They are also known as the Mutika/Lujugira subgroup.

The medium-sized green fruits, which are of a specific group of banana, the East African Highland bananas (Musa AAA-EA), are known in the Bantu languages of Uganda and Western Kenya as matoke.

Cooking bananas have long been and still are a common staple crop around the Lake Victoria area of Kenya and Uganda, and in the West and Kilimanjaro regions of Tanzania.

Description
Uganda Highland bananas are easily distinguishable from other banana cultivars by the numerous black (or more rarely brown or bronze) blotches on their pseudostems, giving them the appearance of polished metal. The outermost sheath of their pseudostems is a medium green, superimposed over the pink to purple underlying sheaths.

Their leaves are also darker green and dull, a difference more apparent when comparing them side by side with other banana cultivars from a distance.

The inflorescence has peduncles covered with coarse hair. The bracts are ovate to lanceolate in shape with outer surfaces that are purple to brown and inner surfaces which are red fading to yellow towards the base. The male flowers have cream colored tepals with yellow lobes. The anthers are pink, while the stigmata are orange.

The fruits are recurved and can vary in length. They are inflated with blunt tips. The pulp is white in unripe fruits and cream-colored in ripe fruits.

Taxonomy
East African Highland bananas are triploid (AAA) cultivars. Their official designation is Musa acuminata Colla (AAA-EA). Synonyms include Musa brieyi De Wild. Their paternal parent is the blood banana subspecies (M. acuminata ssp. zebrina) of the wild banana species Musa acuminata.

East African Highland bananas are a subgroup that refers to about 200 individual banana cultivars (or clones). They can be subdivided into five distinct groups of clones known as clone sets:

Mbidde or beer clone set
The Mbidde clone set contains 14 cultivars. Mbidde means 'beer', and clones belonging to this clone set are usually used for making banana beer. Their pulp is bitter and astringent with sticky brown excretions.
Nakitembe clone set
Nakabululu clone set
Nakabululu clones are soft-textured and savory. They mature quickly, but their fruits are smaller and have lesser overall yields per bunch.
Musakala clone set
Musakala clones are characterized by slender fruits with bottle-necked tips. Other characteristics are the same as the preceding three clone sets.
Nfuuka clone set
Nfuuka clones are characterized by inflated, rounded, or almost rectangular fruits with intermediate-shaped tips. The bunch shape is mainly rectangular. Other characteristics are the same as the other clone sets. It is the most diverse of the five clone sets, a probable result of its tendency to mutate more frequently. They bear heavy compacted bunches and are thus more often exploited commercially than other clone sets.

Over 500 local names are known for cultivars from the EAHB subgroup.

Origin and distribution
East African Highland bananas were introduced early into Africa from Southeast Asia during the first to sixth centuries AD, probably via trade. They are genetically distinct from the other AAA cultivars, having evolved locally in the African Great Lakes region for over a millennium. They are found nowhere else in the world, and the African Great Lakes has been called the secondary center of banana diversity because of this (with Southeast Asia being the first). East African Highland bananas are considered to be especially diverse in Uganda, Burundi, and Rwanda. However, genetic analysis has revealed that all East African Highland bananas are genetically uniform, having most likely originated from a single ancestral clone (introduced to Africa within the past 2000 years) that underwent population expansion by vegetative propagation. The triploid East African Highland banana gene pool arose from a single hybridization event, which generated a genetic bottleneck during the foundation of the crop genepool. Triploid East African Highland bananas are sterile, and have been asexually vegetatively propagated for generations by successive generations of farmers since their introduction to Africa. This has likely led to the emergence of the genetically near-isogenic somatic mutants (i.e. today's East African Highland banana varieties) that have been selected by farmers and environments across East Africa.

Economic importance
East African Highland bananas are one of the most important staple food crops in the African Great Lakes region, particularly for Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, Burundi, and Rwanda. Per capita annual consumption of bananas in Uganda is the highest in the world at  daily per person. Including Rwanda and Burundi, consumption is about  per person annually (about three to 11 bananas each day). Uganda is the second-largest producer of bananas in the world. It is, however, one of the smallest exporters, with the crops being used mostly for domestic consumption.

East African Highland bananas are so important as food crops, the local name matoke (or more commonly matooke) is synonymous for the word "food" in Uganda. Also, a portion of the East African Highland bananas locally known as mbidde is used to produce juice and beer.

Food preparation

Matoke are peeled using a knife, wrapped in the plant's leaves (or plastic bags), and set in a cooking pot (Swahili: sufuria) atop the banana stalks. The pot is then placed on a charcoal or wood fire and the matoke is steamed for a couple of hours; water is poured into the bottom of the cooking pot multiple times. The stalks in the bottom of the pot keep the leaf-wrapped fruits above the level of the hot water. While uncooked, the matoke is white and fairly hard; cooking turns it soft and yellow. The matoke is then mashed while still wrapped in the leaves or bags and often served on a fresh banana leaf. It is typically eaten with a sauce made of vegetables, ground peanut, or some type of meat (goat or beef).

Matoke are also used to make a popular breakfast dish called katogo in Uganda.  Katogo is commonly cooked as a combination of peeled bananas and peanuts or beef, though offal or goat meat are also common.

In Bukoba, Tanzania, matoke (or ebitooke) are cooked with meat or smoked catfish, and beans or groundnuts. This method eliminates the need for preparing a separate sauce. In this recipe, the matoke are not mashed. Until the early 1980s, this was the most common meal in Bukoba and would be eaten all year.

See also
 Banana
 Cooking plantain
 Cuisine of Burundi
 Cuisine of Rwanda
 Cuisine of Uganda
 List of African dishes
 Plantain
Banana cultivar groups
Ensete
Musa balbisiana

References

External links
 The Congo Cookbook (African Recipes)
 Photo of Green Bunches of Matooke
 Musapedia, page on East African highland bananas

Banana cultivars
Banana production
Bananas
Burundian cuisine
Crops originating from Africa
Flora of East Tropical Africa
Musaceae
National dishes
Plantain dishes
Rwandan cuisine
Ugandan cuisine

Matoke


Sir Curtis Alexander Price, KBE (born 1945, in Springfield, Missouri, USA) was the Warden of New College, Oxford, between October 2009 and September 2016. He was previously principal of the Royal Academy of Music from 1995 to 2008 and Professor of Music in the University of London. He retired as the warden of New College at the end of August 2016.

Price was raised in Charleston, Illinois, and received his undergraduate musical training at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.  He attained a Ph.D from Harvard University. He moved to the United Kingdom in 1981 to teach at King's College London, latterly as head of department. Price is a trustee of Musica Britannica, the Handel House Museum and the British Library Sound Archive, a governor of the Purcell School and a Patron of Bampton Classical Opera. During his tenure as principal of Royal Academy of Music, the academy became a full school of University of London, it developed collaborations with Juilliard School (New York) and other music schools abroad, it acquired important archives (including the Foyle Menuhin archive) and in 2005 it acquired the "Viotti ex-Bruce" Stradivari violin.

In 2005, Price was appointed honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) for services to music. The knighthood was made substantive in the New Year Honours List 2006.

He is married to Professor Rhian Samuel, a composer.

Notes

References
The Royal Academy of Music
Interview with Curtis Price

American emigrants to England
British musicologists
British music educators
American musicologists
American music educators
Harvard University alumni
Principals of the Royal Academy of Music
Academics of King's College London
Fellows of King's College London
Wardens of New College, Oxford
Living people
1945 births
Honorary Members of the Royal Academy of Music
Southern Illinois University Carbondale alumni
People from Charleston, Illinois
Naturalised citizens of the United Kingdom
Purcell scholars

Curtis Price


Emily Jordan Osment (born March 10, 1992 Los Angeles, California) is an American actress and singer. She is most famous for her roles of Gerti Giggles in the Spy Kids trilogy, and Lilly Truscott in Hannah Montana. The younger brother of former child actor Haley Joel Osment, actress/vocalist Emily Osment launched her career at a young age, having landed a role in the 1999 film The Secret Life of Girls when she was only seven years old. The Los Angeles native furthered her career by also appearing in Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams, Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over, and the Disney Channel series Hannah Montana, where she enjoyed a recurring role as Lily Truscott. Osment also tried her hand at singing, kicking off that aspect of her career by performing alongside Billy Ray Cyrus on his 2007 album Home at Lastand contributing a song to the soundtrack of R.L. Stine's The Haunting Hour: Don't Think About It, in which she also starred. After making appearances on several Disney compilations, she began voicing a desire to tackle more rock-influenced music, and writing sessions with members of Eve 6 and Plain White T's helped her compile enough material for her debut EP, 2009's All the Right Wrongs. Osment switched directions for her full-length debut, though, leaving rock music behind and embracing electronic dance-pop on 2010's Fight or Flight.

Other websites

1992 births
Living people
Actors from Los Angeles
American child actors
American movie actors
American television actors
Disney actors
Electropop singers

Emily Osment