West Yorkshire is a metropolitan county in the Yorkshire and the Humber region of England. It was created in 1974 by the Local Government Act 1972  and in 2005 covered an area of 2,029 km² and a population of 2.1 million. It is the most built up and biggest urban area in Yorkshire.

Divisions and environs
West Yorkshire is divided into five local government districts; they are the City of Bradford, Calderdale, Kirklees, the City of Leeds and the City of Wakefield. The county borders Lancashire, Greater Manchester, Derbyshire, North Yorkshire and South Yorkshire.

Economy
This is a chart of trend of regional gross value added of West Yorkshire at current basic prices published  (pp.240-253) by Office for National Statistics with figures in millions of British Pounds Sterling.

Cities, towns and villages
 Ackworth, Allerton Bywater
 Baildon, Bailiff Bridge, Batley, Beeston, Bingley, Birkby, Birkenshaw, Boothtown, Boston Spa, Bradford, Brighouse
 Castleford, Cleckheaton, Copley, Cragg Vale, Cullingworth
 Denby Dale, Dewsbury
 Elland, Emley, Esholt
 Fairburn Ings, Ferrybridge, Fitzwilliam
 Garforth, Golcar, Gomersal, Greetland, Guiseley
 Halifax, Harewood, Hartshead, Hartshead Moor, Haworth, Hebden Bridge, Heckmondwike, Hemsworth, Heptonstall, Hipperholme, Holmfirth, Honley, Horbury, Horsforth, Huddersfield
 Ilkley
 Keighley, Kippax, Kirkburton, Kirkstall, Knottingley
 Ledsham, Ledston, Leeds, Linthwaite, Liversedge
 Marsden, Meltham, Mirfield, Morley, Mytholmroyd
 New Mill, Newmillerdam, New Farnley, Nostell, Norristhorpe
 Oakworth, Ossett, Oxenhope, Otley, Oulton
 Pontefract, Pudsey
 Queensbury
 Rastrick, Riddlesden, Ripponden, Rothwell, Roberttown
 Saltaire, Sandal, Scammonden Scarcroft, Scholes, Shelley, Shepley, Shibden, Shipley, Silsden, Slaithwaite, Sowerby Bridge, Stanbury, Swillington
 Thornbury, Thornton, Thornhill, Todmorden, Tong
 Wakefield, Walton, West Bretton, Wetherby, Wilsden
 Yeadon

Historic environment
 Harewood House
 Cliffe Hall, also known as Cliffe Castle
 Esholt Hall
 Firsby Hall
 Kirklees Hall
 Ledston Hall
 Linthwaite Hall
 Linton Hall
 Lotherton Hall
 Kershaw House
 East Riddlesden Hall
 Oakwell Hall
 Oulton Hall
 Sandal Castle
 Shelley Hall
 Shibden Hall
 Tong Hall
 Bretton Hall
 Kirkstall Abbey, Kirklees Priory, Nostell Priory, Pontefract Priory
 Wetherby Castle
 Scarcroft Water Mill
 Roman Lagentium (Castleford)
 Saltaire, a model village
 Keighley and Worth Valley Railway

Museums
 Brontë Parsonage Museum, Haworth
 Royal Armouries museum, Leeds
 Colne Valley Museum
 Pennine Farm Museum, Ripponden
 Pontefract Museum
 West Yorkshire Folk Museum, Shibden
 National Coal Mining Museum for England (Netherton)
 National Media Museum, Bradford
 Yorkshire Sculpture Park, West Bretton
 Tolson Museum, Dalton (Huddersfield)
 Wakefield Museum
 Redhouse Museum

Natural environment
 Emley Moor, site of the tallest self-supporting structure in the UK (a TV mast)
 Walton Hall, West Yorkshire, home of naturalist Charles Waterton and the world's first nature reserve
 RSPB Fairburn Ings - wetland centre for birds
 Seckar Woods LNR, a Local Nature Reserve
 New Swillington Ings Nature Reserve
 Otley Chevin - extensive wooded parkland on high ground with extensive views North over Wharfedale and South as far as the Peak District
 Harewood Estate - Leeds Country Way public footpath runs through the estate, beautiful landscaped gardens and home to Red Kites amongst many other birds

Waterways
 Scammonden Water, Deanhead Reservoir - both in the moors near Ripponden
 River Aire, River Calder, River Hebble, River Spen, River Worth
 Aire & Calder Navigation
 Calder and Hebble Navigation
 Huddersfield Broad Canal
 Huddersfield Narrow Canal, Standedge Tunnel
 Leeds and Liverpool Canal
 Knottingley & Goole Canal
 Rochdale Canal

References

Ceremonial counties of England
Yorkshire and the Humber

West Yorkshire


Consolevania is a video games TV show filmed in and around Glasgow, Scotland. It is notable as one of very few online TV shows to make the leap onto broadcast TV as the show videoGaiden, which has had four series shown on BBC Scotland.

The name Consolevania is a reference to Konami's long-running horror-adventure game series Castlevania and was chosen by Rllmuk forum members before the first episode was shot.  Fittingly, the first game reviewed on the show was Castlevania: Lament of Innocence.

The first episode was filmed in early 2004 and initially distributed on CDs posted out by the team. Eventually all episodes became distributed online via the BitTorrent peer-to-peer network, although an archive of http first and second series downloads now exists and lower quality http downloads are released concurrently with the more recent BitTorrent releases.

On 23 January 2017, it was announced via Patreon that a new series of Consolevania was planned for production. The first episode of the new run was released on 18 February 2017, and the show is following a regular monthly release schedule.

History
Consolevania was first released online in 2004, presented by Robert Florence, former writer for BBC comedy Chewin' the Fat, and Ryan Macleod.  Primary coverage was of console games; however, since the donation of a PC by sponsor Alienware at the start of Series Two, PC games have also been reviewed.  Much of the audience for the early episodes came from various online discussion forums, in particular Rllmuk (itself seen by many as the spiritual home of Consolevania) and NTSC-UK.

The show gradually gained a substantial internet following, largely by word of mouth, and began to attract the attention of both mainstream and video gaming media. Following the description of the show by Sky News as having "something that almost every other games show ever created has lacked: true passion for the subject matter,"  the BBC expressed interest in the show, reportedly since it garners "more viewers than some shows they produce already.". The show received widespread underground popularity and is now a global entity.

BBC Scotland commissioned a games review show from First Person Shooters in a similar vein to Consolevania, titled videoGaiden. This was broadcast on BBC Two Scotland from November to December 2005 for six weeks.

In April 2006, it was reported that Consolevania had acquired the movie rights to the Jeff Minter computer game Hover Bovver. Though they had claimed that the adaptation would be released  at some point in 2007, there have been no further updates since. With no statements issued by Minter about the status of the arrangement, it is presumed that the movie did not get any further than pre-production, or even enter it.

New episodes of Consolevania were released online on an irregular basis, and, in response to much critical acclaim, a second run of videoGaiden, featuring lengthier episodes, was commissioned by BBC Scotland and aired in late 2006. The third series however, has hugely focused on internet-only episodes of which 18 were made and released over a six-month period.  The only material that was made specifically for broadcast were just three "TV Specials". The decision to focus so heavily on internet output seems to be in line with a soapbox piece from the second series. In this segment, Robert Florence stated that television is a dying medium and that the BBC needed to accept this and embrace internet programming, an area they currently do not understand.

On 10 October 2008, Series 4 premiered on Consolevania.com, alongside a newly redesigned website. Series 4 was presented in a new way, with separate segments being uploaded frequently to YouTube. These segments were also used in new "high quality digest" episodes of compiled and exclusive content.

Format and style
The show primarily consists of a mixture of video game-related comedy sketches, reviews of both newly released and older video games, and occasional preview features highlighting forthcoming titles, especially those that appear unusual or eccentric.  The lighthearted comedic approach of the show is met with clear passion for video games and knowledge of the medium's history.  The program has sometimes experimented with unusual visual effects, such as flash edits and periods of slow-motion.  Much of the humour is referential, expressing knowledge of a variety of video games of both mainstream popularity and relative obscurity.  This ability to mock the video game industry whilst remaining affectionate toward it is typical of Consolevania's style.

Where previous video game TV shows such as Bits and Thumb Bandits claimed irreverence with their use of swear words but still were forced to operate within the established systems of television production,  Florence and Macleod are able to dictate the content of their own show without the need for censorship to avoid offence.  Examples of content likely to be restricted on United Kingdom television are the inclusion of characters such as Adolf Hitler and John Wayne Gacy, although these characters are for the most part mocked in the show as opposed to praised in any way.

The fact that the show is self-produced by Florence and Macleod's own production company has presented some issues of budget. In the first series, the equipment was mostly rented, and as such the release of the shows were very irregular. An upshoot of this lack of budget was the microphone used by the team, an omnidirectional device attached to a bent wire coathanger covered in red duct tape. It was frequently thrown at whichever character or presenter was on camera at the start of each sketch or review. However, there was no sign of the microphone at the start of the second series and the show's creators claim it was buried after a night of drunken revelry. Eventually, during the show's 'Independents Day' episode, it was unearthed and so may find itself in service once again.

Some of the show's other recurring themes and sketches include:
The team engaging in various physical activities whilst shouting "tap tap tap" (in reference to 'button bashing' athletics games such as Track and Field).
The misadventures of Adolf Hitler and his bizarre cohort El Zomba (see below), the former apparently interested in taking over the show for his own nefarious purposes, the latter being his sometime assistant and possibly lover.
John Gacy's "Kiddies' Corner", where the notorious serial killer reviews video games aimed at children.
Impromptu interviews with members of the public about games, conducted by one of the show's most popular characters, an American known only as Legend (see below).
Video game cosplay, with an emphasis on the ridiculous.
Overblood, a video game the team display a passionate distaste for.

Perhaps also an issue of budget, there was some inconsistency in the lengths of early episodes, varying runtimes between 45 minutes to an hour. However, the show's creators claim they have now found a format they are happy with and consequently later episodes have been just over 30 minutes in length. At the start of the second series, a basic awards system has been introduced, where the team awarded gold, blue, or brown ribbons to video games that they consider exceptional (gold), very good (blue), or particularly poor (brown). However, as the next episode abandoned this system for one based on Jeff Minter using a torch, it is likely that the new ratings system was never intended to be taken seriously.

Video game industry satire
Consolevania often satirizes major industry figures and companies, both with impersonating caricatures (such as Lionhead Studios developer Peter Molyneux) and the manipulation of press conference videos for humor (Reggie Fils-Aimé of Nintendo of America and  Sony's Ken Kutaragi, among many others).

Microsoft's J Allard is also frequently satirized. In a QuizVania segment in Episode 2.3 , Allard is listed 2nd in the list of "10 Things that are an Embarrassment to the Games Industry".  During this suggestion, the message "Act your fucking age" is flashed on screen.

In Episode 2.1, Consolevania presented a video game proposal to Rockstar Games for a "next-generation" title, Manpuncher vs. Boxhead. This consisted of a video short resembling a '70s police drama starring a gruff anti-authority figure who punches children and fights villains who all conveniently use the same 3D model to cut production costs. Rockstar politely rejected the proposal.

In recent episodes, the Consolevania team have issued taunting challenges for a street fight to Codemasters and Rare.

On 13 September 2007, Consolevania made a major splash with an incisive satirical parody of a Halo 3 promotional advertisement.  The parody addressed an under-discussed issue with Xbox Live online gaming—the bad behaviour of a large proportion of the subscribers.

References to Consolevania in popular culture
In the video game Grand Theft Auto IV, one of the possible addiction levels in the statistics view is "Bummed in the Gob," a reference to an incident in which Robert Florence was dared to say the phrase "bummed in the gob" during a television interview.
In the video game The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion's expansion pack Shivering Isles, a house has a pair of shoes on the roof in reference to Rab Florence's review of the original game, where he stated he enjoyed placing shoes on the roofs of buildings via the use of magic for fun. Florence's review took place before the release of the expansion pack.

Cast
Robert Florence - One of the show's two reviewers, using the pseudonym Mr. Robert, he also plays the parts of John Gacy, El Zomba, and Xbox Live World Champion, Legend.
Michael S. Hoffs - Plays the role of Hitler and Peter Molyneux, though Michael has not been featured since the second episode of the second series.
Ryan Macleod - The second main reviewer, as Mr. Ryan. He also plays Sammy Miller.
Kenny Swanston - Introduced into the show in the third episode (though playing an unnamed, masked wrestler in the first), Kenny is seen repeatedly antagonising and bullying Mr. Robert and Mr. Ryan, both of whom are intimidated by his presence. He berates them for their incompetence and forever telling others that he will "show them how it's fucking done". Their fear seems justified, as Kenny's particularly violent lessons tend to involve a thorough beating or, at their very worst, liberal use of Force lightning. At the end of Series 2, Kenny left the Consolevania TEAM to become the leader of the Dreamcast Universe, however, he returned in the first episode of Series 3 for reasons as yet unknown.
Joanne Daly is a series regular and also appeared in each episode of the BBC sister show videoGaiden. She is also responsible for Consolevania.com's current design.
Louise Stewart has been featured in a variety of supporting roles, along with Louise's young sister Courtney Stewart, who vexes Gacy.
Allan Miller joins the cast in series three as the paranoid 'Ziggy Springsteen', a representative of the sponsors.
Limmy, first seen in series 3 as overconfident 'Zack Eastwood', he also was in many episodes of videoGaiden series 3.
Richard Rankin, introduced in the reviews section of the Consolevania website, makes his debut in the show in the second episode of the third series—appearing in a starring role in "Ken Loach's Halo".

Many members of the cast work behind the camera as crew, either directing, filming or later editing the show.

Recurring characters
Legend - A brash American who claims to be the Xbox Live World Champion, having defeated Lisasimpson45 in both Mech Assault and Halo 2 deathmatch. The main street interviewer in the show, he hails from Milwaukee in Wisconsin, and wears a Russian ushanka. An interview with Rab and Ryan in GamesTM Magazine in February 2007 suggested that Legend is unlikely to return in Series Three due to the fact that the team are unkeen on 'comedy that takes the piss out of unwitting members of the public'.
John Gacy - Based upon the serial killer John Wayne Gacy, this is one of the more controversial characters. A clown dressed in top hat and black coat, he presents the "children's" section of the show. Most of the humour in his segments consists of Freudian slips inadvertently revealing that he's a paedophilic serial killer, or reading out "fan" letters which contain pleas for help before quickly correcting himself.
Hitler - Constantly frustrated and depressed following his defeat in World War II, Hitler's segments are vitriolic diatribes about his dissatisfaction and struggles with video games and the internet. He was about to commit suicide during the show's Christmas Special, but reconsidered after he was visited by a Guardian Angel claiming to be Patrick Moore. When Moore showed Hitler how fantastic the world would be if he had never existed (in reference to It's a Wonderful Life) he gained a new sense of purpose in life, and headed off to make the world miserable and make Consolevania his own.
El Zomba - Hitler's cohort and life partner (Hitler once despairs that he/she is once again pregnant) and an ogre-like character (Mr. Robert, wearing only a Mexican wrestling mask and tape around the groin). He is incompetent in the extreme.
Sammy Miller - Consolevania's safety advisor, commenting upon gaming safety and the potential side-effects of video games, many of which subsequently befall him.
Shigsy - The presenter of "The Shigsy Show", he is a lecherous sock puppet. As his nickname may suggest, he is supposed to represent Nintendo's game designer and artist, Shigeru Miyamoto.

See also
 VideoGaiden
Charlie Brooker's Gameswipe

References

External links

 Consolevania - official website
 videoGaiden - BBC homepage for Consolevania's spin-off show
 consolevania on blip.tv - blip.tv page for consolevania
 consolevania on iTunes - iTunes link for consolevania
 NTSC-uk speaks to Consolevania

 "What's wrong with games TV?" by Robert Florence at GamesIndustry.biz. 10 August 2006.

2004 web series debuts
2009 web series endings
Scottish television shows
British comedy web series
Scottish satirical television shows
Television shows about video games

Consolevania


The Roman Theatre of Orange (French: Théâtre antique d'Orange) is a Roman theatre in Orange, Vaucluse, France. It was built early in the 1st century AD. The municipality of Orange owns the structure. The theatre is the home of the summer opera festival called the Chorégies d'Orange.

It is a very well preserved Roman theatres. It served the Roman colony of Arausio (more specifically, Colonia Julia Firma Secundanorum Arausio: "the Julian colony of Arausio started by the soldiers of the second legion"). This colony was founded in 40 BC. The theatre played an important role in the life of the citizens. They spent a large part of their free time there.The Roman authorities saw it as a way to spread spreading Roman culture to the colonies. They also saw it as a way to make them forget about political activities.

Mime, pantomime, poetry readings and the "attelana" (a kind of farce, similar to the commedia dell'arte) were the most important forms of entertainment. It often lasted all day. The common people liked spectacular effects and beautiful stage sets became very important. The use of stage machinery also became important. The entertainment was open to everyone. It was free of charge.

The Western Roman Empire declined during the 4th century. Christianity had become the official religion. An official edict closed the theatre in AD 391. This is because at that time the Church was against what it saw as uncivilised performances. The Visigoths probably pillaged it in 412. Like most Roman buildings, a lot of its better stone was used again for other buildings. It was used as a defensive post in the early Middle Ages. By the 12th century, the Church started to use it for religious plays. During the 16th-century there were religious wars. The theatre became a place to hide for the townspeople. In 1981 UNESCO declared the theatre as a World Heritage Site. In modern days, it is used mostly for opera. It is also a tourist attraction.

Construction and structure of the theatre

The Romans made early Roman theatres mostly with wood. They were meant to be temporary structures. In 55 BC Pompey asked for a stone theatre in his home city of Rome. After this, important (and permanent) Roman theatres became more popular in the Empire. The Orange theatre was built under the rule of Augustus. It was one of the first of its kind in this area of France. The grand exterior (outside) facade is one of the most famous parts of the structure. It is 103 meters long and 37 meters high. At the beginning, there was a wooden roof across the theatre. This protected the people watching from bad weather. There is evidence on the walls that shows that, at some point, the roof burnt in a fire. There is not very much decoration on the theatre. However, the tall wall gives an imposing look to the whole building. The three main doors on the first level of the facade open directly onto the stage inside the theatre. The theatre can seat between 5,800 up to 7,300. Today, much of the seating is new. This is to make sure that tourists and people watching plays are safe.

The stage is 61 meters long. It is about one meter above the ground. To the back is the  wall. Its height is the same as in Roman times. This wall is very important to the theatre. This is because it helps to make the sound louder for the large audience. The wall is also known as the scaenae frons. It is the only place with decoration in the entire theatre. It used to have marble mosaics of many different colours. It also had many columns, friezes and statues placed in niches. The central niche contains a  statue of the emperor Augustus. This was likely a restoration of an original statue of Apollo, the god of music and the arts. The central door, below the central niche, is called the Royal Door, or valva regia. Only by the most important actors used this door to enter and exit the stage. Above the door there was a frieze decorated with centaurs. It is not there anymore. It is now on display across the street in the Orange Museum. Only some parts of it are left. The stage now has a modern platform. This is to stop damage when actors use it for operas and other performances.

Reconstruction
The reconstruction (building again) of the theatre started in 1825. People wanted to bring back the theatre to its original use: to host large, exciting performances. In 1869, the theatre was still being restored. It hosted "The Roman Festivals," which brought over 10,000 guests. A very important part of the restoration was excavating the area around the theatre. This happened in the 1930s. This excavation and levelling of buildings around the theatre helped find many historical objects and artifacts. These helped make knowledge better about the history and uses of the structure. Today, all three levels of seating have been completely restored. This is the same for many staircases, large parts of the pavement, the stage, the orchestra, and parts of walls.

Current uses of the theatre
During the Middle Ages, around the 12th century, the Church used the theatre to host plays. Theatre companies also hosted plays. In the 16th century this tradition stopped once again when the town was sacked during The French Wars of Religion. Much of the population left.In the 19th century, the theatre went back to its original use. Today, the Orange theatre is considered the best preserved (kept) Roman theatre in all of Europe. Culturespaces manages it. This is an organisation that also manages other related cultural sites in the area, for example the Orange Museum and the Triumphal Arch. It also manages other sites in the South of France.

The theatre is a historical site, but also a venue for concerts and theatrical performances. The first major festival held in the theatre in 1869 after the restoration started was called "The Roman Festival". This festival became a yearly festival called the Chorégies (see below). These decadent events brought in thousands of visitors from around the world. During the rest of the year, the Théâtre d'Orange is a major tourist attraction. Tourists can walk through the main theatre and rooms around it. They can also walk through the corridors.

The "Roman Festival" and the Chorégies

During the 19th century, the theatre slowly started to look better again. Prosper Mérimée helped with this. At the time, he was the director of "Monuments Historiques." He led the restoration. The work began in 1825 and in 1869 the theatre became the home of a "Roman Festival" which celebrated the glory of Rome. It included a performance of Méhul's opera, Joseph. In the second half of the 19th century, and early 20th century, all the major players of the French classical stage appeared in the Orange festivals. For example, Sarah Bernhardt played "Phèdre" there in 1903.

By the end of the century, the tiered seats were restored. In 1902 the festival had a new name, the "Chorégies". It was planned as a yearly summer festival. The name comes from the tax that wealthy Romans had to pay for theatre productions. Until 1969 the Chorégies consisted of plays and musical works, for example opera and symphonies. However, after that date, it became just an opera festival. Plays were done at Avignon.

In 1981 UNESCO made the theatre a World Heritage Site.

Gallery

References

Other websites

 Culturespaces Official website
 Orange Museum
  Les Choregies d'Orange

Orange
World Heritage Sites in France
Roman buildings and structures
1st-century buildings and structures

Roman Theatre of Orange


Blacklers was a large department store on the corner of Elliot Street and Great Charlotte Street in Liverpool, England. The store was famous for its lavish Christmas grotto and its rocking horse, Blackie, which is now on display in the Museum of Liverpool. The store, which at its peak employed a thousand people, also has connections to The Beatles: George Harrison worked as an apprentice electrician at Blacklers in 1959, and Pete Best's mother Mona bought his drum kit from the Blacklers music department.

Blacklers was founded by partners Richard John Blackler and A.B. Wallis in the early twentieth century. Blackler died in 1919 and was succeeded as a partner in the business by his wife Margaret.

Despite the building being severely damaged in The Blitz of May 1941 during World War II, the business survived. Temporary outlets were created in Bold Street and Church Street and the first part of the new store opened on 29 March 1953.

Margaret Blackler died in 1957 without children, at which point the store became the property of several individuals, of which the major shareholder was the sportswoman Vera Kingston (Margaret's god-daughter). In 1983 following Vera's death the store was sold on once again, and all links to the original owners disappeared. The store remained open only a few years more, closing in April 1988.

The site now includes a Wetherspoons chain pub, named Richard John Blackler in honour of the store's founder.

See also
Bill Smith (fell runner)
The shop also boasted a large warehouse on Strand Road Bootle, which serviced the store daily.
Deliveries were also dispatched from there for customers throughout the northwest and an art department that built displays throughout the year.

References

ENG-LIVERPOOL-L Archives. Accessed 31 August 2005.
Hari Scruffs (George Harrison timeline). Accessed 31 August 2005.

External links

Museum of Liverpool
Emporia Fantastica — recollections of a customer
Postcard showing Blacklers Stores
Our Gav — Liverpool photos, including the Blacklers building, with Beatles links

Buildings and structures in Liverpool
Defunct companies based in Liverpool
Defunct retail companies of the United Kingdom
Defunct department stores of the United Kingdom
Department store buildings in the United Kingdom

Blacklers


Dedza Mountain is a mountain in central Malawi. It is located in Dedza District, just north of the town of Dedza.

Dedza Mountain's peak reaches 2198 meters elevation.

Dedza Mountain Forest Reserve was established in 1926, and covers an area of 2917 ha. Plantations of introduced pine trees cover much of the mountain, but there are remnant patches of native montane evergreen forest near the summit, and riparian forests in ravines. The native forests are home to numerous epiphytic orchids and other species.

References

 Mountains of Malawi
Southern Rift montane forest–grassland mosaic
 Forest reserves of Malawi

Dedza Mountain


The Map and the Territory (, ) is a novel by French author Michel Houellebecq. The narrative revolves around a successful artist, and involves a fictional murder of Houellebecq. It was published on 4 September 2010 by Flammarion and received the Prix Goncourt, the most prestigious French literary prize, in 2010. The title is a reference to the map–territory relation.

The Map and the Territory is Michel Houellebecq's fifth novel. It was published five years after his prior novel, The Possibility of an Island. The Map and the Territory was among the most eagerly awaited and discussed novels of the 2010 literary season in France. The first printing was for  copies, as announced by the publisher. An English translation by Gavin Bowd was published in January 2012.

The Map and the Territory received the Prix Goncourt on 8 November 2010 on the first ballot with seven votes against two for Apocalypse bébé by Virginie Despentes.

Synopsis
The novel tells the story of the life and art of Jed Martin, a fictional French artist who becomes famous by photographing Michelin maps and painting scenes about professional activities. His father is slowly entering old age. Jed falls for a beautiful Russian executive from Michelin but the relationship ends when she returns to Russia. Jed becomes extraordinarily successful after a new series of paintings and therefore suddenly rich as the most prominent artist in France around the year 2010. He meets Michel Houellebecq in Ireland in order to ask him to write the text for the catalog of one of his exhibitions, and in exchange offers to paint the writer's portrait.

A few months later Houellebecq is brutally murdered and Jed Martin gets involved in the case.

Themes
In a televised interview given after the Goncourt award, Houellebecq declared that the main themes of the novel were "aging, the relationship between father and son and the representation of reality through art".

As a tongue-in-cheek gimmick, the novel also portrays a few celebrities from French literature and the French media, including Houellebecq himself, Frédéric Beigbeder, Julien Lepers, and Jean-Pierre Pernaut.

Accusations of plagiarism
The novel incorporates a few abstracts from the French edition of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia without mentioning the source, thus not complying with the Creative Commons licence BY-SA. Flammarion, his publisher, has clarified the issue and noted that Houellebecq often uses existing texts from available documentation and web sites as raw literary material for his novels; for instance, the description of a police officer is taken from the official web site of the Ministry of the Interior and the text of a touristic leaflet is used for the humorous description of the Carpe Diem hotel.

Reaction after Goncourt award
Houellebecq had already been a contender for the Goncourt on two previous occasions. It was the first time since 1980 that the award had gone to a novel published by Flammarion. Houellebecq commented right after the award that "it is a strange feeling, but I am deeply happy" (C'est une sensation bizarre mais je suis profondément heureux).

Editions

See also
 2010 in literature
 Contemporary French literature

References

2010 French novels
Novels by Michel Houellebecq
Novels about artists
Novels involved in plagiarism controversies
Prix Goncourt winning works
Novels set in Ireland
Éditions Flammarion books

The Map and the Territory


The iQue Player is a special version of the Nintendo 64. It was made for the Chinese market. It is very rare, and only few exist. You can play some games, and some demos like Super Mario 64. You can only have 5 games at a time.

Nintendo video game consoles

IQue Player


A Half-Breed Tract was a segment of land designated in the western states by the United States government in the 19th century specifically for Métis of American Indian and European or European-American ancestry, at the time commonly known as half-breeds.  The government set aside such tracts in several parts of the Midwestern prairie region, including in Iowa Territory, Nebraska Territory, Kansas Territory, Minnesota Territory, and Wisconsin Territory.

Overview
Historically, the mixed-blood population in the Pays d'en Haut region surrounding the Great Lakes were typically the descendants of Native American women and White men, often men of French-Canadian or Scots (including Orcadian) origin, who dominated early fur trapping and trade. These men lived far from other Europeans. Others had fathers who were American trappers and traders. The children typically grew up in their mother's tribes, where the fathers and families were offered protection if not full membership.

As relations between the United States government and the tribes became more complex, the mixed-race children often were excluded from benefiting both from the federal laws governing Indians and the political rights of their fathers because of discrimination on both sides. The tribes had their own kinship systems and rules of descent and inheritance. For instance, the Omaha had a patrilineal system, and considered mixed-race children of European or "white" fathers to be white unless formally adopted into the tribe by a man. Other tribes had matrilineal systems, and children were considered born into the mother's clan and took their status from her. Due to hypodescent (assignment of children of a mixed union to the subordinate group) and the fact that many of the mixed-race children grew up in tribes on the frontier, Europeans tended to classify them as being more Indian than white. The fact that their fathers lived "outside" civilized society as mountain men contributed to this notion, as well. The Omaha and other tribal leaders advocated setting land aside for the mixed-blood descendants; usually the intent was to award land to male heads of families.

The relationship between mixed-bloods and their ancestral tribes particularly affected the descendants when the tribes ceded communal lands to the U.S. government in exchange for payment. The rights of mixed-blood descendants to payments or a part in decisionmaking were not usually acknowledged. In 1830 the federal government acknowledged this problem by the Fourth Treaty of Prairie du Chien, which effectively set aside a tract of land for mixed-blood people related to the Oto, Ioway, Omaha, Sac and Fox and Santee Sioux tribes.  The treaty granted these "Half-Breed Tracts" as sections of land in a form similar to Indian reservations.

Iowa

A Half-Breed Tract was located in Lee County, Iowa. An 1824 treaty between the Sauk people, the Fox tribe, and the United States set aside a reservation for mixed-blood people related to the tribes. Lying between the Mississippi, and Des Moines rivers and below an eastward extension of the Sullivan Line (The  old  Indian  boundary  surveyed  out  by  John  C. Sullivan  in 1816—at approximately 40.60° N.), the Tract occupied an area of approximately .  Under the original treaty, the half-breed people had the right to occupy the soil, but individuals could not buy or sell the land.

In 1834 Congress repealed the rule. Immediately afterward, claim jumpers claimed much of the land.  The government gave away mixed-blood peoples' claims to the land, effectively ending the provisions of the Half-Breed Tract by 1841.

Mormon leader Joseph Smith, Jr. purchased parts of the Half-Breed Tract, probably in 1837, from a land speculation company. Deeds to most of the land were faulty and could not be held. This left the church with only about , including a town called Commerce in Illinois. The Mormons moved to this Illinois site from Far West, Missouri, to escape the Missouri Executive Order 44 issued by Missouri Governor Lilburn Boggs.

Nebraska

The Nemaha Half-Breed Reservation was established on July 15, 1830. The tract's eastern border was the Missouri River, and the property extended inland for . The north/south borders were between the Little Nemaha River to the north and the Great Nemaha River, near Falls City to the south. Owners were never required to live on their property and many eventually sold their lands to whites. Nebraska's Half-Breed Tract vanished as a legal entity by 1861.

Kansas
An 1825 treaty with the Kaw Indians reserved land of  (640 acres) for each of twenty-three Kaw mixed bloods.  The tracts were located on the north bank of the Kansas River from present day Topeka to Williamstown.  The purpose of granting the land to the mixed-bloods was to gain their support for the treaty in which the Kaw ceded a large amount of land to the United States in exchange for annuities. Indian Superintendent William Clark said, "Reserves of this kind ... have a good effect in promoting civilization ... an idea of separate property is imparted without which it is vain to think of improving the minds and morals of the Indian."

Several of the Kaw half-breed tracts were to become important sites in Kansas history.  In 1827 the Kaw Agency was founded on Tract number 23, allotted to Joseph James, Jr. Here lived the Government Agent to the Kaw; the government farmer Daniel M. Boone, son of the famous pioneer, Daniel Boone; a blacksmith; several mixed-blood Kaw-French traders, and White Plume, recognized by the U.S. government as the head chief of the Kaw. Tract number three, located on the site of Topeka, was to become the site of the Pappan Ferry in the 1840s, a crossing of the Kansas River used by pioneers heading west on the Oregon Trail. Tract four was allotted to Julie Gonville, the maternal grandmother of Charles Curtis, later elected U.S. Senator from Kansas and the Vice President of the United States.

A similar treaty was signed in 1825 between the Osage Indians and the United States. The Osage ceded lands in Missouri, Arkansas, and south of the Arkansas River in Oklahoma in exchange for a reservation in Kansas and Oklahoma.  Forty-two tracts of one-square mile each were reserved for the mixed blood children of French traders and Osage women. Most of the tracts were scattered around eastern Kansas but a few were on the Neosho River in Oklahoma.

Minnesota and Wisconsin

The 1830 Treaty of Prairie du Chien specified the following boundaries of a Half-Breed Tract centered around Lake Pepin, as follows:

The Sioux bands in council have earnestly solicited that they might have permission to bestow upon the half-breeds of their nation the tract of land within the following limits, to wit: Beginning at the place called the Barn, below and near the village of the Red Wing chief, and running back fifteen miles; thence, in a parallel line with Lake Pepin and the Mississippi, about 32 miles, to a point opposite the river aforesaid; the United States agree to suffer said half-breeds to occupy said tract of country; they holding by the same title, and in the same manner that other Indian titles are held.

This description includes a large part of what is now Wabasha County, Minnesota, and some part of Goodhue County, Minnesota. Despite the petitions of several "half-breed" landowners, who had by then lived there for more than twelve years, the U.S. government took the land in 1852 under the premise of serving as restitution against the Sioux for having violated the terms of an earlier treaty.  The land reclamation followed explorers' identification of the area as a "mineral region" with the prospect that, "lead will be found there, and probably copper also."

See also
 Black Hawk Purchase
 Honey War
 Native American tribes in Nebraska

References

External links

 Indian Land Cessions: U.S. Congressional Documents
 Barkwell, Lawrence. "Lake Pepin Half-Breed Tract". Louis Riel Institute.

History of racial segregation in the United States
Political divisions of the United States
Former American Indian reservations
Native American history of Nebraska
Pre-statehood history of Nebraska
Native American history of Iowa
Native American history of Kansas
Native American history of Minnesota
Native American history of Wisconsin
Pre-statehood history of Wisconsin
Aboriginal title in the United States
Former American Indian reservations in Nebraska
Métis in the United States

Half-Breed Tract


Gran Scala was a huge European project to build a "destination city of leisure for all ages" on a  site in the desert of Los Monegros, near Ontiñena, in the province of Huesca, Spain. The project included the construction of 32 casinos, 70 hotels, five theme parks and a town of 100,000 inhabitants. Opening was planned for mid-2012.

Development
While being a private investment project by a consortium called ILD (International Leisure Development), it has backing of the Aragonese government which is providing the construction of all necessary connecting infrastructure. ILD is looking to attract different investors of the hotel, gaming, and leisure industry to develop the facilities.

The project schedule, proposed by ILD, has construction work beginning in September 2008, just after the Zaragoza 2008 International Exhibition. A first opening would take place around mid-2010.

As of 2015, no development has taken place and the project appears to be one of many in Spain that failed after the 2008 financial crisis left its mark very heavily in that country.

Criticism
A large majority of the Aragonese population supported the project.  However,  it was facing criticism from ecological lobby groups for its construction on one of the richest and most delicate ecosystems in the European continent and its survival was incompatible with a development of this scale and nature. The project was highly controversial not only because of the environmental impact that it would have on the ecosystem but also because of its large size, promoting luxury activities such as betting money, and massive consumption. Moreover, an aquatic theme park was planned in an area where drought is common and water is limited.

References

External links
Gran Scala Blog (not updated since 2012)
Los Monegros & Gran Scala (no longer active)

Buildings and structures in Aragon
2012 establishments in Spain
Tourist attractions in Aragon

Gran Scala


Henrietta Matilda Jane Evans (née Congreve) (7 August 1827 – 22 October 1886) was an Australian novelist, who wrote under the pseudonym Maud Jean Franc.

Life
Matilda was the elder daughter of Dr Henry Congreve and his wife Elizabeth Ann, née Jacob of Peckham, England. The family moved to South Australia in 1852, started a school at Mount Barker and on 16 February 1860 Matilda married the Rev. Ephraim Evans, a Baptist minister, who died 6 April 1863. In 1860 Mrs Evans opened a school at Angaston which was still in existence in 1868. She wrote her first story, Marian; or the light of Some One's Home while she was at Mount Barker and it appears to have been immediately successful. The British Museum catalogue records an edition published at Bath in 1860, a second edition was published by John Darton and Company in 1861, and another edition published by Sampson Low appeared in the same year.

Evans had chosen as a pseudonym Maud Jean Franc, but in her later books variations in the spelling of both Maud and Jean appeared. Her second book Vermont Vale came out in 1866 and during the next 19 years 13 other volumes were published. She died of peritonitis in 1886 and was survived by two sons. The elder, Henry Congreve Evans (died 1899) was leader of the staff of the Adelaide Advertiser and author of the libretto of Immomeena: an Australian Comic Opera published in 1893. The younger, William James Evans, was joint author with his mother of Christmas Bells, a collection of short stories published in 1882. He also published in 1898 Rhymes without Reason and died in 1904.

The stories of Maud Jean Franc were often reprinted. A collected edition in 13 volumes was published in 1888 and 40 years after. They are pleasantly told tales somewhat sentimental and rhetorical in style, sincerely religious and didactic in theme.

Bibliography
Marian; or the light of Some One's Home (1860)
second edition (1861)
Vermont Vale (1866)
Emily's Choice (1867)
Minnie's Mission: an Australian Temperance Tale (1869)
Golden Gifts (1869)
Silken Cords and Iron Fetters (1870)
John's Wife (1874)
Hall's Vineyard (1875)
Little Mercy (1878)
Beatrice Melton's Discipline (1880)
The Master of Ralston (1880)
Jem's hopes : and how they were realized (1881)
No Longer a Child (1882)
Two Sides to Every Question (1883)
At the Well (1883)
Into the Light (1885)
Fern hollow, or, Old life in new lands (1885)

References

Sources

H. J. Finnis, "Evans, Matilda Jane (1827 - 1886)", Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 4, Melbourne University Press, 1972, p. 143. Retrieved on 12 October 2008
Allen,Margaret  Matilda Jane Evans 1827 - 1886 deaconess 200 Australian Women, Pandora,NLA
Evans, Matilda Jane (1827–1886) Obituaries Australia, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University,

External links

Franc, Maud Jeanne WorldCat

1827 births
1886 deaths
19th-century Australian novelists
Australian women novelists
Australian Baptists
19th-century Australian women writers
19th-century Baptists
19th-century pseudonymous writers
Pseudonymous women writers

Matilda Jane Evans


The Personal Health Information Protection Act, also known as PHIPA, is Ontario legislation established in November 2004. PHIPA is one of two components of the Health Information Protection Act 2004.

The Health Information Protection Act, also established in 2004, comprises two schedules: PHIPA (Schedule A) and the Quality of Care Information Protection Act (Schedule B). The PHIPA replaced the Health Cards and Numbers Control Act (SO 1991, c 1).

PHIPA provides a set of rules for the collection, use and disclosure of personal health information by a "Health Information Custodian" (HIC), and includes the following provisions:
 Consent is required for the collection, use and disclosure of personal health information, with few exceptions
 HICs are required to treat all personal health information as confidential and maintain its security
 Individuals have a right to access their personal health information, as well as the right to correct errors
 Individuals have the right to instruct HICs not to share their personal health information with others
 Rules are provided for the use of personal health information for fundraising or marketing purposes
 Guidelines are set for the use and disclosure of personal health information as a secondary use such as research, quality improvement or education
 Accountability is ensured by granting an individual the right to complain if they have identified an error in their personal health information
 Remedies are established for breaches of the legislation

History

 December 17, 2003: The Health Information Protection Act (Bill 31) was introduced by the first McGuinty government
 January 26, 2004: Public hearing at Standing Committee on General Government held in Toronto
 February 2, 2004: Public hearing at Standing Committee on General Government held in Sault Ste. Marie, Kingston and London
 February 9, 2004: and April 28, 2004 Clause-by-clause consideration of the Bill resulting in various amendments
 May 17, 2004: Bill 31 passed third and final reading with unanimous support in the legislature
 May 20, 2004: Bill 31 received Royal Assent
 July 3 - September 3, 2004: Public consultation on regulations
 November 1, 2004: Schedules A and B of the Health Information Protection Act come into force
 May 18, 2016: passage by the first Wynne government of the Health Information Protection Act 2016, S.O. 2016, c. 6 - Bill 119, to amend the Personal Health Information Protection Act, 2004, to make related amendments, to introduce the idea of an "ELECTRONIC HEALTH RECORD", to repeal and replace the Quality of Care Information Protection Act 2004 with the Quality of Care Information Protection Act 2016, and to amend the Regulated Health Professions Act, 1991

Application
PHIPA applies to individuals and organizations involved in the delivery of healthcare services. Under the Act, they are referred to as HICs, "prescribed organizations", or "agencies", each with various function.

Health information custodians
A HIC can be any number of individuals or organizations who have custody or control of personal health information.  To elaborate, some examples of an HIC include:
 Healthcare providers such as doctors, nurses, social workers, dentists, psychologists, paramedics, optometrists, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, chiropractors, massage therapists, dieticians, naturopaths and acupuncturists
 Hospitals
 Long-term care homes and homes for special care
 Community Care Access Centres
 Pharmacies
 Medical laboratories
 Local medical officers of health
 Ambulance services
 Community mental health programs
 Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care

Agents of health information custodians
An "agent" of an HIC includes anyone who is authorized by the HIC to do anything on behalf of the HIC with respect to personal health information. These actions are for the purposes of the HIC and not the agent.

Examples include:
 Employees of the HIC
 Clinician researchers conducting research under the jurisdiction of the HIC
 Persons contracted to provide services to the HIC where the person has access to personal health information (e.g. copying or shredding service, records management service)
 Volunteers or students who have any access to personal health information

Role of the Information and Privacy Commissioner
The Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario (IPC) is appointed by the Legislative Assembly of Ontario and is independent of the government. The IPC is responsible for ensuring that HICs comply with the Act. Under PHIPA, the IPC has the power to review and make rulings about complaints.

When the commissioner receives a complaint, a mediator may be appointed to try to solve the problem. The IPC has various powers to resolve complaints, including the power to order an HIC to:
 Change or stop the way information is collected, used or shared
 Provide access to the record of personal health information
 Correct the record of personal health information

Content
The Act covers the following subjects relating to personal health information in the province of Ontario:
Section 1: Interpretation and Application sets out of the purpose of the Act. It defines key terms used throughout the Act, such as "health information custodian" and "health information agent".
Section 2: Practices to Protect Health Information details the required practices for the handling of personal health information and health records. Accountability of information is also discussed.
Section 3: Consent Concerning Personal Health Information discusses consent for the use, collection and disclosure of personal health information. Capacity to consent and characteristics of substitute decision-making are outlined.
Section 4: Collection, Use and Disclosure of Personal Health Information outlines the situations for when personal health information can be used, collected and disclosed, and for what purposes.
Section 5: Access to Records of Personal Health Information and Correction summarizes an individual's right of access to their personal health information, and the necessary steps that are taken to correct information within their record if need be.
Section 6: Admission and Enforcement details the role of the Commissioner in enforcing the Act.
Section 7: General explains the general applications and details of the Act, including non-retaliation, immunity, Crown liability, reliance on assertion, offences and regulations.

References

Healthcare in Ontario
Health law in Canada
Ontario provincial legislation
2004 in Ontario
2004 in Canadian law
Medical privacy legislation
Privacy legislation in Canada


Flukonazole is an antifungal medication that is given either by mouth or intravenously. It is used to treat a variety of fungal infections, especially Candida infections of the vagina, mouth, throat, and bloodstream.

It is on the World Health Organization's (Mokgatlo wa Maphelo wa Lefase) List of Essential Medicines, a list of the most important medication needed in a basic health system.

Flukonazole


Strange Odyssey  is a text adventure written by Scott Adams and Neil Broome.

Description

Published by Adventure International, this text-based adventure game was one of many from Scott Adams.

Gameplay involved moving from location to location, picking up any objects found there, and using them somewhere else to unlock puzzles. Commands took the form of verb and noun, e.g. "Take Shovel". Movement from location to location was limited to North, South, East, West, Up, and Down.

The game begins with the player stranded on a tiny asteroid in a damaged spaceship.  The player must use an alien teleportation device to travel to distant worlds, collect treasure, and find the materials to repair the spacecraft.

Reception
Kilobaud Microcomputing stated that Strange Odyssey was inferior in quality to Adventureland despite being released later, stating that the older game had "many more treasures and situations to figure out" and criticizing Strange Odysseys lack of help for novice players. The game was reviewed in issue #42 of The Dragon magazine. The reviewer, Mark Herro, stated that "My present situation in this game is opposite that of Pirate Adventure. I've found treasures but I don't know where to take them! ... The game starts in the control room of a disabled spaceship. It took me a good half hour just to find my way out of the spaceship! To compound problems, a space suit must be worn when outside the spaceship. When the air is gone, that's it, my friend."

Reviews
''Commodore User (Aug, 1985)

References

External links
Strange Odyssey at MobyGames

1979 video games
Apple II games
Atari 8-bit family games
Adventure games
Adventure International games
BBC Micro and Acorn Electron games
VIC-20 games
Commodore 16 and Plus/4 games
Commodore 64 games
Commodore PET games
Dragon 32 games
TI-99/4A games
TRS-80 games
Video games developed in the United States
Single-player video games
Exidy Sorcerer games

Strange Odyssey


Erwin Redl (born 1963) in Gföhl, Lower Austria is an Austrian-born artist currently living in the United States. As artistic medium, he uses LEDs. His work includes installations, videos, graphics, computerart, and electronic music.

Life and work
Redl studied electronic music and composition at the University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna. Then he moved to New York City, where he studied Computer Art at the School of Visual Arts; he graduated in 1995. With his artwork Matrix VI, he lit the face of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York during the Whitney Biennial 2002.
His works, some of them are named Matrix, were shown in New York, Germany, France, Austria, and Korea. The installation called Fade I allows visitors to move into lit spaces. This installation was shown in Lille, France, as part of Lille 2004 (fr) - European Capital of Culture, where it animated the Eglise Sainte-Marie Madeleine (fr).
Erwin Redl's Nocturnal Flow has been installed in the Paul G. Allen Center. The artwork, an 85-foot brick column at the west end of the atrium, was chosen by the Washington State Arts Commission. It was supported by the Washington State's Art in Public Places Program.

Erwin Redl lives and works in New York.

Public Collections
 ACE GALLERY Los Angeles,
 C3 Budapest, Budapest, Hungary
 Niederösterreichisches Landesmuseum, St. Pölten, Austria

References

External links
 Official Website
 Biography with an image of the Installation "Nocturnal Flow"
 Erwin Redl in artfacts

Austrian artists
1963 births
Living people
University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna alumni
American digital artists
Postmodern artists
Artists from New York (state)
New media artists
American installation artists
American conceptual artists
American sound artists
American experimental musicians
Experimental composers
Male classical composers
20th-century American composers
20th-century American male musicians

Erwin Redl


Devolution is when a central government  transfers powers to a local government.  It is sometimes called Home Rule or decentralisation.

In the United Kingdom devolution has happened in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.  Each of these three countries now has an elected legislature which can pass some laws and a government to administer those laws and propose new ones.

These bodies are called

The Welsh Parliament, and the Welsh Government;
The Northern Ireland Assembly, and the Northern Ireland Executive; and
The Scottish Parliament, and the Scottish Government

England does not currently have its own parliament, but there have been increasing calls today for one.

Devolved assemblies depend on the parent body.  The British government could change its mind and abolish the devolved assemblies.  This happened in 1972 to the government and parliament of Northern Ireland.  It had been set up in 1920, with the parliament of Southern Ireland.

This is different from a federal country. In a federal country like Germany the states, and their powers, exist because of the constitution, not because of the national parliament.

Related pages
Decentralization
Federal republic
Limited government

References

Forms of government

Devolution


Tumbes-Chocó-Magdalena is a biodiversity hotspot, which includes the tropical moist forests and tropical dry forests of the Pacific coast of South America and the Galapagos Islands. The region extends from easternmost Panama to the lower Magdalena Valley of Colombia, and along the Pacific coast of Colombia and Ecuador to the northwestern corner of Peru. Formerly called the Chocó-Darién-Western Ecuador Hotspot, it has been expanded to include several new areas, notably the Magdalena Valley in northern Colombia. It is bounded on the east by the Andes Mountains. The Tumbes-Choco-Magdalena Hotspot is 1,500 km long and encircles 274,597 km². Tumbes-Choco-Magdalena is near the Pacific Ocean. The factors that threaten Tumbes-Choco-Magdalena are farming encroachment, deforestation, illegal crops, and population growth. Whereas the Panamanian and Colombian portion of the hotspot are relatively intact, approximately 98% of native forest in coastal Ecuador has been cleared, rendering it the most threatened tropical forest in the world. The hotspot includes a wide variety of habitats, ranging from mangroves, beaches, rocky shorelines, and coastal wilderness to some of the world's wettest rain forests in the Colombian Chocó. The hotspot includes a number of ecoregions:

Chocó–Darién moist forests (Colombia, Ecuador, Panama)
Ecuadorian dry forests (Ecuador)
Guayaquil flooded grasslands (Ecuador)
Gulf of Guayaquil–Tumbes mangroves (Ecuador, Peru)
Galápagos Islands xeric scrub (Ecuador)
Magdalena Valley montane forests (Colombia)
Magdalena–Urabá moist forests (Colombia)
Manabí mangroves (Ecuador)
Tumbes–Piura dry forests (Ecuador, Peru)
Piura mangroves (Peru)
Western Ecuador moist forests (Colombia, Ecuador)

Some of the endemic species of this hotspot are the following:

Endemic Plant Species: 2,750

Endemic Threatened Birds: 21

Endemic Threatened Mammals: 7

Endemic Threatened Amphibians: 8

Human Population Density (people/km²): 51

References

External links
 Tumbes-Chocó-Magdalena at CEPF

Natural regions of South America
Ecoregions of Colombia
Ecoregions of Ecuador
Ecoregions of Panama
Geography of South America
Colombian coasts of the Pacific Ocean
Panamanian coasts of the Pacific Ocean
Natural regions of Colombia
Natural history of Ecuador
Natural history of Panama
Ecoregions of Central America
Ecoregions of South America
Neotropical ecoregions

Tumbes–Chocó–Magdalena


Jakob Ehrlich (15 September 1877 – 17 May 1938) was an early Zionist and leader of the Jewish Community in Vienna, Austria.  Ehrlich represented the city's 180,000 Jewish citizens in the city government before World War II, and was among those deported in the "Prominententransport" to the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau, soon after the German army entered Vienna in March 1938.  He died in Dachau a few weeks later, from beatings. His wife, Irma Hutter Ehrlich  emigrated to England, then the USA with their son where she was active in the rescue of Jewish children from Europe, working with WIZO and Hadassah.

Biography

Zionist movement
Ehrlich was born in Bystřice pod Hostýnem (Bistritz am Hostein), a small town in northern Moravia.  As a youth, he joined  Herzl's Zionist organization, and went on to study law in Vienna, where he joined the Jewish-academic fraternity "Ivria".  As a young man, he traveled widely through Moravia, Bohemia, and Austria,  speaking on the vision of modern Zionism and helping to organize Zionist groups.

In 1908 he returned to Vienna, passed the law examination, and the following year was listed as a barrister.  He was a persuasive speaker and an energetic organizer, and soon had increased Zionist representation from one seat to three in the Jewish Kultusgemeinde.  In 1913,  the 11th  Zionist Congress met in Vienna.  On the request of Weizmann, Ehrlich was selected as Vice-President of the congress.

In World War I, Ehrlich served as an Austrian officer,  and after long service at the front was transferred as Chief Auditor to Odessa where a group of young Jews had been charged with revolutionary activities, and sentenced to death by a military court.  Ehrlich showed the charges to be groundless.  Among the young men saved was a son of the Zionist engineer Menachem Ussishkin, with whom Ehrlich later worked in Vienna, despite some differences in ideology.

After the war, the Viennese City Council was restored.  Ehrlich was at the top of the Jewish Nationalist roster of three candidates – Ehrlich, Plaschkes, and Pollack-Parnau. Before the Council he spoke against injustices to Jewish citizenry, with examples and statistics.  The council listened, rarely interrupting with heckling.  One of the principal reasons for his large following was his incessant and successful fight for the naturalization of the Jews streaming into Vienna during the wars in Galicia and other provinces.

Zionist conference organizer
The 14th World Zionist Conference opened in August 1925, in Vienna's Concert Hall.  As a member of the city government, Ehrlich welcomed the Congress on behalf of the government.  As a representative of the Austrian Ministry, he had to minimize the threat from the Nazi horde, though he knew the danger of the situation.  Weizmann and his wife rode through taunting crowds, accompanied by a police escort from their hotel  to the conference hall.  The hall itself was protected by groups from the Jewish youth federations, and other groups of students and workers.  In his inaugural address Ehrlich reminded the delegates of  the 11th Zionist Congress, 12 years earlier in Vienna.  Since then, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem had been established and steps taken to enable further development, in addition to other initiatives.  "Despite a five-year war, despite the terrible post-war period, despite emergencies and deaths, this plan was carried out, and if the torch which was ignited in Jerusalem is carried forward, as the hearts of all humanity pray, to be one in love and aspirations, then the fourteenth congress will take a place of honor in our movement.  So I hope that this, our fourteenth Congress, will also be blessed with success and that its deliberations lay the path forward to become a free people among free peoples, for our own happiness and the welfare of all mankind."

In the year 1933, shortly after the seizure of power by the Nazi party in Germany, Ehrlich made a visit to Palestine.  He was enthused by much that he saw, but also disappointed by the raw reality of the harsh conditions.  Nevertheless, he took the precaution to acquire immigration visas for his family and a group of friends.  That plan was not executed however, due to the reservations of some of the proposed group.

Anti-fascist
In 1938, Ehrlich was the official representative for the city's Jews in Vienna's City Government .  He brought international attention to the growing strength of Austrian fascism with a masterful and widely reported speech delivered during the annual budget debate.  In that speech he showed how  each of the individual laws and regulations passed by the anti-semites of the city council, and each hypocritical encroachments on the rights of Jewish citizens, also damaged the overall integrity of government and the rule of law.   The speech was printed in all the larger foreign newspapers with lively supportive commentary.  The German press, too, reported the speech; and Julius Streichers Nazi paper Der Stürmer  printed a furious attack.  Ehrlich's caricature occupied the entire front page with the headline:  "What is the Jew Ehrlich up to in Vienna's German Council?"

A few months later the German army was welcomed into Vienna, and Ehrlich was arrested on a spurious charge of trying to organize armed resistance against the Nazis.  A few weeks later his body was returned in a sealed coffin.  He is buried in Vienna's Jewish cemetery.  A memorial plaque for members of the Vienna municipal council killed in the Nazi period, among them Jakob Ehrlich, was installed in the Vienna town hall in 1988.

References

General

Specific

External links
 Jakob Ehrlich at Wien Geschichte Wiki
 Jakob Ehrlich at Jewish Virtual Library

1877 births
1938 deaths
People from Bystřice pod Hostýnem
Czech Zionists
Politicians who died in Nazi concentration camps
Austrian people who died in Dachau concentration camp
Austrian Zionists
Jewish Austrian politicians
Jewish Czech politicians
Austrian Jews who died in the Holocaust
Deaths by beating in Europe

Jakob Ehrlich


Serosa (or serous membrane) is a smooth membrane consisting of a thin layer of cells, found on the outer wall of the organs of the abdominal cavity known as the serous cavity. It secretes serous fluid, and a thin connective tissue layer. They secrete a lubricating fluid which reduces friction from muscle movement.

Serosa is not to be confused with adventitia, a connective tissue layer which binds together structures rather than reducing friction between them. The serous membrane covering the heart and lining the mediastinum is called the pericardium, the serous membrane lining the thoracic cavity and surrounding the lungs is called the pleura, and that lining the abdominopelvic cavity and the viscera is called the peritoneum.

The portions of the gastrointestinal tract that do not have a serosa include the esophagus, as well as the middle and distal rectum.
Animal tissues

Serosa


Robert "Voros" McCracken (born August 17, 1971, Chicago) is an American baseball sabermetrician. "Voros" (vörös in hungarian = red in english) is a nickname from his partial Hungarian heritage. He is widely recognized for his pioneering work on Defense Independent Pitching Statistics (DIPS).

DIPS

McCracken first published his ideas about DIPS in 1999 on the rec.sports.baseball newsgroup on Usenet. He also effectively named the new concept of "defense independent pitching" with that publication: "I've been working on a pitching evaluation tool and thought I'd post it here to get some feedback. I call it 'Defensive Independent Pitching' and what it does is evaluate a pitcher base[d] strictly on the statistics his defense has no ability to affect...".

His findings implied that major league pitchers had little control over the outcome of balls put into play against them and specifically that the percentage of balls put into play against a particular pitcher that fell for hits did not correlate across seasons. This implied that elements beyond the pitcher's control, including defense, ballpark, weather and randomness, had significant effects upon his performance.

McCracken's "Pitchers and Defense: How Much Control Do Hurlers Have?" was published on the Baseball Prospectus website in 2001 and was picked up on by baseball researchers and ESPN baseball writer and analyst Rob Neyer. After explaining McCracken's findings, including reporting some of his own calculations from the previous years' pitching statistics and describing the aspects of DIPS that were most original, Neyer concluded: "And it seems to me that anyone who wants to project pitcher performance should read McCracken's article, because it'll blow your mind." In his book The Numbers Game, Alan Schwarz writes that McCracken told him "all hell broke loose" after Neyer's column appeared. He received nearly 2,000 emails in the next couple of days and thousands more in the ensuing months.

Sabermetrician Craig Wright agreed that hit rate is not as heavily influenced by the pitcher as is commonly believed, but at the same time concluded "... some [pitchers] emphasize pitches that are tough to hit sharply enough to get your share of hits on balls in play. I don't think the latter is a primary way for pitchers to distinguish themselves from others, but I do believe it is a more significant factor for some groups than others." He specifically cited two groups, knuckleball pitchers and flyball pitchers, as examples of those who tend to allow fewer hits on balls in the field of play.

Subsequent independent research by Phil Birnbaum, Clifford Blau and Tom Tippett confirmed Wright's findings, but Wright still praises McCracken as "... 'the' guy who really got people to understand that most folks overestimate the pitcher's ability to influence the number of hits that result from balls batted into the field of play."

Bill James also expressed some skepticism but recognized the potential value of McCracken's findings if further research bore them out. He argued that "the research really should be done, for several reasons. First, if McCracken turns out to be correct, this has important consequences, even allowing us, to a certain extent, to predict movements in pitcher's records. . . ." In his New Historical Baseball Abstract in 2001, James acknowledged that McCracken was correct, that the results were significant, and that James himself felt "stupid for not having realized it 30 years ago." Rob Neyer noted the impact of McCracken's discovery on James' subsequent work. The discovery and its influence on baseball analysis is outlined in Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game.

McCracken continued to refine his new statistic, including addressing the issue of knuckleballers in his DIPS 2.0 in 2002. He published DIPS statistical results as well as extensions and improvements to his initial formulas in other forums, including Baseball Primer (now Baseball Think Factory).

Baseball researchers have continued to evaluate and to propose refinements to DIPS, such as Tom Tippett in his 2003 article "Can Pitchers Prevent Hits on Balls in Play?".

Subsequent career

Red Sox
A year and a half after the publication of his "Pitchers and Defense" article, McCracken's discovery earned him a consulting position with the Boston Red Sox. An important consequence of this was that by early 2003, he ceased publishing revisions of his formulas or updated results. He announced this step with excitement on his website on February 18, 2003. McCracken worked for the Red Sox through June 2005.

After the Boston hiatus
McCracken continued to think about how to measure performance in a variety of organized sports, such as international football (American soccer).

In 2007, he began a blog, vorosmccracken.com, with the subtitle "triumphant return of The Knack of the baseball world." The blog focused much of its attention on international soccer, including ratings of the national teams and forecasts of team performance in the World Cup 2010 and other tournaments. But he has little involvement in baseball analysis.

Jeff Passan has written, Of course, one great idea guarantees nothing.

Not prominence. McCracken spends his days and nights analyzing European soccer. He won't say for what or whom or where. The client appreciates anonymity.

Wealth is absent, too. McCracken lives paycheck to paycheck. He couldn't make rent on his apartment last year.

"If I give DIPS away for free once, that's fine," he says. "I came up with an idea that was monetized to the hundreds of millions of dollars, and I'm broke. I'm glad I did it. Can't do it anymore. I've done enough to prove I can at least do something. Boy, that's a revolutionary idea that changed baseball. Can you do it again? No. I can't do it again unless you pay me".

 And there's the deepest, most hurtful part of all: Voros McCracken hasn't worked in baseball since the game chewed him up and spit him out five years ago. In an industry where progress moves by the inch, the man who sent it forward a mile can't get a job. And he's not quite sure why.

As of March 2017, McCracken worked for the Chicago White Sox.

Legacy
While still doing sports analysis, including occasional publications on such media as ESPN.com, his major legacy is the revolution that he helped to bring to the statistical analysis of major league baseball. In a 2011 article titled "Voros McCracken changed the world," baseball writer Jeff Passan wrote:A decade after Baseball Prospectus let McCracken spread the gospel in a story that popularized DIPS across the sport, it remains among the most seminal theories developed by sabermetrics, the nickname given to quantitative baseball study. It's almost certainly the most revolutionary. Nothing before or since has so upended an entire line of thought and forced teams to assess a wide breadth of players in a different fashion.For a commentary on McCracken by Rob Neyer, introducing Passan's article, see Rob Neyer, "Voros McCracken changed the game," ESPN.com, January 25, 2011.

See also
 Defense-Independent ERA
 Defense Independent Pitching Statistics
 Sabermetrics

References

External links
 VorosMcCracken.com
 Baseball Digest Daily
 McCracken's Former Home Page
 DIPS Intro (1999)
 Pitching and Defense: How Much Control Do Hurlers Have? (2001)
 Mailbag: Pitching and Defense (2001)
 Neyer columns on DIPS (2001)
 DIPS Version 2.0 (2002)
 DIPS Version 2.0 Formula (2002)
 DIPS and its correlation with ERA for the following year (2002)
 The Great Debate (2005)
 Diamond Mind, "Can Pitchers Prevent Hits on Balls in Play?" (2003)
 Futility Infielder, DIPS 2004 and DIPS bibliography

1971 births
Living people
Baseball statisticians
Boston Red Sox personnel
American people of Hungarian descent
People from Chicago
People from Phoenix, Arizona

Voros McCracken


Stephen R. Hilbert is an American mathematician best known as co-author of the Bramble–Hilbert lemma, which he published with James H. Bramble in 1970. Hilbert's area of specialty is numerical analysis. He has been a professor of mathematics at Ithaca College since 1968. Additionally, he taught mathematics at Cornell University as a visiting program professor during the 2003–2004 academic year.

Early life and education
Hilbert was born in Brooklyn, New York. As a teenager, he attended Regis High School in New York City. He received his BS in mathematics from the University of Notre Dame in 1964 and his PhD in applied mathematics from the University of Maryland in 1969. He completed his dissertation, Numerical Solutions of Elliptic Partial Differential Equations, with Bramble as his advisor.

Awards and honors
Distinguished College Teaching of Mathematics Award – 1994 – Seaway Section of the Mathematical Association of America
Dana Teaching Fellow – 1985
Dana Teaching Fellow – 1982
Outstanding Faculty Award – 1979 – School of Humanities and Sciences, Ithaca College

Publications
Barron's GMAT. Jaffe, Eugene D., and Stephen Hilbert, 2009, Barron's Educational Series, , 497 pgs
Calculus: An Active Approach with Projects. Hilbert, Stephen, et al., 1993–1994, John Wiley & Sons; Reissued 2010 by Mathematical Association of America,  , 307 pgs
Estimation of Linear Functionals on Sobolev Spaces with Application to Fourier Transforms and Spline Interpolation. Bramble, James H., and Stephen R. Hilbert.  SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysis (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics) (Vol. 7, No. 1 (Mar., 1970)): 112–124.
A Mollifier Useful for Approximations in Sobolev Spaces and Some Applications to Approximating Solutions of Differential Equations. Hilbert, Stephen. Mathematics of Computation (American Mathematical Society) (Vol. 27, No. 121 (Jan., 1973)): 81–89.

References

External links

Year of birth missing (living people)
Living people
20th-century American mathematicians
21st-century American mathematicians
Cornell University faculty
Ithaca College faculty
Mathematicians from New York (state)
Academics from New York City
Regis High School (New York City) alumni
University of Maryland, College Park alumni
University of Notre Dame alumni

Stephen Hilbert


"Noël" is the 10th episode of the second season of The West Wing. The episode aired on December 13, 2000 on NBC.

Plot
Due to his colleagues' growing concern over his behavior Josh spends the day with Stanley Keyworth, a psychotherapist from the American Trauma Victims Association (ATVA). Stanley notices Josh's bandaged hand and asks about it. Josh insists that he cut his hand on a glass, even though Stanley makes it clear that he doesn't believe him. Josh recounts the last few weeks:

His behavior began to change on the day that he was assigned to review the personal and military history of an Air Force pilot who had broken away from his fighter jet's training formation. Josh had discovered that the two shared the same birthday, and that the pilot had been shot down and injured over Bosnia. Before Josh had a chance to report on this, the pilot radioed in to say, "It wasn't the plane," and killed himself by crashing into a mountain in New Mexico. Days later, while discussing a political situation, Josh raised his voice to the President in the Oval Office, at which point Leo called in ATVA to talk to him. During the congressional Christmas party, Yo-Yo Ma performed Bach's Suite No. 1 in G major and Josh was overcome with panic. When he went home, he slammed his hand into his window and cut himself on the broken glass.

Stanley asks Josh if, given what he had in common with the pilot – their common birthday and injuries – he wondered if he himself might have been suicidal. Josh initially denies this, but eventually admits that during the party he found himself reliving the attack at Rosslyn and that he felt out of control. Stanley tells him that his increasing stress and the episode at the party were triggered by the presence of a brass quintet at the White House, which subconsciously reminded Josh of police and ambulance sirens, thereby transporting him back to his own shooting and near-death in Rosslyn. He is diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and is concerned that it will endanger his job ("That doesn't sound like something they let you have if you work for the President") but Leo promises him "as long as I got a job, you got a job" in a moving speech which aligns Josh's trauma with Leo's own difficult past.

In another story, C.J. is told by a reporter that a woman saw a painting on the White House Tour and began screaming. C.J. does some research and finds out with the help of Bernard Thatch, the White House's snobbish but competent Protocol Chief, that the painting was owned by a Jewish family in Europe, seized by the Nazi collaborationist French Vichy Regime, and eventually given as a gift to the White House by the French government. The woman's father owned the painting, and C.J. returns it to the grateful woman and her son.

Sam is interested in a measure to tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to reduce high gas prices, and the staff decides to review the issue when the new year begins. Finally, the President wants to sign all of his holiday cards by hand, until he is told the total number of cards is 1,110,000.

Awards
Thomas Del Ruth won the American Society of Cinematographers award for cinematography for this episode.

Bradley Whitford won the 2001 Best Supporting Actor Emmy Award, in part for his performance in this episode.

Thomas Schlamme won the 2000 Directors Guild of America Award for Best Dramatic Series for this episode.

References

External links

The West Wing (season 2) episodes
American Christmas television episodes
2000 American television episodes
Television episodes about post-traumatic stress disorder
Television episodes directed by Thomas Schlamme
Television episodes written by Aaron Sorkin

Noël (The West Wing)


The banner o Vatican Ceety wis adoptit on Juin 7, 1929, the year Pape Pius XI signed the Lateran Treaty wi Italy, creatin a new independent state governed bi the Holy See. The Vatican banner is modeled on the banner o the earlier Papal States.

The banner
The banner consists o twa vertical baunds, ane o gowd (hoist side) an ane o white wi the crossed keys o Saunt Peter an the Papal Tiara centered in the white baund. The crossed keys conseest o a golden an a siller key, in which the siller key is placed in the dexter poseetion. The banner is ane o ae twa square kintra banners in the warld, the ither bein the banner o Swisserland.

The Vatican Ceety coat o airms can be foond in the white hauf. The coat o airms consists o:

 the papal tiara (as uised unner the pontificate o Pius XI);
 the twa keys which represent the keys tae Heaven (accordin tae the Gospel o Matthew 16:19) gien bi Jesus Christ tae St. Peter. The popes are regardit as the successor o Peter, an the gowd an siller keys hae been significant elements in the seembolism o the Papal State syne the 13t century. The gowd represents spiritual pouer, while the siller key represents warldly pouer.
 a reid cord connectin the keys.

The yellae an white o the banner an aa refer tae the keys – in heraldic terminology, thare is nae distinction atween yellae an gowd (the metallic colour or), nor atween white an siller (argent).

The banner is flewn or displayed warldwide in Roman Catholic kirks an institutions, uisually alangside the naitional banner o whaur the kirk or institution is locatit.

The flag o the Holy See
As statit abuins, the banner o the Vatican Ceety State shows the airms wi the siller key in the dexter poseetion. In case o the banner o the Holy See, which is no the same as the Vatican Ceety State, the keys are reversed. When the Vatican Ceety State wis established in 1929, the keys in the airms o the Holy See, which shows the gowd ane in dexter poseetion, wur reversed tae provide a distinctive seembol for the new state. In the personal airms o the popes, the keys are arranged as in the airms o the Holy See. The opposite arrangement wad be equivalent tae treatin him as merely the heid o that little state.

References

Vatican Ceety cultur
Vatican Ceety

Banner o Vatican Ceety


Egon Bondy, born Zbyněk Fišer (20 January 1930 in Prague – 9 April 2007 in Bratislava), was a Czech philosopher, writer, and poet, one of the leading personalities of the Prague underground.

In the late 1940s, Bondy was active in a surrealistic group. From 1957 to 1961, he studied philosophy and psychology at Charles University in Prague. From the 1960s he was considered to be one of the main figures of the Prague underground, particularly once his texts were set to music by The Plastic People of the Universe in the 1970s. His non-conformism brought him into conflict with the totalitarian communist regime in Czechoslovakia. His works were circulated only as samizdat.

Bondy was always interested in the study of Karl Marx and in the criticism of both contemporary capitalism and state socialism. His philosophical work concerns ontological and related ethical problems. He attempts to show the relevance of ontology without any substance or grounding.

Bondy's work is very distinctive. He was a close friend of Bohumil Hrabal, another Prague writer, and is one of the most influential Czech intellectuals of the 20th century.

In the 1990s Bondy moved from Prague to Bratislava, Slovakia.

The scope of his works is exceptionally broad: he published about thirty books of poetry, ranging from epic poems in early 1950s to meditative philosophical works in the 1980s. He also published about twenty novels, including Invalidní sourozenci, most of them dealing with the topic of a society or an individual in crisis, or a crisis in the relationship between an individual and his or her community. Despite the deep, existential background of his work, the texts are fresh and entertaining. He himself most valued his philosophical works. He published a history of philosophy. However, this work is criticized by authorities within the field for its subjective deformation of the topic.

Zbyněk Fišer first took on the name Egon Bondy in 1949 when preparing a surrealistic anthology whose authors all adopted Jewish pseudonyms. Bondy had been the name of a number of prominent Prague Jews (in addition to being the name of a character in Karel Čapek's classic War with the Newts).

See also

 List of Czech writers

References

External links
We are again at the very beginning - An interview with Egon Bondy published in the Slovak weekly Slovo and daily Blisty in 2003
 Obituary in the New York Times by Douglas Martin, published 15 April 2007
 Obituary in The Independent (UK) by Marcus Williamson, published 17 April 2007
 Obituary in The Times (UK), published 18 April 2007
 Obituary in The Guardian (UK) by Ken Hunt, published 20 April 2007

1930 births
2007 deaths
Czech philosophers
Czech male poets
Czech male dramatists and playwrights
Marxist theorists
Marxist humanists
Charles University alumni
20th-century Czech philosophers
People of the Velvet Revolution
StB
20th-century Czech poets
20th-century Czech dramatists and playwrights

Egon Bondy


Jia Qiaojie () is a character in the 18th century Chinese novel Dream of the Red Chamber. She is the only child of Jia Lian and Wang Xifeng. She remains a child throughout much of the novel. She is named after the Weaver Girl by Granny Liu, hoping the name will give some good luck and fortune.

In the end of the novel according to the Cheng-Gao version, Granny Liu saves her from being sold into concubinage by her maternal uncle. She and Ping'er are taken to Granny Liu's village in the country, where Qiaojie eventually marries one of Granny Liu's neighbors.

Qiaojie is the youngest of Jinling Twelve Beauties.

Dream of the Red Chamber characters
Fictional characters from Jiangsu
Fictional victims of crime
Child characters in literature

Jia Qiaojie


Avachinsky (also known as Avacha or Avacha Volcano or Avachinskaya Sopka) () is an active stratovolcano in Russia. It is situated on the Kamchatka Peninsula in the Russian Far East. Avachinsky lies within sight of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, the capital of Kamchatka Krai. Together with neighbouring Koryaksky volcano, it has been designated a Decade Volcano, worthy of particular study in light of its history of explosive eruptions and proximity to populated areas.

Avachinsky's last eruption occurred in 2008. This eruption was tiny compared to the volcano's major Volcanic Explosivity Index 4 eruption in 1945.

Geological history
Avachinsky lies on the Pacific Ring of Fire, at a point where the Pacific Plate is sliding underneath the Eurasian Plate at a rate of about /year. A wedge of mantle material lying between the subducting Pacific Plate and the overlying Eurasian Plate is the source of dynamic volcanism over the whole Kamchatka Peninsula.

The volcano is one of the most active volcanoes on the Kamchatka Peninsula, and began erupting in the middle to late Pleistocene era. It has a horseshoe-shaped caldera, which formed 30-40,000 years ago in a major landslide which covered an area of  south of the volcano, underlying the city of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky.  Reconstruction of a new cone inside the caldera occurred in two major eruption phases, 18,000 and 7,000 years ago.

Recorded history
In his Journal of Captain Cook's Last Voyage, John Ledyard records the eruption of Avachinsky on 15 June 1779.  He refers to Koryaksky and Avachinsky as Peter and Paul.

Recent activity

Avachinsky has erupted at least 16 times in recorded history. Eruptions have generally been explosive, and pyroclastic flows and lahars have tended to be directed to the south west by the breached caldera.  The most recent large eruption (VEI=4) occurred in 1945, when about  of magma was ejected.  The volcano has since had small eruptions in 1991 and 2001.

The volcano continues to experience frequent earthquakes, and many fumaroles exist near the summit.  The temperature of gases emitted at these fumaroles has been measured at over . In light of its proximity to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Avachinsky was designated a Decade Volcano in 1996 as part of the United Nations' International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction, together with the nearby Koryaksky volcano.

See also

List of volcanoes in Russia

References

External links
  VolcanoWorld information

Active volcanoes
Decade Volcanoes
Volcanoes of the Kamchatka Peninsula
Mountains of the Kamchatka Peninsula
VEI-4 volcanoes
Calderas of Russia
Stratovolcanoes of Russia
Holocene stratovolcanoes
Holocene Asia
Pleistocene stratovolcanoes

Avachinsky


Botticelli Inferno is a 2016 Italian-German documentary film directed by Ralph Loop. The film is part of the project Great Art Cinema and analyses one of the most mysterious works of Sandro Botticelli, the Map of Hell in the Divine Comedy Illustrated by Botticelli in the Vatican Library. The map was originally part of an illustrated manuscript of Dante's Divine Comedy, featuring artwork by Botticcelli.

The film was edited in the facilities of TV Plus, Medea Film, and Nexo Digital. It attempts to shed light on Botticelli's motivation for drawing his Map of Hell, and, in the process, to reveal the dark, and less well known, side of the Renaissance master who is famous for painting The Birth of Venus and Primavera.

Plot
Botticelli had created 102 drawings based on the writings of Dante's Inferno depicting Dante's vision of Hell. One of those drawings, the Map of Hell, shows the suffering of the condemned souls at the various levels of Hell, is analysed by art experts and their conclusions are presented in the film.

When the director of the film, Ralph Loop, saw Botticelli's exhibitions in Berlin and London in 2015, he became so fascinated with the Map of Hell that he decided to make a film about it. In Ron Howard's Inferno, the Map of Hell is shown briefly as a projection on a wall, while Ralph Loop's film is dedicated to examining the map and its history in detail.

The film attempts to shed light on what motivated Botticelli to draw the Map of Hell, and, in doing so, to reveal the dark, and less well known, side of the Renaissance master who is famous for painting The Birth of Venus and Primavera.

The drawing is about 30 by 40 centimetres and in the film it is examined by a glove-wearing German art historian inside the air-conditioned vaults of the Vatican. A letter from Friedrich Lippmann, director of Kupferstichkabinett Berlin, who in 1882 brought 85 of Botticelli's 102 drawings to the museum, is also shown in the film. A high-performance digital scanner is used in the film to reveal details in the map which could not be discerned by the human eye.

Locales
The film was shot on location in the Vatican, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, the Vatican Library, London, Berlin and Scotland.

Reception

Die Zeit comments that the film is worth seeing "as a background for the blockbuster [Ron Howard's film] – or instead." and further comments that Ron Howard's film only briefly shows a projection of the map, while in Ralph Loop's film the viewer can "marvel at the miracle in detail". The reviewer further asks "A whole film about a darkly colored drawing of just 30 by 40 centimeters, centuries old – is not that terribly dry?" concluding that "In fact, the small film is not meant to provide new insights to art scientists. But it entertains us non-experts in the best possible [way] with the little material that can be filmed in this subject so we see shots of Florence and Rome...". Die Zeit finally concludes, "Anyone who can free himself from such perfectly overworked vision of hell, recognizes Botticelli's painting [for] what it still is: infernal[ly] good."

Spielfilm.de comments that the film will be interesting to "[a]lmost anyone who has a passion for exciting thriller costumes or unsolved secrets (the history of art and culture)". The critic further comments "[o]n the one hand, [Loop] provides a comprehensive insight into the time of Botticelli – at all times, friendly, and comprehensible. And also for cinema-goers, to whom Botticelli and his art so far were largely foreign." Concerning the technology employed to scan the map details, the reviewer remarks that "[f]or the documentary "Botticelli Inferno", the [map] was illuminated with a high-performance scanner. This makes shading, coloring, details and hidden messages visible in an unprecedented way. Things that hitherto remained hidden from the eye." The review also mentions that the film employs a first-person narration technique, when referring to Botticelli, that makes the viewer feel close to the artist. The critic goes on to conclude that the film is: "a masterly, artfully documented work of art, [about] one of the most mysterious works of art in history."

AlloCiné comments that "Botticelli – Inferno transports viewers into another world: a journey to the underworld through the nine levels of hell, as described by Dante. "Only by traveling through hell and purgatory we can reach paradise and emerge to see the stars again"
Do not miss this unique event, specially created for cinema."

Release
The film was released in Italy in November 2016.

References

External links

2016 films
2016 documentary films
Documentary films about painters
German documentary films
Italian documentary films
Works about the Renaissance
Films based on Inferno (Dante)
Sandro Botticelli
2010s German films

Botticelli Inferno


HMS Narcissus was a  which served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War from 1941 to the end of the war in 1945. She primarily escorted convoys across the Atlantic Ocean.

Construction and armament
Narcissus was constructed at Lewis's shipyard in Aberdeen in April 1941, with the express purpose of joining the Battle of the Atlantic as a convoy escort. She was to act as a platform, from which attacking German submarines could be detected above or below the surface anytime, and driven away or destroyed. She was equipped with sonar and, eventually, type-271 radar and armed with depth charge rails and throwers.   A forward throwing Hedgehog was added at a later date.

War service
After her crew had been worked up at the training base at Tobermory in August 1941, she joined the Clyde Escort Force at Greenock on the River Clyde. Apart from three annual refits and a rearmament at Govan, Fort William and Troon, she escorted merchant ships continuously for three years. Narcissus went across the North Atlantic to Newfoundland;  across the Bay of Biscay to Gibraltar; and once to Freetown and back.

During the course of these convoys, she expended countless depth charges against under-water contacts and picked up survivors from several Allied ships. In March 1943, she took part in the rescue of survivors of the destroyer , which had been sunk by  during the passage of convoy HX 228. In September 1943, she narrowly missed being torpedoed by  and witnessed the sinking of her consort, , by .

On 6 June 1944 (D-day), she escorted the follow-up wave of the invasion of Normandy, of the 3rd Canadian Division in Landing Ships and Landing Craft (Infantry) to Juno Beach and the 51st Highland Division to Gold Beach respectively. After the first frantic months of re-supply convoy duties across the English Channel, she acted as a local escort for the South-western Approaches.

Post-war
When the Second World War ended, she was ordered to Milford Haven to de-ammunition and be laid up in reserve.

References
 Peter Coy, 1997 The Echo of a Fighting Flower, Square One Publications

Flower-class corvettes of the Royal Navy
1941 ships

HMS Narcissus (K74)


The Fibonacci Association is a mathematical organization that specializes in the Fibonacci number sequence and a wide variety of related subjects, generalizations, and applications, including recurrence relations, combinatorial identities, binomial coefficients, prime numbers, pseudoprimes, continued fractions, the golden ratio, linear algebra, geometry, real analysis, and complex analysis.

History
The organization was founded in 1963 by Brother Alfred Brousseau, F.S.C. of St. Mary's College (Moraga, California) and Verner E. Hoggatt Jr. of San Jose State College (now San Jose State University).

Details regarding the early history of The Fibonacci Association are given Marjorie Bicknell-Johnson's "A Short History of The Fibonacci Quarterly", published in The Fibonacci Quarterly 25:1 (February 1987) 2-5, during the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary year of the journal.

Publications
Since the year of its founding, the Fibonacci Association has published an international mathematical journal, The Fibonacci Quarterly .

The Fibonacci Association also publishes Proceedings for its international conferences, held every two years since 1984.  The 2008 conference, formally entitled the Thirteenth International Conference on Fibonacci Numbers and Their Applications, took place at the University of Patras (Greece), preceded by conferences at San Francisco State University (USA, 2006), Technische Universität Braunschweig (Germany, 2004), Northern Arizona University (USA, 2002), and Institut Supérieur de Technologie (Luxemburg, 2000).

The 2010 Conference was held at the Instituto de Matemáticas de la UNAM, Morelia, Mexico, as announced at the Fibonacci Association website:  .  The 2012 Conference will take place during June 25–30 at the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics, Eszerházy Károly College, Eger, Hungary, with keynote speaker Neil Sloane, founder of the Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences.

External links
The Official website of the Fibonacci Association
The Fibonacci Quarterly
Up-to-date list of issues of The Fibonacci Quarterly

Fibonacci numbers
Organizations established in 1963
Mathematics organizations
1963 establishments in California

The Fibonacci Association