Stravinsky's compositional career was notable for its stylistic diversity. He first achieved international fame with three ballets commissioned by the impresario Serge Diaghilev and first performed in Paris by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes: The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911), and The Rite of Spring (1913). The latter transformed the way in which subsequent composers thought about rhythmic structure and was largely responsible for Stravinsky's enduring reputation as a musical revolutionary who pushed the boundaries of musical design. His "Russian phase", which continued with works such as Renard, L'Histoire du soldat, and Les Noces, was followed in the 1920s by a period in which he turned to neoclassicism. The works from this period tended to make use of traditional musical forms (concerto grosso, fugue, and symphony) and drew from earlier styles, especially those of the 18th century. In the 1950s, Stravinsky adopted serial procedures. His compositions of this period shared traits with examples of his earlier output: rhythmic energy, the construction of extended melodic ideas out of a few two- or three-note cells, and clarity of form and instrumentation.

Early life, 1882–1901

Stravinsky was born on 17 June 1882 in the town of Oranienbaum on the southern coast of the Gulf of Finland, 25 miles west of Saint Petersburg.[1][2] His father, Fyodor Ignatievich Stravinsky (1843–1902), was an established bass opera singer in the Kyiv Opera and the Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg and his mother, Anna Kirillovna Stravinskaya (née Kholodovskaya; 1854–1939), a native of Kiev, was one of four daughters of a high-ranking official in the Kiev Ministry of Estates. Igor was the third of their four sons; his brothers were Roman, Yury, and Gury.[3] The Stravinsky family was of Polish and Russian heritage,[4] descended "from a long line of Polish grandees, senators and landowners".[5] It is traceable to the 17th and 18th centuries to the bearers of the Soulima and Strawinski coat of arms. The original family surname was Soulima-Stravinsky; the name "Stravinsky" originated from the word "Strava", one of the variants of the Streva River in Lithuania.[6][7]

house of Igor Stravinsky
Stravinsky's house in Ustilug, now a museum

On 10 August 1882, Stravinsky was baptised at Nikolsky Cathedral in Saint Petersburg.[3] Until 1914, he spent most of his summers in the town of Ustilug, now in Ukraine, where his father-in-law owned an estate.[8][9] Stravinsky's first school was The Second Saint Petersburg Gymnasium, where he stayed until his mid-teens. Then he moved to Gourevitch Gymnasium, a private school, where he studied history, mathematics, and six languages.[10] Stravinsky expressed his general distaste for schooling and recalled being a lonely pupil: "I never came across anyone who had any real attraction for me."[11]

Stravinsky took to music at an early age and began regular piano lessons at age nine, followed by tuition in music theory and composition.[12] At around eight years old, he attended a performance of Tchaikovsky's ballet The Sleeping Beauty at the Mariinsky Theatre, which began a lifelong interest in ballets and the composer himself. By age fifteen, Stravinsky had mastered Mendelssohn's Piano Concerto No. 1 and finished a piano reduction of a string quartet by Alexander Glazunov, who reportedly considered Stravinsky unmusical and thought little of his skills.[13]

Pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov and first compositions, 1901–1909

Stravinsky in 1903

Despite Stravinsky's enthusiasm and ability in music, his parents expected him to study law and, at first, he took to the subject. In 1901, he enrolled at the University of Saint Petersburg studying criminal law and legal philosophy, but attendance at lectures was optional and he estimated that he turned up to fewer than fifty in his four years of study.[14] In 1902 Stravinsky, at age 20, met Vladimir, a fellow pupil at the University of Saint Petersburg and the youngest son of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Rimsky-Korsakov at that time was arguably the leading Russian composer and he was a professor at Saint Petersburg Conservatory of music. Stravinsky wished to meet Vladimir's father about his musical aspirations. He stayed the summer of 1902 with Rimsky-Korsakov and his family in Heidelberg, Germany. Rimsky-Korsakov suggested to Stravinsky that he should not enter the Saint Petersburg Conservatory but continue private lessons in theory. [15]

By the time of his father's death from cancer in 1902, Stravinsky was spending more time studying music than law.[16] His decision to pursue music full time was helped when the university was closed for two months in 1905 in the aftermath of Bloody Sunday, which prevented him from taking his final law exams. In April 1906, Stravinsky received a half-course diploma and concentrated on music thereafter.[5][17] In 1905, he started twice-weekly lessons from Rimsky-Korsakov and regarded him as a second father.[14] These lessons continued until Rimsky-Korsakov's death in 1908.[18] Stravinsky completed his first composition during this time, the Symphony in E-flat, catalogued as Opus 1. In the wake of Rimsky-Korsakov's death, Stravinsky composed Funeral Song, Op. 5 which was performed once and then considered lost until its discovery in 2015.[19]

In August 1905, Stravinsky became engaged to his first cousin, Katherine Gavrylivna Nosenko.[9] In spite of the Orthodox Church's opposition to marriage between first cousins, the couple married on 23 January 1906. They lived in the family's residence at 6 Kryukov Canal in Saint Petersburg before they moved into a new home in Ustilug, which Stravinsky designed and built, and which he later called his "heavenly place". He wrote many of his first compositions there.[20][21] It is now a museum with documents, letters, and photographs on display, and the annual Stravinsky Festival takes place in the nearby town of Lutsk.[22][citation needed][23] Stravinsky and Nosenko's first two children, Fyodor (Theodore) and Ludmila, were born in 1907 and 1908, respectively.[24]

Ballets for Diaghilev and international fame, 1909–1920

Sergei Diaghilev

By 1909, Stravinsky had composed two more pieces, Scherzo fantastique, Op. 3 and Feu d'artifice ("Fireworks"), Op. 4. In February of that year, both were performed in Saint Petersburg at a concert that marked a turning point in Stravinsky's career. In the audience was Sergei Diaghilev, a Russian impresario and owner of the Ballets Russes who was struck with Stravinsky's compositions. He wished to stage a mix of Russian opera and ballet for the 1910 season in Paris, among them a new ballet from fresh talent that was based on the Russian fairytale of the Firebird.[25] After Anatoly Lyadov was given the task of composing the score, he informed Diaghilev that he needed about one year to complete it.[26] Diaghilev then asked the 28-year-old Stravinsky, who had provided satisfactory orchestrations for him for the previous season at short notice and agreed to compose a full score.[25] At 50 minutes in length, The Firebird was revised by Stravinsky for concert performance in 1911, 1919, and 1945.

The Firebird premiered at the Opera de Paris on 25 June 1910 to widespread critical acclaim and Stravinsky became an overnight sensation.[27][28][29] As his wife was expecting their third child, the Stravinskys spent the summer in La Baule in western France. In September, they moved to Clarens, Switzerland where their second son, Sviatoslav (Soulima), was born.[30] The family would spend their summers in Russia and winters in Switzerland until 1914.[31] Diaghilev commissioned Stravinsky to score a second ballet for the 1911 Paris season. The result was Petrushka, based the Russian folk tale featuring the titular character, a puppet, who falls in love with another, a ballerina. Though it failed to capture the immediate reception that The Firebird had following its premiere at Théâtre du Châtelet in June 1911, the production continued Stravinsky's success.

It was Stravinsky's third ballet for Diaghilev, The Rite of Spring, that caused a sensation among critics, fellow composers, and concertgoers. Based on an original idea offered to Stravinsky by Nicholas Roerich, the production features a series of primitive rituals celebrating the advent of spring, after which a young girl is chosen as a sacrificial victim to the sun god Yarilo, and dances herself to death. Stravinsky's score contained many novel features for its time, including experiments in tonality, metre, rhythm, stress and dissonance. The radical nature of the music and choreography caused a near-riot at its premiere at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on 29 May 1913.[32][33]

Shortly after the premiere, Stravinsky contracted typhoid from eating bad oysters and he was confined to a Paris nursing home. He left in July 1913 and returned to Ustilug.[34] For the rest of the summer he focused on his first opera, The Nightingale (Le Rossignol), based on the same-titled story by Hans Christian Andersen, which he had started in 1908.[35] On 15 January 1914, Stravinsky and Nosenko had their fourth child, Marie Milène (or Maria Milena). After her delivery, Nosenko was discovered to have tuberculosis and was confined to a sanatorium in Leysin in the Alps. Stravinsky took up residence nearby, where he completed The Nightingale.[36][37] The work premiered in Paris in May 1914, after the Moscow Free Theatre had commissioned the piece for 10,000 rubles but soon became bankrupt. Diaghilev agreed for the Ballets Russes to stage it.[38][39][40] The opera only lukewarm success with the public and the critics, apparently because its delicacy did not meet their expectations following the tumultuous Rite of Spring.[37] However, composers including Maurice Ravel, Béla Bartók, and Reynaldo Hahn found much to admire in the score's craftsmanship, even alleging to detect the influence of Arnold Schoenberg.[41]

Group of supporters and members of the Ballets Russes in 1911

In April 1914, Stravinsky and his family returned to Clarens.[38] Following the outbreak of World War I later that year, he was ineligible for military service due to health reasons.[31] Stravinsky managed a short visit to Ustilug to retrieve personal items just before national borders were closed.[42] In June 1915, he and his family moved from Clarens to Morges, a town six miles from Lausanne on the shore of Lake Geneva. The family lived there (at three different addresses), until 1920.[43] In December 1915, Stravinsky made his conducting debut at two concerts in aid of the Red Cross with The Firebird.[44] The war and subsequent Russian Revolution in 1917 made it impossible for Stravinsky to return to his homeland.[45]

Stravinsky began to struggle financially in the late 1910s as Russia (and its successor, the USSR) did not adhere to the Berne Convention, thus creating problems for Stravinsky to collect royalties for the performances of his pieces for the Ballets Russes.[46] He blamed Diaghilev for his financial troubles, accusing the impresario of failing to adhere to their contract.[16] While composing his theatrical piece L'Histoire du soldat (The Soldier's Tale), Stravinsky approached Swiss philanthropist Werner Reinhart for financial assistance, who agreed to sponsor him and largely underwrite its first performance which took place in Lausanne in September 1918.[47] In gratitude, Stravinsky dedicated the work to Reinhart and gave him the original manuscript.[48] Reinhart supported Stravinsky further when he funded a series of concerts of his chamber music in 1919.[49][50] In gratitude to his benefactor, Stravinsky also dedicated his Three Pieces for Clarinet to Reinhart, who was also an amateur clarinetist.[51]

Life in France, 1920–1939

Stravinsky as drawn by Picasso in 1920

In June 1920, Stravinsky and his family left Switzerland for France, first settling in Carantec, Brittany for the summer while they sought a permanent home in Paris.[53][54] They soon heard from couturière Coco Chanel, who invited the family to live in her Paris mansion until they had found their own residence. The Stravinskys accepted and arrived in September.[55] Chanel helped secure a guarantee for a revival production of The Rite of Spring by the Ballets Russes from December 1920 with an anonymous gift to Diaghilev that was claimed to be worth 300,000 francs.[56]

In 1920, Stravinsky signed a contract with the French piano manufacturing company Pleyel. As part of the deal, Stravinsky transcribed most of his compositions for their player piano, the Pleyela. The company helped collect Stravinsky's mechanical royalties for his works and provided him with a monthly income. In 1921, he was given studio space at their Paris headquarters where he worked and entertained friends and acquaintances.[57][58][59] The piano rolls were not recorded, but were instead marked up from a combination of manuscript fragments and handwritten notes by Jacques Larmanjat, musical director of Pleyel's roll department. During the 1920s, Stravinsky recorded Duo-Art piano rolls for the Aeolian Company in London and New York City, not all of which have survived.[60]

Stravinsky's second wife, Vera de Bosset

Stravinsky met Vera de Bosset in Paris in February 1921,[61] while she was married to the painter and stage designer Serge Sudeikin, and they began an affair that led to Vera leaving her husband.[62]

In May 1921, Stravinsky and his family moved to Anglet, a town close to the Spanish border.[63] Their stay was short-lived as by the autumn, they had settled to nearby Biarritz and Stravinsky completed his Trois mouvements de Petrouchka, a piano transcription of excerpts from Petrushka for Artur Rubinstein. Diaghilev then requested orchestrations for a revival production of Tchaikovsky's ballet The Sleeping Beauty.[64] From then until his wife's death in 1939, Stravinsky led a double life, dividing his time between his family in Anglet, and Vera in Paris and on tour.[65] Katya reportedly bore her husband's infidelity "with a mixture of magnanimity, bitterness, and compassion".[66]

In June 1923, Stravinsky's ballet Les noces (The Wedding) premiered in Paris and performed by the Ballets Russes.[67] In the following month, he started to receive money from an anonymous patron from the US who insisted to remain anonymous and only identified themselves as "Madame". They promised to send him $6,000 in the course of three years, and sent Stravinsky an initial cheque for $1,000. Despite some payments not being sent, Robert Craft believed that the patron was famed conductor Leopold Stokowski, whom Stravinsky had recently met, and theorised that the conductor wanted to win Stravinsky over to visit the US.[67][68]

In September 1924, Stravinsky bought a new home in Nice.[69] Here, the composer re-evaluated his religious beliefs and reconnected with his Christian faith with help from a Russian priest, Father Nicholas.[70] He also thought of his future, and used the experience of conducting the premiere of his Octet at one of Serge Koussevitzky's concerts the year before to build on his career as a conductor. Koussevitzky asked for Stravinsky to compose a new piece for one of his upcoming concerts; Stravinsky agreed to a piano concerto, to which Koussevitzky convinced him that he be the soloist at its premiere. Stravinsky agreed, and the Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments was first performed in May 1924.[71] The piece was a success, and Stravinsky secured himself the rights to exclusively perform the work for the next five years.[72] Following a European tour through the latter half of 1924, Stravinsky completed his first US tour in early 1925 which spanned two months.[72]

In May 1927, Stravinsky's opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex premiered in Paris. The funding of its production was largely provided by Winnaretta Singer, Princesse Edmond de Polignac, who paid 12,000 francs for a private preview of the piece at her house. Stravinsky gave the money to Diaghilev to help finance the public performances. The premiere received a reaction,[clarification needed] which irked Stravinsky, who had started to become annoyed at the public's fixation towards his early ballets.[73] In the summer of 1927 Stravinsky received a commission from Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, his first from the US. A wealthy patroness of music, Coolidge requested a thirty-minute ballet score for a festival to be held at the Library of Congress, for a $1,000 fee. Stravinsky accepted and wrote Apollo, which premiered in 1928.[74]

From 1931 to 1933, the Stravinskys lived in Voreppe, near Grenoble, southeastern France.[75] The Stravinskys became French citizens in 1934 and moved to the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris.[76] Stravinsky later remembered this last European address as his unhappiest, as his wife's tuberculosis infected both himself and his eldest daughter Ludmila, who died in 1938. Katya, to whom he had been married for 33 years, died of tuberculosis three months later, in March 1939.[77] Stravinsky himself spent five months in hospital, during which time his mother died.[78]

During his later years in Paris, Stravinsky had developed professional relationships with key people in the United States: he was already working on his Symphony in C for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra[79] and he had agreed to deliver the prestigious Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University during the 1939–40 academic year.[80]

Life in the United States, 1939–1971

On 30 September 1939, Stravinsky arrived in New York City and travelled onward to Cambridge, Massachusetts to fulfil his engagement at Harvard. For the first two months in the US, he stayed at Gerry's Landing, the home of art historian Edward W. Forbes.[81][82][page needed] Vera arrived in New York City in January 1940, after which the couple married in Bedford, Massachusetts on 9 March.[83] They moved into a home in Beverly Hills, California before settling in Hollywood from 1941. The composer had decided that the warm Californian climate would benefit his health.[83]

Stravinsky's unconventional dominant seventh chord in his arrangement of the "Star-Spangled Banner" led to an incident with the Boston police on 15 January 1944, and he was warned that the authorities could impose a $100 fine upon any "re-arrangement of the national anthem in whole or in part".[86] The police, as it turned out, were wrong. The law in question merely forbade using the national anthem "as dance music, as an exit march, or as a part of a medley of any kind",[87] but the incident soon established itself as a myth, in which Stravinsky was supposedly arrested, held in custody for several nights, and photographed for police records.[88]

Stravinsky's professional life encompassed most of the 20th century, including many of its modern classical music styles, and he influenced composers both during and after his lifetime. Included among his students in the 1940s was the American composer and music educator Robert Strassburg.[89][90] In 1959, he was awarded the Sonning Award, Denmark's highest musical honour. In the early 1960s his students included Robert Craft and Warren Zevon.[91]

On 28 December 1945, Stravinsky and his wife Vera became naturalized US citizens.[92] Their sponsor and witness was actor Edward G. Robinson.[93]

Stravinsky on the cover of Time in 1948

On the same day Stravinsky became an American citizen, he arranged for Boosey & Hawkes to publish rearrangements of several of his compositions and used his newly acquired American citizenship to secure a copyright on the material, thus allowing him to earn money from them.[94] The five-year contract was finalised and signed in January 1947 which included a guarantee of $10,000 per for the first two years, then $12,000 for the remaining three.[95]

In late 1945, Stravinsky received a commission from Europe, his first since Perséphone, in the form of a string piece for the 20th anniversary for Paul Sacher's Basle Chamber Orchestra. The Concerto in D premiered in 1947.[96] In January 1946, Stravinsky conducted the premiere of his Symphony in Three Movements at Carnegie Hall in New York City. It marked his first premiere in the US.[97] In 1947, Stravinsky was inspired to write his English-language opera The Rake's Progress by a visit to a Chicago exhibition of the same-titled series of paintings by the eighteenth-century British artist William Hogarth, which tells the story of a fashionable wastrel descending into ruin. American poet W. H. Auden and writer Chester Kallman worked on the libretto. The opera premiered in 1951 and marks the final work during Stravinsky's neoclassical period.[98]

Stravinsky befriended American conductor Robert Craft while composing The Rake's Progress. Craft later became Stravinsky's personal assistant and close friend, and encouraged him to compose serial music. This began Stravinsky's third and final distinct musical period, the serial (or twelve-tone) period, which lasted until his death.[99]

In January 1962, during his tour's stop in Washington, D.C., Stravinsky attended a dinner at the White House with President John F. Kennedy in honour of his eightieth birthday, where he received a special medal for "the recognition his music has achieved throughout the world".[100][101] In September 1962, Stravinsky returned to Russia for the first time since 1914, accepting an invitation from the Union of Soviet Composers to conduct six performances in Moscow and Leningrad. During the three-week visit he met with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and several leading Soviet composers, including Dmitri Shostakovich and Aram Khachaturian.[102][103] Stravinsky did not return to his Hollywood home until December 1962 in what was almost eight months of continual travelling.[104] Following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, Stravinsky completed his Elegy for J.F.K. in the following year. The two-minute work took the composer two days to write.[105]

By early 1964, the long periods of travel had started to affect Stravinsky's health. His case of polycythemia had worsened and his friends had noticed that his movements and speech had slowed.[105] In 1965, Stravinsky agreed to have David Oppenheim produce a documentary film about himself for the CBS network. It involved a film crew following the composer at home and on tour that year, and he was paid $10,000 for the production.[106] The documentary includes Stravinsky's visit to Les Tilleuls, the house in Clarens, Switzerland, where he wrote the majority of The Rite of Spring. The crew asked Soviet authorities for permission to film Stravinsky returning to his hometown of Ustilug, but the request was denied.[107] In 1966, Stravinsky completed his last major work, the Requiem Canticles.[108]

In February 1967, Stravinsky and Craft directed their own concert in Miami, Florida, the composer's first in that state. By this time, Stravinsky's typical performance fee had burgeoned to $10,000. However subsequently, upon doctor's orders, offers to perform that required him to fly were generally declined.[109] An exception to this was a concert at Massey Hall in Toronto, Canada in May 1967, where he conducted the relatively physically undemanding Pulcinella suite with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. He had become increasingly frail and for the only time in his career, Stravinsky conducted while sitting down. It was his final performance as conductor in his lifetime.[110] While backstage at the venue, Stravinsky informed Craft that he believed he had suffered a stroke.[109] In August 1967, Stravinsky was hospitalised in Hollywood for bleeding stomach ulcers and thrombosis which required a blood transfusion. In his diary, Craft wrote that he spoon-fed the ailing composer and held his hand: "He says the warmth diminishes the pain."[111]

By 1968, Stravinsky had recovered enough to resume touring across the US with him in the audience while Craft took to the conductor's post for the majority of the concerts.[112] In May 1968, Stravinsky completed the piano arrangement of two songs by Austrian composer Hugo Wolf for a small orchestra.[112] In October Stravinsky, Vera, and Craft travelled to Zurich, Switzerland to sort out business matters with Stravinsky's family. While there, Stravinsky's son Theodore held the manuscript of The Rite of Spring while Stravinsky signed it before giving it to Vera.[113] The three considered relocating to Switzerland as they had become increasingly less fond of Hollywood, but they decided against it and returned to the US.[114]

Final years and death

Stravinsky's grave on San Michele Island

In October 1969, after close to three decades in California and being denied to travel overseas by his doctors due to ill health, Stravinsky and Vera secured a two-year lease for a luxury three bedroom apartment in Essex House in New York City. Craft moved in with them, effectively putting his career on hold to care for the ailing composer.[115] Among Stravinsky's final projects was orchestrating two preludes from The Well-Tempered Clavier by Bach, but it was never completed.[116] He was hospitalised in April 1970 following a bout of pneumonia, which he successfully recovered from. Two months later, he travelled to Évian-les-Bains by Lake Geneva where he reunited with his eldest son Theodore and niece Xenia.[117]

On 18 March 1971, Stravinsky was taken to Lenox Hill Hospital with pulmonary edema where he stayed for ten days. On 29 March, he moved into a newly furbished apartment at 920 Fifth Avenue, his first city apartment since living in Paris in 1939. After a period of well being, the edema returned on 4 April and Vera insisted that medical equipment should be installed in the apartment.[118] Stravinsky soon stopped eating and drinking and died at 5:20 a.m. on 6 April at the age of 88. The cause on his death certificate is heart failure. A funeral service was held three days later at Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel.[116][119] As per his wishes, he was buried in the Russian corner of the cemetery island of San Michele in northern Italy, several yards from the tomb of Sergei Diaghilev.[120]

He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and in 1987 he was posthumously awarded the Grammy Award for Lifetime Achievement. He was posthumously inducted into the National Museum of Dance and Hall of Fame in 2004.

Russian period (c. 1907–1919)

Aside from a very few surviving earlier works, Stravinsky's Russian period, sometimes called primitive period, began with compositions undertaken under the tutelage of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, with whom he studied from 1905 until Rimsky's death in 1908, including the orchestral works Symphony in E major (1907), Faun and Shepherdess (for mezzo-soprano and orchestra; 1907), Scherzo fantastique (1908), and Feu d'artifice (1908/9).[121] These works clearly reveal the influence of Rimsky-Korsakov, but as Richard Taruskin has shown, they also reveal Stravinsky's knowledge of music by Glazunov, Taneyev, Tchaikovsky, Wagner, Dvořák, and Debussy, among others.[122]

Performances in St. Petersburg of Scherzo fantastique and Feu d'artifice attracted the attention of Serge Diaghilev, who commissioned Stravinsky to orchestrate two piano works of Chopin for the ballet Les Sylphides to be presented in the 1909 debut "Saison Russe" of his new ballet company.[125]

The Firebird was first performed at the Paris Opéra on 25 June 1910 by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Like Stravinsky's earlier student works, The Firebird continued to look backward to Rimsky-Korsakov not only in its orchestration, but also in its overall structure, harmonic organization, and melodic content.[126]

According to Taruskin, Stravinsky's second ballet for the Ballet Russes, Petrushka, is where "Stravinsky at last became Stravinsky."[127]

Stravinsky in the 1920s

Neoclassical period (c. 1920–1954)

Apollon musagète (1928), Perséphone (1933) and Orpheus (1947) exemplify not only Stravinsky's return to the music of the Classical period but also his exploration of themes from the ancient Classical world, such as Greek mythology. Important works in this period include the Octet (1923), the Concerto for Piano and Winds (1924), the Serenade in A (1925), and Symphony of Psalms (1930).

In 1951, he completed his last neoclassical work, the opera The Rake's Progress to a libretto by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman based on the etchings of William Hogarth. It premiered in Venice that year and was produced around Europe the following year before being staged in the New York Metropolitan Opera in 1953.[130] It was staged by the Santa Fe Opera in a 1962 Stravinsky Festival in honor of the composer's 80th birthday and was revived by the Metropolitan Opera in 1997.[131]

Serial period (1954–1968)

In the 1950s, Stravinsky began using serial compositional techniques such as dodecaphony, the twelve-tone technique originally devised by Arnold Schoenberg.[132] He first experimented with non-twelve-tone serial techniques in small-scale vocal and chamber works such as the Cantata (1952), the Septet (1953) and Three Songs from Shakespeare (1953). The first of his compositions fully based on such techniques was In Memoriam Dylan Thomas (1954). Agon (1954–57) was the first of his works to include a twelve-tone series and Canticum Sacrum (1955) was the first piece to contain a movement entirely based on a tone row.[133] Stravinsky expanded his use of dodecaphony in works such as Threni (1958) and A Sermon, a Narrative and a Prayer (1961), which are based on biblical texts,[134] and The Flood (1962), which mixes brief biblical texts from the Book of Genesis with passages from the York and Chester Mystery Plays.[135]

Innovation and influence

Stravinsky has been called "one of music's truly epochal innovators".[136] The most important aspect of Stravinsky's work, aside from his technical innovations (including in rhythm and harmony), is the "changing face" of his compositional style while always "retaining a distinctive, essential identity".[136]

Stravinsky with Wilhelm Furtwängler, German conductor and composer.

Stravinsky's use of motivic development (the use of musical figures that are repeated in different guises throughout a composition or section of a composition) included additive motivic development. This is a technique in which notes are removed from or added to a motif without regard to the consequent changes in metre. A similar technique can be found as early as the 16th century, for example in the music of Cipriano de Rore, Orlandus Lassus, Carlo Gesualdo and Giovanni de Macque, music with which Stravinsky exhibited considerable familiarity.[137]

The Rite of Spring is notable for its relentless use of ostinati, for example in the eighth-note ostinato on strings accented by eight horns in the section "Augurs of Spring (Dances of the Young Girls)". The work also contains passages where several ostinati clash against one another. Stravinsky was noted for his distinctive use of rhythm, especially in the Rite of Spring (1913).[138] According to the composer Philip Glass, "the idea of pushing the rhythms across the bar lines [...] led the way [...]. The rhythmic structure of music became much more fluid and in a certain way spontaneous."[139] Glass mentions Stravinsky's "primitive, offbeat rhythmic drive".[140] According to Andrew J. Browne, "Stravinsky is perhaps the only composer who has raised rhythm in itself to the dignity of art."[141] Stravinsky's rhythm and vitality greatly influenced the composer Aaron Copland.[142]

Over the course of his career, Stravinsky called for a wide variety of orchestral, instrumental, and vocal forces, ranging from single instruments in such works as Three Pieces for Clarinet (1918) or Elegy for Solo Viola (1944) to the enormous orchestra of The Rite of Spring (1913), which Aaron Copland characterized as "the foremost orchestral achievement of the 20th century".[143]

Following the model of his teacher, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky’s student works such as the Symphony in E, Op. 1 (1907), Scherzo fantastique, Op. 3 (1908), and Fireworks (Feu d'artifice), Op. 4 (1908), call for large orchestral forces. The Symphony, for example, calls for 3 flutes (3rd doubles piccolo), 2 oboes, 3 clarinets in B, 2 bassoons, 4 horns in F, 3 trumpets in B, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, triangle, cymbals, and strings.[145] The Scherzo fantastique calls for a slightly larger orchestra but completely omits trombones: this was Stravinsky’s response to Rimsky’s criticism of their overuse in the Symphony.[146]

The three ballets composed for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes call for particularly large orchestras:

A costume sketch by Léon Bakst for The Firebird


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“It’s driven by the increased need, desire and commercial applicability of renewable energy," he says. "It is driven by where the best resource is, and mapping that resource with load centres, and therefore not being restricted by transmitting centralised power to those areas."

Balachandran says the needs of the consumer have evolved with the evolution in technology.

“Today, more consumers are switching to smart appliances, and demand the ability as well as the interface required to connect more IoT devices to their network,” he says.

With the increasing adoption of electric vehicles and the advent of vehicle-to-grid technology, Balachandran says there is a need for the network to become bidirectional both in terms of electricity, as well as information.

“This needs to be in real-time and machine learning algorithms and AI are playing a leading role in automating this process and enabling the network to communicate with each node and each consumer,” he says.

Tech to the fore

There are a number of technological developments that will shape the electricity sector going forward. The rollout of smart meters is allowing consumers to monitor energy consumption in real-time and make usage more efficient. That in turn allows network operators to manage load flow in real time, Balachandran says.

“All this data allows distribution companies to forecast usage patterns and make more informed decisions such as the need for network upgrades,” he adds.

Smart meters fitted relay data in terms of the amount of power consumed for billing, making it possible to manage monthly expenses. Affleck says in Southeast Asia, smart meters have been adopted in places like Thailand, home to a growing rooftop solar market.

Power companies are also using AI-based image recognition to monitor powerlines and substations. Korean utility company KEPCO, for example, is already using this technology to relay information such as smoke, falling trees and break-ins at their power plants.

Energy companies are also using AI, IoT and drone technologies to predict the longevity of hardware and infrastructure at plants. Smart plug-systems powered by AI are being developed to only transmit electricity when a device is plugged. Such technology can cut energy consumption substantially.

Similarly, battery storage is critical as it addresses the intermittency of renewable energy power supply. Unlike conventional electricity generation, power generated from solar and wind depends on a multitude of external factors that are hard to predictwith accuracy.

“There are times of the day when solar irradiance or wind speeds are high resulting in good power generation but the demand for electricity during these times need not be high," Balachandran says.

"During such times, battery storage allows the ‘time shifting’ of the generation from periods of peak resource/generation to periods of peak demand."

Storage also plays an important role in the decentralisation of energy transmission and distribution. In the emerging markets in particular decentralisation is important because in many cases it may make more sense for utilities companies to set up microgrids - as opposed to building transmission and distribution lines.

Affleck says as more of these decentralised solutions get up and running they will need to be connected and optimised through data transfer so they can communicate with one another.

Implementation challenges

The many benefits of technology notwithstanding, there are challenges when it comes to the adoption and implementation of technology in electricity systems. This has meant tech adoption has not been as pervasive as can be.

This is one of the anomalies of the electricity sector. On the one hand, it is a sector that can benefit greatly with the adoption of new technologies; but on the other, as an industry, it has always appeared somewhat reluctant to adopt these new technologies.

A key reason for this is the dominance of public utilities over the electricity landscape in many economies, particularly in emerging markets.

“Public utilities are riddled with traditional processes and are slow to adopt technology,” says Affleck, adding the reconciling between technology needs and the inability to change is a challenge even for investors in the sector. This is why a lot of the investment in the energy sector has been into assets and projects as opposed to being technology-focused, he says.

Additionally, state utilities often do not have the resources needed to invest in upgrading their technological capabilities. Utility companies often have entrenched legacy systems which are expensive to replace or modify. Many are also faced with a dearth of skilled professionals.

The US Department of Energy, for instance, estimates a demand of 105,000 new workers in the smart grid and electric utility industry by 2030, as against the available 25,000 industry personnel. This problem is going to become more acute with the adoption of even newer technologies.

One way for public utilities to get around this challenge is to forge strategic partnerships with private-sector companies involved in utilities distribution and management.

According to Balachandran, winds of change are blowing already.

“The business model of a monopolistic utility generating electricity and selling to consumers is a thing of the past,” he says.

He adds with utility-scale renewable energy, generation has become more widespread,with generators spread out to regions with better resource quality. Moreover, large scale adoption of rooftop solar in countries such as Australia, combined with two-directional network and net metering has truly made generation distributed.

“Microgrids, which is a single entity (often remote) that has generation from distributed sources, consumers to sell to and potentially storage capability, will be key in any distributed system,” he adds.

With the increased use of technology in energy systems and the increasingly connected nature of electricity assets, security is another major challenge that energy companies will need to address in the pursuit of increased efficiencies.

A cyberattack on a US utility company in March 2019 left it unable to access its supervisory control and data acquisition system.

The denial-of-service attack disabled devices controlling power grid control systems in the states of Utah, Wyoming and California, disrupting grid operations.

This was the first instance of such an attack but experts warn that it won’t be the last.

Finding the right balance

In many developing economies, the primary challenge now is still electricity generation, as a result of which the adoption of technology to enhance efficiencies is not a top priority.

The World Bank estimates 840 million people around the world have no access to electricity and countless millions suffer due to irregular power supply. In this context, it is not surprising if technology adoption in the electricity sector proceeds only slowly.

State utilities must adapt their business models and determine which technologies are practical in terms of adoption and implementation. It is imperative they find the right balance between the immediate needs of providing primary energy, and the long-term needs of introducing upgraded and optimised solutions.

While the pace of technological adoption in the electricity sector may vary from market to market, it is clear that each will eventually see the adoption of these new technologies.

The Economist Intelligence Unit, commissioned by ANZ institutional, surveyed over 750 executives across the technology, resources, energy and infrastructure, food, beverages and agriculture and financial services industries in seven key markets: Australia, China, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Singapore, United Kingdom, United States and India.

The survey, conducted in the spring and summer of 2019, was designed to capture insight into the role of technology in corporate growth, sustainability and the macro-economy.

Three reports were written based on insights from the data. You can read the third report HERE.


Deja, šis puslapis dar neišverstas į lietuvių kalbą...

    Ladies' Market is a popular place to shop for affordable fashion goods in Hong Kong. This open-air market runs the length of Tung Choi Street in Mong Kok. Both sides of the 1-km-long street are lined with stalls selling clothes, bags, shoes, and jewellery. You’ll also find plenty of local coffee shops and street stalls selling wonton noodles, curry fish balls, and deep-fried squids.

    Expect the quality of items to vary massively, and be prepared to bargain hard because the local vendors running the stalls will start with inflated prices every time. Haggling is a must-do here, so aim for about 50% lower than the first offer. Know that politeness (and a smile) goes a long way when it comes to bargaining.

    At its southern end, closest to Mong Kok MTR Station, you’ll find fashion stalls selling fake designer goods, while further north there are many traders selling plants, animals (it’s nicknamed Goldfish Street by the locals), and homeware.

    Ladies' Market opens at midday but usually gets livelier towards mid-afternoon. It can get rather packed on weekends due to its narrow lane, so head there early to avoid crowds.

    Ladies' Market Hong Kong

    Vieta: Tung Choi Street, Mong Kok, Hong Kong

    Darbo laikas: Daily from 11am to 11.30pm

    Paul Smith | prisiekęs keliautojas

    Planuoti viešnagę


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The top 9 shows on Netflix this week, from 'Fear City' to 'Shameless'

Submitted by Tech Insider on August 1, 2020 - 10:00am

  • "Fear City," "Shameless," and "Dark Desire" are all popular on Netflix this week.
  • Streaming search engine Reelgood keeps track of the lists and provides Business Insider with a rundown of the week's most popular TV shows on Netflix.
  • Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

The longrunning Showtime series "Shameless" debuted new episodes on Netflix recently, propelling it up Netflix's popularity rankings.

Every week, the streaming search engine Reelgood compiles for Business Insider a list of which TV shows have been most prominent on Netflix's daily lists that week.

ESPN's "Last Dance" docuseries about Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls continues to be a hit on the streaming giant.

Below are Netflix's 9 most popular TV shows of the week in the US:

SEE ALSO: The top 9 movies on Netflix this week, from 'The Kissing Booth 2' to 'Animal Crackers'

9. "Indian Matchmaking" (Netflix original, 2020-present)

Rotten Tomatoes critic score: 67%

What critics said: "Natural light suffuses the production, and the colorful B-roll footage in India is refreshingly free of stereotypes. The 35- to 40-minute runtime is well suited to the storylines, with well-constructed cliffhangers underscoring the series' narrative." — Hollywood Reporter (season 1)

8. "Last Chance U" (Netflix original, 2016-present)

Rotten Tomatoes critic score: 94%

What critics said: "There's the season where the team wins in spite of their personal issues, and the season where everything goes wrong because of them. This new season is the latter, and you won't see a better drama all summer." — Guardian (season 4)

7. "In the Dark" (The CW, 2019-present)

Description: "A blind woman with vices finds herself in the middle of a murder investigation when her best friend turns up dead."

Rotten Tomatoes critic score: 73%

What critics said: "Good actors like these can only do so much with muddled, unsatisfying plots and thin characterisation." — Den of Geek (season 1)

6. "Down to Earth with Zac Efron" (Netflix original, 2020-present)

Description: "Actor Zac Efron journeys around the world with wellness expert Darin Olien in a travel show that explores healthy, sustainable ways to live."

Rotten Tomatoes critic score: 67%

What critics said: "It's not resonant, it's not revelatory, it's just a professional himbo going on a vacation paid for by Netflix. And honestly, I'm not mad at it! He had fun, I had fun, Wildcats in the house, etc." — Mashable (season 1)

5. "Dark Desire" (Netflix original, 2020-present)

Rotten Tomatoes critic score: N/A

What critics said: N/A

4. "Shameless" (Showtime, 2011-2020)

Description: "This dramedy based on a British series centers on siblings in a dysfunctional Chicago family who struggle while coping with their alcoholic father."

Rotten Tomatoes critic score: 85%

What critics said: "'Shameless' is still more than good enough this season to take up space in existing fans' hearts." — Uproxx (season 10)

3. "Cursed" (Netflix original, 2020-present)

Description: "Armed with mysterious powers and a legendary sword, young rebel Nimue joins forces with charming mercenary Arthur on a mission to save her people."

Rotten Tomatoes critic score: 71%

What critics said: "'Cursed' is still a lot of fun, but don't expect anything too revolutionary from this safely subversive new Netflix show." — Nerdist (season 1)

2. "Fear City: New York vs. the Mafia" (Netflix original, 2020)

Description: "Five Mafia families ruled New York with a bloody fist in the 1970s and '80s, until a group of federal agents tried the unthinkable: taking them down."

Rotten Tomatoes critic score: 67%

What critics said: "To tell this story with the scope it requires, 'Fear City' would have needed to double its running time at minimum." — Newsday

1. "The Last Dance" (ESPN, 2020)

Description: "This docuseries chronicles the rise of superstar Michael Jordan and the 1990s Chicago Bulls, with unaired footage from an unforgettable 1997-98 season."

Rotten Tomatoes critic score: 96%

What critics said: "'The Last Dance' shows the best dances are done with a partner, or in this case, several." — Detroit News

Full, story source published in:


Mysterious Majorana quasiparticle is now closer to being controlled for quantum computing

Mysterious Majorana quasiparticle is now closer to being controlled for quantum computing
A scanning tunneling microscope (STM) was used to visualize Majorana quasiparticles (green peaks) occurring at the ends of topological edge channels (yellow regions) at the atomic steps of a bismuth thin film grown on a superconducting surface. Small magnetic clusters are seen as small bumps decorating the corner of these edges. At the interfaces between the magnetic clusters and the edge channel, experiments detected robust Majorana quasiparticles, but only when the cluster magnetization points along the channel. Credit: Yazdani Lab at Princeton University

Its fame stems from its strange properties—it is the only particle that is its own antiparticle—and from its potential to be harnessed for future quantum computing.

In recent years, a handful of groups including a team at Princeton have reported finding the Majorana in various materials, but the challenge is how to manipulate it for quantum computation.

In a new study published this week, the Princeton team reports a way to control Majorana quasiparticles in a setting that also makes them more robust. The setting—which combines a superconductor and an exotic material called a —makes Majoranas especially resilient against destruction by heat or vibrations from the outside environment. What is more, the team demonstrated a way to turn on or off the Majorana using small magnets integrated into the device. The report appeared in the journal Science.

"With this new study we now have a new way to engineer Majorana quasiparticles in materials," said Ali Yazdani, Class of 1909 Professor of Physics and senior author on the study. "We can verify their existence by imaging them and we can characterize their predicted properties."

This capability has captivated technologists who envision a way to make quantum bits—the units of —that are more robust than current approaches. Quantum systems are prized for their potential to tackle problems impossible to solve with today's computers, but they require maintaining a fragile state called superposition, which if disrupted, can result in system failures.

The team went on to detect the Majorana's quantum "spin," a property shared by electrons and other subatomic particles. In a report published in Science in 2017, the team stated that the Majorana's spin property is a unique signal with which to determine that a detected quasiparticle is indeed a Majorana.

"It was a prediction, and it was just sitting there all these years," said Yazdani. "We decided to explore how one could actually make this structure because of its potential to make Majoranas that would be more robust to material imperfections and temperature."

"When we began to characterize the small magnets, we realized they are the control parameter," said Yazdani. "The way the magnetization of the bit is oriented determines whether the Majorana appears or not. It is an on-off switch."

Explore further

Study investigates how spin-orbit interaction protects Majorana nanowires

More information: "Observation of a Majorana zero mode in a topologically protected edge channel" Science (2019). science.sciencemag.org/lookup/ … 1126/science.aax1444
Journal information: Science

Citation: Mysterious Majorana quasiparticle is now closer to being controlled for quantum computing (2019, June 13) retrieved 14 August 2020 from https://phys.org/news/2019-06-mysterious-majorana-quasiparticle-closer-quantum.html

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17.1: From Isolation to Global Superpower

  • Page ID
  • The Second World War was the hinge point for establishing American dominance. Prior to that war, the United States had focused on continental expansion, making sure its neighbours recognised its regional dominance and pre-empting the influence of European powers in the Americas. George Washington, the first American president, warned in his farewell address that the US should avoid ‘entangling alliances’. Another president, John Quincy Adams, said that America should not go abroad searching ‘for monsters to destroy’ and that its glory was in liberty, not dominion. The United States did, nevertheless, dabble in imperialism during the late nineteenth century, toppling a decaying Spanish empire to help liberate Cuba and acquiring Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines in the process. But, having won its own freedom in 1776 from British colonial control, there was little desire in America for it to become a colonial power itself. Even involvement in the First World War could not shake the US out of its preferred isolationist shell. The United States entered the war late, brought its forces home quickly afterwards and refused to help enforce a peace its president helped design due to the US Congress rejecting membership of the League of Nations.

    The Second World War was truly global in scope and revolutionary in its impact. The United States was drawn into the conflict, again late, by German submarine warfare in the Atlantic and a surprise attack on its military facilities at Pearl Harbor by the Japanese in December 1941. When the war began in 1939 there were several powers contesting for global leadership, but the United States was not among them. The United Kingdom and France had sizeable empires. Adolf Hitler was determined to create a new German ‘Reich’ (or empire) that would last at least 1,000 years. Imperial Japan was seeking dominance in Asia and had already occupied parts of China and all of Korea. Finally, the Soviet Union had proved that a communist revolution was possible, and prospects were good that other nations would follow suit and communism would spread globally. By the war’s end Germany and Japan were devastated, defeated countries, occupied by foreign powers. Among the victors, the United Kingdom and France were spent powers. Their empires were fragmenting and their economies near-destroyed. The Soviet Union had suffered the most significant losses of all, primarily through battling a German invasion. Despite winning the war, the cost of victory for the allied powers had been high. In contrast, by 1945 the United States had shaken off the effects of the Great Depression, the global economic collapse of the 1930s, and was relatively untouched by the war. It had demonstrated its power by mobilising and equipping a military of over 16 million. As the war ended it had military forces stationed across the globe and was the world’s dominant economic power.

    The United States took several lessons from the Second World War, the most important of which was that it had to be involved in managing global security in order to protect its own security. It was too big and too powerful for others not to challenge even if it had no interest in challenging them. Because international relations as a system is anarchical, with no ruler, powerful states tend to make other states feel insecure by default. Even if powerful states do not behave threateningly, there is a fear that they may do so in the future. This leads to competition and the risk of future conflict as states seek to maximise their security by attempting to increase their relative power. In the past this was typically done by acquiring territory, as described in chapter one. But in a post-war era characterised by decolonisation and the presence of nuclear weapons, security calculations were in flux. To monitor the situation, the United States chose to be involved globally, designing the international frameworks for commerce and governance at conferences it convened in Bretton Woods and San Francisco, both in America, and joining the United Nations which was headquartered in New York City. Essentially, the Americans created a new system of international relations, both economic and political, and placed themselves in the driving seat. Although the bulk of its forces were demobilised at the war’s end, the United States maintained the network of bases it had built during the war and retained a substantial military presence in both Europe and Asia. At home, it created, via the National Security Act of 1947, the governmental framework for coordinating the development and exercise of global power. In short, the United States was now permanently constituted to be a different type of actor.

    Having helped destroy fascism in the Second World War, the United States set itself the task of first containing and then undermining the two remaining rival systems of global order – colonialism and communism. The test came quickly with the Soviet Union’s push to dominate Eastern Europe and its acquisition of nuclear weapons in 1949. Many American politicians feared that the Soviet Union could dominate all of Europe and Asia – an area with the industrial resources and military potential to match or even surpass the United States. When China turned communist in 1949 and other nations looked set to follow, these fears seemed to have a basis in reality. A series of confrontations and crises that we now call the Cold War became the new normal in international relations. The conflict marked a two-power struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union spanning more than forty years. IR calls this a bipolar system, as two principal actors are responsible for shaping global affairs. In the end, with the Soviet Union’s internal collapse between 1989 and 1991, there was one superpower standing – the United States. The question was, would this mean that bipolarity would give way to unipolarity (the dominance of one power) or multipolarity (many centres of power)?


Kōrero: Weekends

The Great Levante and his magical extravaganza, 1941 (1 o 3)

The Great Levante and his magical extravaganza, 1941

The Great Levante is advertised to perform his 'magical extravaganza' at Wellington's Opera House on Easter Saturday, 1941. Saturday night was the time for shows, cabarets, dances, boxing matches and wrestling bouts. The Great Levante, Australian magician Leslie George Cole, toured the world with his illusionist tricks and escapology.

Te whakamahi i tēnei tūemi

Alexander Turnbull Library
Reference: Eph-D-CABOT-Magic-1941-01

Ngā whakaahua me ngā rauemi katoa o tēnei kōrero

Te tuhi tohutoro mō tēnei whārangi:

Peter Clayworth, 'Weekends - Saturday – pay day, work day, half-holiday', Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/mi/ephemera/39784/the-great-levante-and-his-magical-extravaganza-1941 (accessed 14 August 2020)


A person's identity can be disclosed from:

  • Direct identifiers such as names, postcode information or pictures
  • Indirect identifiers which, when linked with other available information, could identify someone, for example information on workplace, occupation, salary or age

You decide which information to keep for data to be useful and which to change. Removing key variables, applying pseudonyms, generalising and removing contextual information from textual files, and blurring image or video data could result in important details being missed or incorrect inferences being made. See example 1 and example 2 for balancing anonymisation with keeping data useful for qualitative and quantitative data.

Anonymising research data is best planned early in the research to help reduce anonymisation costs, and should be considered alongside obtaining informed consent for data sharing or imposing access restrictions. Personal data should never be disclosed from research information, unless a participant has given consent to do so, ideally in writing.

Quantitative data

Anonymising quantitative data may involve removing or aggregating variables or reducing the precision or detailed textual meaning of a variable.

Primary anonymisation techniques

  • Remove direct identifiers from a dataset. Such identifiers are often not necessary for secondary research.

Example: Remove respondents' names or replace with a code; remove addresses, postcode information, institution and telephone numbers.

  • Aggregate or reduce the precision of a variable such as age or place of residence. As a general rule, report the lowest level of geo-referencing that will not potentially breach respondent confidentiality. The exact scale depends on the type of data collected, but very detailed geo-references like full postcodes, names of small towns or villages are likely to be problematic. Coded or categorical variables which may be potentially revealing can be aggregated into broader codes. If aggregation of a disclosive variable is not possible, consider whether it should be removed from the dataset.

Example: Record the year of birth rather than the day, month and year; record postcode sectors (first 3 or 4 digits) rather than full postcodes; aggregate detailed 'unit group' standard occupational classification employment codes up to 'minor group' codes by removing the last digit.

  • Generalise the meaning of a detailed text variable by replacing potentially disclosive free-text responses with more general text.

Example: Detailed areas of medical expertise could indirectly identify a doctor. The expertise variable could be replaced by more general text or be coded into generic responses such as 'one area of medical speciality', 'two or more areas of medical speciality', etc.

  • Restrict the upper or lower ranges of a continuous variable to hide outliers if the values for certain individuals are unusual or atypical within the wider group researched. In such circumstances the unusually large or small values might be collapsed into a single code, even if the other responses are kept as actual quantities, or one might code all responses.

Example: Annual salary could be 'top-coded' to avoid identifying highly paid individuals. A top code of £100,000 or more could be applied, even if lower incomes are not coded into groups.

  • Anonymise relational data where relations between variables in related or linked datasets or in combination with other publicly available outputs may disclose identities.

Example: In confidential interviews on farms the names of farmers have been replaced with codes and other confidential information on the nature of the farm businesses and their locations have been disguised to anonymise the data.

However, if related biodiversity data collected on the same farms, using the same farmer codes, contain detailed locations for biodiversity data alone the location would not be confidential. Farmers could be identified by combining the two datasets.

The link between farmer codes and biodiversity location data should be removed, for example by using separate codes for farmer interviews and for farm locations.

  • Anonymise geo-referenced data by replacing point coordinates with non-disclosing features or variables; or, preferably, keep geo-references intact and impose access restrictions on the data instead.

Point data may fix the position of individuals, organisations or businesses studied, which could disclose their identity. Point coordinates may be replaced by larger, non-disclosing geographical areas such as polygon features (km2 grid, postcode district, county), or linear features (random line, road, river). Point data can also be replaced by meaningful alternative variables that typify the geographical position and represent the reason why the locality was selected for the research, such as poverty index, population density, altitude, vegetation type. In this way, the value of data is maintained, whilst removing disclosing geo-references.

A better option may be to keep detailed spatial references intact and to impose access controls on the data instead.

Procedures to anonymise any research data that are destined for sharing or archiving should always be considered together with appropriate informed consent procedures.

Qualitative data

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Quick Access To

Add-on MS Word anonymisation macro tool for qualitative data, available from our tools collection.


Biographical context of maria montessori

Biographical context of maria montessori

He is also the author of more than six books on early childhood education, including Miseducation and The Hurried Child. The lecture summarized the research Prof. Elkind has undertaken for his forthcoming book Giants in the Nursery: Grandmasters of Educational Reform.

I have reproduced my lecture notes from this lecture here; any errors or omissions are my own. Mozart suggested that the composer should begin with something simpler; the frustrated young composer observed that Mozart had written his first Biographical context of maria montessori at eight.

SAGE Reference - Montessori Curriculum

Talent is a gift that cannot be taught, Prof. Elkind uses the term "grandmaster" to refer to those individuals who had the vision to see beyond even the best.

Learning is the modification of behavior as a result of experience. Psychology traditionally focuses upon behavior because it is the objective, measurable, aspect of learning. One of Professor Elkind's central arguments is that early childhood education should serve as the model for all education not the other way around- by determining standards for the education of older children and working backwards to determine appropriate standards and experiences for younger children.

He identifies four main commonalities among these individuals. Learning only occurs when you re-present an experience. Practical education must combine the social and the natural. Believed God is the creator and people should emulate God; therefore, people should work to be creative.

He believed people create through play. He was trained as a crystallographer and believed that physical development follows the same process as organic development. He created beautiful materials for children which famously influenced the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright.

He was very concerned with the over-intellectualism of education and highly valued fine arts music, dance, and art. Where Pestalozzi, sought to bring the social and the natural together; Steiner sought to unify the personal and the social.

Biographical context of maria montessori

Art is the boundary between that which is personal and that which is social.Maria Montessori was born on August 31, , in the provincial town of Chiaravalle, Italy, to middle-class, well-educated parents. At the time that Montessori was growing up, Italy held Born: Aug 31,  Biographical Context of Maria Montessori Research the educational and social context of Maria Montessori’s life, especially those early developmental years of Examine the theorists and events that influenced her work and why.

Biographical material based on the personal and professional aspects of being a teacher were writings of Maria Montessori, although the educational context in which Montessori teachers In the present context, Montessori educational theory is the common frame of reference.

Similarities and differences should become more apparent when. 'Children experience a certain sensation which makes them desire to possess the objects that they are stimulated by. Sensations involve not only a neural reaction but a psychic re. The Italian educator and physician Maria Montessori was the first Italian woman to receive a medical degree.

She was the originator of the Montessori method of education for children. On August 31, , Maria Montessori was born in Chiaravalle, Italy. Her father, Allessandro Montessori, a retired Died: May 06, Maria Montessori and La Casa dei Bambini. Maria Montessori became the first woman in Italy to graduate from the University of Rome’s medical school, in , and become a licensed medical doctor.

Talk:Montessori education - Wikipedia


Data Sets

The Climate Hazards Center and affiliates create and use a variety of key data sets to make informed decisions as they relate to climate early warning.

Climate Hazards Center InfraRed Precipitation with Station data (CHIRPS)

Climate Hazards Center’s Precipitation Climatology (CHPClim)

The CHIRPS-GEFS data set uses the higher spatial resolution of CHIRPS and the advanced forecasting ability of GEFS to provide weather forecasts, updated daily at a spatial resolution of 5 km across the globe. In blending CHIRPS and GEFS, we bias-correct and downscale GEFS with respect to CHIRPS.

CHIRTSmax is a global 2-m maximum temperature (Tmax) product that directly combines satellite and station-based estimates of Tmax to produce routinely updated data to support the monitoring of temperature extremes. The CHIRTSmax development process broadly follows the data development strategy used to develop our CHIRPS precipitation data set, integrating a long-term climatology with satellite information and available station data. The result is a monthly estimate of the daily maximum temperature for the 1983-2016 time period.

Evaporative Demand Drought Index (EDDI) Forecasts

EDDI is an experimental indicator of drought severity and a promising tool for early warning guidance. This indicator is based solely on atmospheric evaporative demand (Eo). EDDI measures the signal of drought through the response of Eo to surface drying anomalies that result from two distinct land surface-atmosphere interactions: 1) a complementary relationship between E0 and Evapotranspiration (ET) that develops under moisture limitations at the land surface, leading to ET declining and increasing E0, as in sustained droughts, and 2) parallel ET and E0 increases arising from increased energy availability that lead to surface moisture limitations, as in flash droughts (Hobbins et al., 2016).


Privacy policy

FAME FAN privacy and security policy: This is the purpose of this privacy policy. You should read the whole policy; however, we hereby state some key issues we want to convey:

A: FAME FAN is a public network and the general contents published can be viewed and searched by anyone around the world, except for what is exclusively published for prepaid subscribers. We also provide not-public means to communicate with FAME FAN, through protected messages and direct messages. You can use FAME FAN under a pseudonym if you prefer not to use your real name.
B: Even when you use FAME FAN, just for looking at the contents, we receive some personal information from you, such as the type of device you are using and your IP address. You can choose to share additional information with us, such as your email address, phone number, contacts list and public profile. We use this information for activities such as: maintaining your account secure; showing contents, interesting or famous people to follow, events and relevant advertisement.
C: We give you control over your settings to limit the data we collect about you, and how we use and control issues like account security. Also you can always download the information shared FAN FAME FAN.
D: From the information you share with us, we use your comments, the content you have read or shared, your likes, and other information, to determine which topics you are interested in, your age, the languages you speak and other issues which allow us to give you more relevant content. We offer transparency when dealing with this information and you can modify or correct it at any time.
E: If you have any questions about this policy, how we collect or treat your personal information or any other matter related to our data privacy practices, please contact us at any time.
Information shared with us: We require certain information to provide our services. For example, you must have an account in FAME FAN to upload or share contents. When you choose to share the following information with us, we collect it and use it to manage our services.

Basic account information: you do not need to create an account to use some of the features of our service, such as searching and viewing profiles of celebrities or famous people, which are public, or watching a broadcast on the page; but if you choose to create an account, you should provide some personal information so that we can offer our services. In FAME FAN, this includes an account name (for example, "MY FAVORITE TASTE"), a user name (for example, the grasshopper under the sun), a password and an email address or phone number. Your account name and user-name are always public and can be real or a pseudonym. You can also create and manage multiple accounts, for example, public information such as the fan´s club.
Most of the activity in FAME FAN is public. But your profile information, your time zone and language, the date of the creation of your account and your messages are private; as well as certain information from your comments or publications such as date, time, application and version in FAME FAN since you started operating it. You can also choose to publish your location or give permission to see some data from your profile in FAME FAN. The lists you create, the people who you follow and follow you, as well as the messages you like or post. Transmissions that you create, click or participate are public, along with the information of when to perform those actions. Also your likes, comments, number of likes you have received, and from which accounts they come from and if you watch any live or repetition of broadcasts. Any like, comment or other content which post in someone else´s account, will remain part of such transmission during its duration. The information published about you by other people using our services, may also be public, as long as you authorize it. For example, some people may mention you in a message.
You are responsible for your messages and other information you provide through our services, so you should consider carefully what you make public, especially if it is sensitive information which could harm the free exercise of your rights, person, work, profession , art and/or occupation.
If you update your public information in FAME FAN, for example, we will update your content in FAME, FAME FAME FAN for IOS and FAME FAN for Android. We have standard conditions that govern how these data is delt with and a program to implement these conditions.
Contact information: We use your contact information, such as your email address or telephone number, to authenticate and maintain your account secure (and our services), as well as to prevent Spam, fraud and abuse. We also use the contact information to customize our services, activate certain features of the account (for example, for access verification) and to send you information about our services. If you provide your phone number, you agree to receive text messages from FAME FAN, to that number according to he laws of your country. FAME FAN also uses your contact information to show advertising, according to he laws of your country. You can use your notification settings through your e-mail and mobile phone to control the notifications received from FAME FAN. You can also cancel notifications by following the instructions provided in the notification itself. We also use this information to show better content recommendations to you and others. If you send us an email, we will keep the content of your message, your e-mail address and contact information to answer to your request.

Direct messages and non-public communications: We provide certain features that allow you to communicate with us more privately or to control who sees your content. For example, you can use direct messages to keep conversations with FAME FAN not public, protect your messages or make private transmissions. When communicating with others by sending or receiving direct messages, we will store and process the communications and information related to them. This includes links scanning to detect malicious content, URL shortening, Spam detection, banned images and review of complains. We also use information about who has been reported and when (but not the content of these communications) to better understand the use of our services, protect the security and integrity of our platform and display more relevant content. We share the content of your direct messages with the people to whom you sent the message. We do not use them to show advertisement. Note that, if you interact in a way that would normally be public with FAME FAN content, shared with you by direct messages, for example, by liking a message, such interactions will be public. When using features such as direct messages to communicate, remember that recipients of the messages have their own copy of the communications in FAME FAN (even if you delete your copy of these messages from your account), they can duplicate, store or share it.

Payment information: You can provide your payment information, including your credit or debit card number, the expiration date in your card, CVV number and billing address, and that information is not public.

How you control the information shared with us: your privacy and security settings allow you to decide:
A- If your messages are publicly available in FAME FAN.
B-If you can receive direct messages from anyone in FAME FAN or just the followers or subscribers who share the same celebrity or famous person that you follow.
D-If others can find you by your email or website/app.

Additional information received: We receive certain information about you when you use our services. We also received information from third parties including advertisers. In the same way we use the information you share with us to deliver our services, we also use:
1. Location information: We require access information and current location, from signals such as your IP address or device parameters, to configure and maintain your account secure and reliable and provide our services. Depending on your configuration, we may collect, use and store additional information about your location (such as your current location or specific places where you previously used FAME FAN) to manage or customize our services; for example, including more relevant content, such as events, announcements and local suggestions about the celebrity followed, so other can follow them too.
2. Links: to manage our services, we track how you interact with the links in our services. This includes links in emails that we send you and links in messages that appear on other web sites or mobile applications. We may also collect other personal information about you, such as cookies or your IP address.
3. Cookies: A cookie is a small set of data that is stored on your computer or mobile device. Like many websites, we use cookies and similar technologies to collect additional data from website usage and to manage our services. No cookies are required for many features of our services such as searching and displaying public profiles. Although most browsers accept cookies automatically, in the configuration of many browsers, an option can be programed to stop accepting cookies or to alert you when a website is attempting to place a cookie on your computer. However, some of our services may not function properly if you disable cookies. When your browser or device allow so, we use both session cookies and persistent cookies to better understand how you interact with our services, obtain patterns of aggregated use and customize and otherwise administer our services, such as providing security to the account, customizing the content we exhibit, including advertisements, and remembering your language preference.
4. Registration data: We receive information when you watch content or interact in any way with our services, this is called "registration data," even if you have not created an account. For example, when you visit our website, subscribe to our services, interact with our email notifications, use your account to authenticate in a third party´s service or visit a third party service that includes content of FAME FAN, we can receive information about you. Registration data includes information such as your IP address, browser type, operating system, website sources, the websites visited, location, mobile service provider, device information (including device ID and application ID), terms searches, and cookie information. We also received registration data when you click on a link in our services, watch or interact with it. We use registration data to manage our services and ensure their proper, safe, reliable and full functioning. For example, we use login data to protect the security of accounts and determine what content is popular in our services. We also use this data to improve the content we show you, including advertisements. We use the information you provide and the data received, including log data and data obtained from third parties, to determine what topics will be of interest, your age and what languages you speak. This helps us to improve our services and customize the content we offer you, including advertisements.
6-FAME FAN data for the network: When you watch our content on third-party websites that contain FAME FAN content, such as integrated chronologies or FAME FAN links, we can receive registration data including the web page you visited. We use this information to better understand your use of our services, protect the security and integrity of our platform and display more relevant content, including advertisement. We do not associated this browser search in the network with your name, email address, phone number or user name; and we eliminate it.
Advertisers and advertising partners: the income obtained from advertising will allow us to maintain and improve our services. We use the information described in this privacy policy to make our advertisement more relevant to you, to measure its effectiveness and to help us recognize their devices to provide ads within FAME FAN. Our advertising partners and affiliates share information with us, such as cookie IDs browser, mobile device IDs, email addresses encrypted when using hash, demographic or interests data, and content watched or actions done in a website or application. Some of our advertising partners, particularly our advertisers also allow us to collect similar information directly from their website or application integrating our advertising technology.

FAME FAN adheres to the principles of self-regulation for behavioral digital advertising (also called "interest-based advertising") of the "Digital Advertising Alliance " and adheres to the consumer choice tool APD, so that you be excluded from interest-based advertising you can find in In addition, our policies prohibit targeted ads sent by advertisers based on categories that we consider sensitive or that are prohibited by law such as race, religion, politics, sexual life or health.
If you are an advertiser or potential advertiser, we process your personal data to facilitate the offering and provision of our advertising services. You can update your data on your Ads FAME FAN panel or by contacting us directly as described in this Privacy Policy.
Developers: If you access our API or developer portal, we process your personal data to facilitate the delivery of our services. You can update your data by contacting us directly as described in this Privacy Policy.
Other third parties and affiliates: We may receive information about you from third parties other than our advertising partners, and other users of FAME FAN, partners who assist us in evaluating the safety and quality of the content in our platform, and other services that you link to your account in FAME FAN.
Devices customization: when you log in FAME FAN with a browser or device, we associate that browser or device with your account, for as authentication, security and personalization purposes . Depending on your configuration, you can also associate your account with browsers different from the one used to access FAME FAN (or associate such devices or browsers with other browsers or devices). We do this to manage and customize our services.
How you can control the additional information we receive: your data configuration and FAME FAN customizing allow you decide:
A- If we show interest-based advertising inside and outside FAME FAN.
B-How we should customize your experience different devices.
C- If we collect and use your exact location .
D- If we personalize your experience depending on where you have been.
E-If we track the websites that exhibit FAME FAN content.. You can use your FAME FAN data to find: Advertisers who have included you in their target audience, to show ads; or demographic and interests data from your account of our advertising partners data; or information FAME FAN deduced about you such as your age, gender, language and interests. We also provide a version of these tools in FAME FAN, if you do not have an account in FAME FAN or if you have not logged into your account. This allows you to view data and settings about the browser or device using these configuration data even if you have not log in, these are independent of any FAME FAN account using that browser or device.
Information shared and disclosed: as we have mentioned above, FAME FAN is designed to widely and instantly spread the information you publicly share through our services. In the very limited situations in which we disclose your personal data private, we do so under your control, as it is necessary to manage our services, or as required by law.
Disclosures controlled by you: we share or disclose personal information with your consent or at your direction, for example, when you authorize a subscriber or celebrity, or a web application from a third party to access your account, or when you request us to share your comments. If you have shared information such as protected direct messages with someone who accesses FAME FAN through a third party service, please note that the information may be shared with third-party services. Depending on your configuration, we also provide personal information to certain third parties to facilitate the offering or provision of services. For example, we share the identifiers of the devices which watch advertisements with the advertisers, to allow them to measure the effectiveness of our advertising business. We also shared device identifiers, together with any interests or other characteristics of a device or the person who uses it, to help our partners to decide whether to show an advertisement on the device or not, or to enable them to carry out marketing activities, trademark analysis, or similar interests-based advertising.
The information we share with these partners does not include your name, email address, phone number or FAME FAN user-name, but some of these agreements link the information we share,to other personal information, if you give your consent beforehand, to the partner.
Service providers: service providers are hired to perform functions and provide services in the United States and other countries. We used many third-party services to manage our services, such as hosting our different blogs, under confidentiality obligation compatible to this Privacy Policy and under any other appropriate confidentiality and security measure, and on condition that third parties use the personal details only on our account and under our instructions. We share your payment information with payment service providers to process payments; prevent, detect and investigate fraud or other prohibited activities; to facilitate the disputes resolution, such as those caused by additional charges or refunds; and for other purposes related to the acceptance of credit cards and debit cards.
Laws, damages and public interest: Notwithstanding any provision on the contrary in this privacy policy or the ways of control that we can offer, we can save, use or disclose your personal information, if we believe it is reasonably necessary to comply with a law, regulation, legal proceeding or authorities request. This is done in order to protect the safety of any person; protect the security or integrity of our platform, which includes avoiding Spam, abuse or malicious intents in our services, or to explain why we have removed content or accounts from our services; to address fraud, security or technical issues; or to protect our rights or property or the rights or property of those who use our services. However, the provisions in this privacy policy are not intended to limit any defense or legal objections you may have against a requirement of information disclosure by a third party, even if it is the requirement of a governmental entity.
Subsidiaries and change of ownership: if we are affected by a bankruptcy, merger, acquisition, reorganization or sale of assets, your personal information may be sold or transferred as part of that transaction. This privacy policy will apply to your personal data in the same way it is transferred to the new entity. We may also disclose your personal data to our subsidiaries to facilitate delivery of our services and the services of our subsidiaries, including advertisement.
Non personal information: we share or disclose non-personal information, such as additional information, including the total number of times people interacted with a message, the number of people who clicked on a particular link, or who voted in a poll through a message (even if only one person did so), the topics that people are discussing about a celebrity or famous person, in a particular location, or reports to advertisers on how many users watched or clicked on their advertisement. Managing our personal information about you controls the personal information you share with us. You can access this data and rectify it, at any time. You can also cancel your account. We also provide tools to object to the data processing and limit or withdraw your consent in the use of the data, which you have provided to FAME FAN. We make possible the portability of data shared with our services and provide easy methods to contact us. Access or correction of your personal data: If you have registered an account at FAME FAN, we provide tools and configuration options in your account to access, correct, delete or modify the personal information you provided and is associated to your account. You can download specific account information, including your messages and comments, by following the instructions provided here.
Elimination: we keep the login data for at least 18 months. If you follow the instructions provided, your account will be deactivated and then deleted. When deactivated: your FAME FAN account, including your account name, user-name and public profile, cease to be visible in FAME, FAMEFAN for IOS and FAME FAN for Android. In case your FAME FAN account is accidentally or improperly deactivated, it will be possible to restore it within 30 days after deactivation. Note that search engines and other third parties may retain copies of your public information, such as your profile information and public posts, even after you have deleted information about our services or your account disabled.
Opposing information precessing and limiting or withdrawing consent: when you are connected to your FAME FAN account, you can manage your privacy settings and other features of the account here, at any time.
Portability: FAME FAN provides a way to download the information you have shared with our services by following the instructions in the App. Additional information or assistance: Do you have any comments or questions about this privacy policy? You can ask by completing the contact form App or sending an email to
If you live in the European Union or any EFTA State, you can privately contact us through the data protection officer. If you want to express a concern about how we use your information (without any prejudice to any other rights it may have), you have the right to do it before the local control authority or main control authority of FAME FAN: in USA.
Children and our services: our services are not for children and you cannot use our services if you are under 13 years old. You have to be old enough to consent to the personal data prossesing in your country (in some countries parents or guardians are allowed to do it on their behalf).
When the laws of your country allow you, you can authorize us to transfer, store and use your data in the United States and any other country in which we operate. In some of the countries to which we transfer personal data, protection laws and data privacy regulations about when government officials can access the data may be different from your country. To get more information about our global operations and data transfer, click here. When we transfer personal data outside the European Union or EFTA States, we ensure an adequate level of protection of the rights of the user based on the adequacy of data protection legislation in the recipient country, contractual obligations on the receiver of data (standard terms may be requested by an information request, as described below) or the principles of privacy shield framework, between the EU and USA. and between Switzerland and the USA. FAME FAN complies with the principles of the privacy shield between the EU and the USA and between Switzerland and the USA, and between Switzerland and the USA. (The "principles") regarding the collection, use, exchange and storage of personal data from the European Union and Switzerland, as described in our privacy shield certification between the EU and the US. UU. certification and privacy shield between Switzerland and the USA. If you have a complaint about the privacy shield, please contact us As part of our participation in the privary shield framework, if you have any dispute with us about our compliance with the principles, we will try to resolve it through our internal proceedings for resolving complaints, alternatively, through the independent body of dispute resolution and under certain conditions through the arbitration process privacy shield. Participants in the privacy shield are subject to the powers of investigation and enforcement of the Federal Trade Commission of the USA. and other authorized statutory entities. In certain circumstances, users may be liable for the transfer of personal data from the EU or Switzerland to third parties outside the EU and Switzerland. To get more information about the privacy shield between the EU and US. UU. Click here. certification and privacy shield between Switzerland and the USA.
Changes in this privacy policy: We can modify this privacy policy periodically. The latest version of the policy will regulate our data processing, and is always available at If we change this policy in any part, at our sole discretion, relevant, we will notify you via an update or an email sent to the email address associated with your account. By continuing to access or using the services after made such changes, you agree to be subject to the Privacy Policy.