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Aramaic
Aramaic ( ; ) is a Northwest Semitic language that originated in the ancient region of Syria and quickly spread to Mesopotamia, the southern Levant, southeastern Anatolia, Eastern Arabia and the Sinai Peninsula, where it has been continually written and spoken in different varieties for over three thousand years.<!--
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Saint Titus
Titus ( ; , "Títos") was an early Christian missionary and church leader, a companion and disciple of Paul the Apostle, mentioned in several of the Pauline epistles including the Epistle to Titus. He is believed to be a Gentile converted to Christianity by Paul and, according to tradition, he was consecrated as Bishop of the Island of Crete.
Titus brought a fundraising letter from Paul to Corinth, to collect for the poor in Jerusalem. According to Jerome, Titus was the amanuensis of this epistle (2 Corinthians). Later, on Crete, Titus appointed presbyters (elders) in every city and remained there into his old age, dying in Gortyna.
Life.
Titus was a Greek, who may have studied Greek philosophy and poetry in his early years. He seems to have been converted by Paul, whereupon he served as Paul's secretary and interpreter. In the year 48 or 49 CE, Titus accompanied Paul to the council held at Jerusalem, on the subject of the Mosaic rites.
In the fall of 55 or 56 CE, Paul, as he himself departed from Asia, sent Titus from Ephesus to Corinth, with full commission to remedy the fallout precipitated by Timothy's delivery of 1 Corinthians and Paul's "Painful Visit", particularly a significant personal offense and challenge to Paul's authority by one unnamed individual. During this journey, Titus served as the courier for what is commonly known as the "Severe Letter", a Pauline missive that has been lost but is referred to in .
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After success on this mission, Titus journeyed north and met Paul in Macedonia. There the apostle, overjoyed by Titus' success, wrote 2 Corinthians. Titus then returned to Corinth with a larger entourage, carrying 2 Corinthians with him. Paul joined Titus in Corinth later. From Corinth, Paul then sent Titus to organize the collections of alms for the Christians at Jerusalem. Titus was therefore a troubleshooter, peacemaker, ecclesiastical administrator, and missionary.
Early church tradition holds that Paul, after his release from his first imprisonment in Rome, stopped at the island of Crete to preach. Due to the needs of other churches, requiring his presence elsewhere, he ordained his disciple Titus as bishop of that island, and left him to finish the work he had started. John Chrysostom says that this is an indication of the esteem Paul held for Titus.
Paul summoned Titus from Crete to join him at Nicopolis in Epirus. Later, Titus traveled to Dalmatia. The New Testament does not record his death.
Identification with Timothy.
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It has been argued that the name "Titus" in 2 Corinthians and Galatians was an informal name used by Timothy, a view circumstantially supported by the fact that both are said to be long-term close companions of Paul, even though they never appear together in these books. The theory proposes that a number of passages (1 Corinthians 4:17, 16.10; 2 Corinthians 2:13, 7:6, 13–14, 12:18; and Acts 19.22) refer to the same journey of a single individual, variously called Titus and Timothy.
This theory is complicated by various details from the Pauline epistles. In , Paul tells Timothy that Titus has departed to Dalmatia.
Additionally, Timothy is circumcised in , but states that Paul did not compel Titus to be circumcised. This would indicate that they are different men, although some scholars interpret as indicating that Paul did in fact circumcise Titus, drawing on the fourth-century commentaries of Gaius Marius Victorinus.
Veneration.
He was venerated as a saint earlier than 261 CE. The feast day of Titus was not included in the Tridentine calendar. When added in 1854, it was assigned to 6 February. In 1969, the Catholic Church assigned the feast to 26 January so as to celebrate the two disciples of Paul, Titus and Timothy, the day after the feast of the Conversion of St. Paul. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America celebrates these two, together with Silas, on the same date while he is honored on the calendars of the Church of England and Episcopal Church (with Timothy) on 26 January.
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The Eastern Orthodox Church commemorates Titus on 25 August and on 4 January. His relics, now consisting of only his skull, are venerated in the Church of St. Titus, Heraklion, Crete, to which it was returned in 1966<ref name="The Orthodox Messenger, v. 8(7/8), July/Aug 1997"></ref> after being removed to Venice during the period of Ottoman Crete (1667–1898).
Titus is the patron saint of the United States Army Chaplain Corps. The Corps has established the Order of Titus Award, described by the Department of Defense:
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Actinide
The actinide () or actinoid () series encompasses at least the 14 metallic chemical elements in the 5f series, with atomic numbers from 89 to 102, actinium through nobelium. Number 103, lawrencium, is also generally included despite being part of the 6d transition series. The actinide series derives its name from the first element in the series, actinium. The informal chemical symbol An is used in general discussions of actinide chemistry to refer to any actinide.
The 1985 IUPAC "Red Book" recommends that "actinoid" be used rather than "actinide", since the suffix "-ide" normally indicates a negative ion. However, owing to widespread current use, "actinide" is still allowed.
Actinium through nobelium are f-block elements, while lawrencium is a d-block element and a transition metal. The series mostly corresponds to the filling of the 5f electron shell, although as isolated atoms in the ground state many have anomalous configurations involving the filling of the 6d shell due to interelectronic repulsion. In comparison with the lanthanides, also mostly f-block elements, the actinides show much more variable valence. They all have very large atomic and ionic radii and exhibit an unusually large range of physical properties. While actinium and the late actinides (from curium onwards) behave similarly to the lanthanides, the elements thorium, protactinium, and uranium are much more similar to transition metals in their chemistry, with neptunium, plutonium, and americium occupying an intermediate position.
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All actinides are radioactive and release energy upon radioactive decay; naturally occurring uranium and thorium, and synthetically produced plutonium are the most abundant actinides on Earth. These have been used in nuclear reactors, and uranium and plutonium are critical elements of nuclear weapons. Uranium and thorium also have diverse current or historical uses, and americium is used in the ionization chambers of most modern smoke detectors.
Due to their long half-lives, only thorium and uranium are found on Earth and astrophysically in substantial quantities. The radioactive decay of uranium produces transient amounts of actinium and protactinium, and atoms of neptunium and plutonium are occasionally produced from transmutation reactions in uranium ores. The other actinides are purely synthetic elements. Nuclear weapons tests have released at least six actinides heavier than plutonium into the environment; analysis of debris from the 1952 first test of a hydrogen bomb showed the presence of americium, curium, berkelium, californium, and the discovery of einsteinium and fermium.
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In presentations of the periodic table, the f-block elements are customarily shown as two additional rows below the main body of the table. This convention is entirely a matter of aesthetics and formatting practicality; a rarely used wide-formatted periodic table inserts the 4f and 5f series in their proper places, as parts of the table's sixth and seventh rows (periods).
Actinides
Discovery, isolation and synthesis.
Like the lanthanides, the actinides form a family of elements with similar properties. Within the actinides, there are two overlapping groups: transuranium elements, which follow uranium in the periodic table; and transplutonium elements, which follow plutonium. Compared to the lanthanides, which (except for promethium) are found in nature in appreciable quantities, most actinides are rare. Most do not occur in nature, and of those that do, only thorium and uranium do so in more than trace quantities. The most abundant or easily synthesized actinides are uranium and thorium, followed by plutonium, americium, actinium, protactinium, neptunium, and curium.
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The existence of transuranium elements was suggested in 1934 by Enrico Fermi, based on his experiments. However, even though four actinides were known by that time, it was not yet understood that they formed a family similar to lanthanides. The prevailing view that dominated early research into transuranics was that they were regular elements in the 7th period, with thorium, protactinium and uranium corresponding to 6th-period hafnium, tantalum and tungsten, respectively. Synthesis of transuranics gradually undermined this point of view. By 1944, an observation that curium failed to exhibit oxidation states above 4 (whereas its supposed 6th period homolog, platinum, can reach oxidation state of 6) prompted Glenn Seaborg to formulate an "actinide hypothesis". Studies of known actinides and discoveries of further transuranic elements provided more data in support of this position, but the phrase "actinide hypothesis" (the implication being that a "hypothesis" is something that has not been decisively proven) remained in active use by scientists through the late 1950s.
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At present, there are two major methods of producing isotopes of transplutonium elements: (1) irradiation of the lighter elements with neutrons; (2) irradiation with accelerated charged particles. The first method is more important for applications, as only neutron irradiation using nuclear reactors allows the production of sizeable amounts of synthetic actinides; however, it is limited to relatively light elements. The advantage of the second method is that elements heavier than plutonium, as well as neutron-deficient isotopes, can be obtained, which are not formed during neutron irradiation.
In 1962–1966, there were attempts in the United States to produce transplutonium isotopes using a series of six underground nuclear explosions. Small samples of rock were extracted from the blast area immediately after the test to study the explosion products, but no isotopes with mass number greater than 257 could be detected, despite predictions that such isotopes would have relatively long half-lives of α-decay. This non-observation was attributed to spontaneous fission owing to the large speed of the products and to other decay channels, such as neutron emission and nuclear fission.
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From actinium to uranium.
Uranium and thorium were the first actinides discovered. Uranium was identified in 1789 by the German chemist Martin Heinrich Klaproth in pitchblende ore. He named it after the planet Uranus, which had been discovered eight years earlier. Klaproth was able to precipitate a yellow compound (likely sodium diuranate) by dissolving pitchblende in nitric acid and neutralizing the solution with sodium hydroxide. He then reduced the obtained yellow powder with charcoal, and extracted a black substance that he mistook for metal. Sixty years later, the French scientist Eugène-Melchior Péligot identified it as uranium oxide. He also isolated the first sample of uranium metal by heating uranium tetrachloride with metallic potassium. The atomic mass of uranium was then calculated as 120, but Dmitri Mendeleev in 1872 corrected it to 240 using his periodicity laws. This value was confirmed experimentally in 1882 by K. Zimmerman.
Thorium oxide was discovered by Friedrich Wöhler in the mineral thorianite, which was found in Norway (1827). Jöns Jacob Berzelius characterized this material in more detail in 1828. By reduction of thorium tetrachloride with potassium, he isolated the metal and named it thorium after the Norse god of thunder and lightning Thor. The same isolation method was later used by Péligot for uranium.
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Actinium was discovered in 1899 by André-Louis Debierne, an assistant of Marie Curie, in the pitchblende waste left after removal of radium and polonium. He described the substance (in 1899) as similar to titanium and (in 1900) as similar to thorium. The discovery of actinium by Debierne was however questioned in 1971 and 2000, arguing that Debierne's publications in 1904 contradicted his earlier work of 1899–1900. This view instead credits the 1902 work of Friedrich Oskar Giesel, who discovered a radioactive element named "emanium" that behaved similarly to lanthanum. The name actinium comes from the , meaning beam or ray. This metal was discovered not by its own radiation but by the radiation of the daughter products. Owing to the close similarity of actinium and lanthanum and low abundance, pure actinium could only be produced in 1950. The term actinide was probably introduced by Victor Goldschmidt in 1937.
Protactinium was possibly isolated in 1900 by William Crookes. It was first identified in 1913, when Kasimir Fajans and Oswald Helmuth Göhring encountered the short-lived isotope 234mPa (half-life 1.17 minutes) during their studies of the 238U decay chain. They named the new element "brevium" (from Latin "brevis" meaning brief); the name was changed to "protoactinium" (from Greek πρῶτος + ἀκτίς meaning "first beam element") in 1918 when two groups of scientists, led by the Austrian Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn of Germany and Frederick Soddy and John Arnold Cranston of Great Britain, independently discovered the much longer-lived 231Pa. The name was shortened to "protactinium" in 1949. This element was little characterized until 1960, when Alfred Maddock and his co-workers in the U.K. isolated 130 grams of protactinium from 60 tonnes of waste left after extraction of uranium from its ore.
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Neptunium and above.
Neptunium (named for the planet Neptune, the next planet out from Uranus, after which uranium was named) was discovered by Edwin McMillan and Philip H. Abelson in 1940 in Berkeley, California. They produced the 239Np isotope (half-life 2.4 days) by bombarding uranium with slow neutrons. It was the first transuranium element produced synthetically.
Transuranium elements do not occur in sizeable quantities in nature and are commonly synthesized via nuclear reactions conducted with nuclear reactors. For example, under irradiation with reactor neutrons, uranium-238 partially converts to plutonium-239:
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Arthur Miller
Arthur Asher Miller (October 17, 1915 – February 10, 2005) was an American playwright, essayist and screenwriter in the 20th-century American theater. Among his most popular plays are "All My Sons" (1947), "Death of a Salesman" (1949), "The Crucible" (1953), and "A View from the Bridge" (1955). He wrote several screenplays, including "The Misfits" (1961). The drama "Death of a Salesman" is considered one of the best American plays of the 20th century.
Miller was often in the public eye, particularly during the late 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s. During this time, he received a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and married Marilyn Monroe. In 1980, he received the St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates. He received the Praemium Imperiale prize in 2001, the Prince of Asturias Award in 2002, and the Jerusalem Prize in 2003, and the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize in 1999.
Early life and education.
Miller was born in the Harlem area of Manhattan Island, the second of three children of Augusta (Barnett) and Isidore Miller. He was born into a Jewish family of Polish-Jewish descent. His father was born in Radomyśl Wielki, Galicia (then part of Austria-Hungary, now Poland), and his mother was a native of New York whose parents also arrived from that town. Isidore owned a women's clothing manufacturing business employing 400 people. He became a well respected man in the community. The family, including Miller's younger sister Joan Copeland, lived on West 110th Street in Manhattan, owned a summer house in Far Rockaway, Queens, and employed a chauffeur. In the Wall Street crash of 1929, the family lost almost everything and moved to Gravesend, Brooklyn. According to Peter Applebome, they moved to Midwood.
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As a teenager, Miller delivered bread every morning before school to help the family. Miller later published an account of his early years under the title "A Boy Grew in Brooklyn". After graduating in 1932 from Abraham Lincoln High School, he worked at several menial jobs to pay for his college tuition at the University of Michigan. After graduation (), he worked as a psychiatric aide and copywriter before accepting faculty posts at New York University and University of New Hampshire. On May 1, 1935, he joined the League of American Writers (1935–1943), whose members included Alexander Trachtenberg of International Publishers, Franklin Folsom, Louis Untermeyer, I. F. Stone, Myra Page, Millen Brand, Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett. Members were largely either Communist Party members or fellow travelers.
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Career.
1940–1949: Early career.
In 1940, Miller married Mary Grace Slattery. The couple had two children, Jane (born September 7, 1944) and Robert (May 31, 1947 – March 6, 2022). Miller was exempted from military service during World War II because of a high school football injury to his left kneecap. In 1944 Miller's first play was produced: "The Man Who Had All the Luck" won the Theatre Guild's National Award. The play closed after four performances with disastrous reviews.
In 1947, Miller's play "All My Sons", the writing of which had commenced in 1941, was a success on Broadway (earning him his first Tony Award, for Best Author) and his reputation as a playwright was established. Years later, in a 1994 interview with Ron Rifkin, Miller said that most contemporary critics regarded "All My Sons" as "a very depressing play in a time of great optimism" and that positive reviews from Brooks Atkinson of "The New York Times" had saved it from failure.
In 1948, Miller built a small studio in Roxbury, Connecticut. There, in less than a day, he wrote Act I of "Death of a Salesman". Within six weeks, he completed the rest of the play, one of the classics of world theater. "Death of a Salesman" premiered on Broadway on February 10, 1949, at the Morosco Theatre, directed by Elia Kazan, and starring Lee J. Cobb as Willy Loman, Mildred Dunnock as Linda, Arthur Kennedy as Biff, and Cameron Mitchell as Happy. The play was commercially successful and critically acclaimed, winning a Tony Award for Best Author, the New York Drama Circle Critics' Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It was the first play to win all three of these major awards. The play was performed 742 times.
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In 1949, Miller exchanged letters with Eugene O'Neill regarding Miller's production of "All My Sons". O'Neill had sent Miller a congratulatory telegram; in response, he wrote a letter that consisted of a few paragraphs detailing his gratitude for the telegram, apologizing for not responding earlier, and inviting Eugene to the opening of "Death of a Salesman". O'Neill replied, accepting the apology, but declining the invitation, explaining that his Parkinson's disease made it difficult to travel. He ended the letter with an invitation to Boston, a trip that never occurred.
1950–1963: Critical years and HUAC controversy.
In 1952, Elia Kazan appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Kazan named eight members of the Group Theatre, including Clifford Odets, Paula Strasberg, Lillian Hellman, J. Edward Bromberg, and John Garfield, who in recent years had been fellow members of the Communist Party. Miller and Kazan were close friends throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, but after Kazan's testimony to the HUAC, the pair's friendship ended. After speaking with Kazan about his testimony, Miller traveled to Salem, Massachusetts, to research the witch trials of 1692. He and Kazan did not speak to each other for the next ten years. Kazan later defended his own actions through his film "On the Waterfront", in which a dockworker heroically testifies against a corrupt union boss. Miller would retaliate against Kazan's work by writing "A View from the Bridge", a play where a longshoreman outs his co-workers motivated only by jealousy and greed. He sent a copy of the initial script to Kazan and when the director asked in jest to direct the movie, Miller replied "I only sent you the script to let you know what I think of stool-pigeons."
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In "The Crucible", which was first performed at the Martin Beck Theatre on Broadway on January 22, 1953, Miller likened the situation with the House Un-American Activities Committee to the witch hunt in Salem in 1692. Though widely considered only somewhat successful at the time of its release, "The Crucible" is Miller's most frequently produced work throughout the world. It was adapted into an opera by Robert Ward in 1961. Earlier in 1955, a one-act version of Miller's verse drama, titled "A View from the Bridge", opened on Broadway in a joint bill with one of Miller's lesser-known plays, "A Memory of Two Mondays". The following year, Miller revised "A View from the Bridge" as a two-act prose drama, which Peter Brook directed in London. A French-Italian co-production "Vu du pont", based on the play, was released in 1962.
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Miller's experience with the HUAC affected him throughout his life. In the late 1970s, he joined other celebrities (including William Styron and Mike Nichols) who were brought together by the journalist Joan Barthel. Barthel's coverage of the highly publicized Barbara Gibbons murder case helped raise bail for Gibbons' son Peter Reilly, who had been convicted of his mother's murder based on what many felt was a coerced confession and little other evidence. Barthel documented the case in her book "A Death in Canaan", which was made as a television film of the same name and broadcast in 1978. "City Confidential", an A&E Network series, produced an episode about the murder, postulating that part of the reason Miller took such an active interest (including supporting Reilly's defense and using his own celebrity to bring attention to Reilly's plight) was because he had felt similarly persecuted in his run-ins with the HUAC. He sympathized with Reilly, whom he firmly believed to be innocent and to have been railroaded by the Connecticut State Police and the Attorney General who had initially prosecuted the case.
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Miller began work on writing the screenplay for "The Misfits" in 1960, directed by John Huston and starring Monroe. It was during the filming that Miller's and Monroe's relationship hit difficulties, and he later said that the filming was one of the lowest points in his life. Monroe was taking drugs to help her sleep and other drugs to help her wake up, arriving on the set late, and having trouble remembering her lines. Huston was unaware that Miller and Monroe were having problems in their private life. He recalled later, "I was impertinent enough to say to Arthur that to allow her to take drugs of any kind was criminal and utterly irresponsible. Shortly after that I realized that she wouldn't listen to Arthur at all; he had no say over her actions."
Shortly before the film's premiere in 1961, Miller and Monroe divorced after five years of marriage. Nineteen months later, on August 5, 1962, Monroe died of a likely drug overdose. Huston, who had also directed her in her first major role in "The Asphalt Jungle" in 1950, and who had seen her rise to stardom, put the blame for her death on her doctors as opposed to the stresses of being a star: "The girl was an addict of sleeping pills and she was made so by the God-damn doctors. It had nothing to do with the Hollywood set-up."
1964–2004: Later career.
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In 1964, "After the Fall" was produced, and is said to be a deeply personal view of Miller's experiences during his marriage to Monroe. It reunited Miller with his former friend Kazan; they collaborated on the script and direction. It opened on January 23, 1964, at the ANTA Theatre in Washington Square Park amid a flurry of publicity and outrage at putting a Monroe-like character, Maggie, on stage. Robert Brustein, in a review in the "New Republic", called "After the Fall" "a three and one half hour breach of taste, a confessional autobiography of embarrassing explicitness ... There is a misogynistic strain in the play which the author does not seem to recognize. ... He has created a shameless piece of tabloid gossip, an act of exhibitionism which makes us all voyeurs ... a wretched piece of dramatic writing." That year, Miller produced "Incident at Vichy". In 1965, he was elected the first American president of PEN International, a position which he held for four years. A year later, he organized the 1966 PEN congress in New York City. He also wrote the penetrating family drama "The Price", produced in 1968. It was his most successful play since "Death of a Salesman".
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In 1968, Miller attended the Democratic National Convention as a delegate for Eugene McCarthy. In 1969, Miller's works were banned in the Soviet Union after he campaigned for the freedom of dissident writers. Throughout the 1970s, he spent much of his time experimenting with the theatre, producing one-act plays such as "Fame" and "The Reason Why", and traveling with his wife, producing "In the Country" and "Chinese Encounters" with her. Both his 1972 comedy "The Creation of the World and Other Business" and its musical adaptation, "Up from Paradise", were critical and commercial failures.
Miller was an unusually articulate commentator on his own work. In 1978, he published a collection of his "Theater Essays", edited by Robert A. Martin and with a foreword by Miller. Highlights of the collection included Miller's introduction to his "Collected Plays", his reflections on the theory of tragedy, comments on the McCarthy Era, and pieces arguing for a publicly supported theater. Reviewing this collection in the "Chicago Tribune," Studs Terkel remarked, "In reading [the "Theater Essays"] ... you are exhilaratingly aware of a social critic, as well as a playwright, who knows what he's talking about."
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In 1983, Miller traveled to China to produce and direct "Death of a Salesman" at the People's Art Theatre in Beijing. It was a success in China and in 1984, "Salesman in Beijing", a book about Miller's experiences in Beijing, was published. Around the same time, "Death of a Salesman" was adapted into a television film starring Dustin Hoffman as Willy Loman. The film was broadcast on CBS, and garnered an audience viewership of 25 million. In late 1987, Miller's autobiographical work, "Timebends", was published. Before it was published, it was well known that Miller would not talk about Monroe in interviews; however, in the book, he wrote extensively in detail about his experiences with Monroe.
During the early 1990s, Miller wrote three new plays: "The Ride Down Mt. Morgan" (1991), "The Last Yankee" (1992), and "Broken Glass" (1994). In 1996, a film adaptation of "The Crucible" starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Scofield, Bruce Davison and Winona Ryder was released. Miller spent much of 1996 working on the screenplay.
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"Mr. Peters' Connections" was staged Off-Broadway in 1998, and "Death of a Salesman" was revived on Broadway in 1999 to celebrate its 50th anniversary. The 1999 revival ran for 274 performances at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre, starring Brian Dennehy as Willy Loman. Once again, it was a large critical success, winning a Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play.
In 1993, Miller received the National Medal of Arts. He was honored with the PEN/Laura Pels Theater Award for a Master American Dramatist in 1998. In 2001, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected him for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities. His lecture, "On Politics and the Art of Acting", analyzed political events (including the U.S. presidential election of 2000)
in terms of the "arts of performance". It drew attacks from some conservatives such as Jay Nordlinger, who called it "a disgrace"; and George Will, who argued that Miller was not a legitimate "scholar".
In October 1999, Miller received The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, given annually to "a man or woman who has made an outstanding contribution to the beauty of the world and to mankind's enjoyment and understanding of life". Additionally in 1999, San Jose State University honored Miller with the John Steinbeck "In the Souls of the People" Award, which is given to those who capture "Steinbeck's empathy, commitment to democratic values, and belief in the dignity of people who by circumstance are pushed to the fringes." In 2001, he received the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. On May 1, 2002, he received Spain's Principe de Asturias Prize for Literature as "the undisputed master of modern drama". Later that year, Ingeborg Morath died of lymphatic cancer at the age of 78. The following year, Miller won the Jerusalem Prize.
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In December 2004, 89-year-old Miller announced that he had been in love with 34-year-old minimalist painter Agnes Barley and had been living with her at his Connecticut farm since 2002, and that they intended to marry.
Miller's final play, "Finishing the Picture", opened at the Goodman Theatre, Chicago, in the fall of 2004, with one character said to be based on Barley. It was reportedly based on his experience during the filming of "The Misfits", though Miller insisted the play was a work of fiction with independent characters that were no more than composite shadows of history.
Personal life.
Marriages and family.
In June 1956, Miller left his first wife, Mary Slattery, whom he had married in 1940, and wed film star Marilyn Monroe. They met in 1951, had a brief affair, and remained in contact. Monroe had just turned 30 when they married; she never had a real family of her own and was eager to join the family of her new husband.
Monroe began to reconsider her career and the fact that trying to manage it made her feel helpless. She admitted to Miller, "I hate Hollywood. I don't want it any more. I want to live quietly in the country and just be there when you need me. I can't fight for myself any more." Monroe converted to Judaism to "express her loyalty and get close to both Miller and his parents", writes biographer Jeffrey Meyers. She told her close friend, Susan Strasberg: "I can identify with the Jews. Everybody's always out to get them, no matter what they do, like me." Soon after Monroe converted, Egypt banned all of her movies. Away from Hollywood and the culture of celebrity, Monroe's life became more normal; she began cooking, keeping house, and giving Miller more attention and affection than he had been used to.
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Later that year, Miller was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and Monroe accompanied him. In her personal notes, she wrote about her worries during this period:
During the filming of the 1961 film "The Misfits", which Miller wrote the script for, Miller and Monroe's marriage dissolved. Monroe obtained a "Mexican divorce" from Miller in January 1961.
In February 1962, Miller married photographer Inge Morath, who had worked as a photographer documenting the production of "The Misfits". The first of their two children, Rebecca, was born September 15, 1962. Their son Daniel was born with Down syndrome in November 1966. Against his wife's wishes, Miller had him institutionalized, first at a home for infants in New York City, then at the Southbury Training School in Connecticut. Though Morath visited Daniel often, Miller never visited him at the school and rarely spoke of him; Daniel left Southbury at the age of 17 and gradually went from living in a group home to living in an apartment with occasional visits by a social worker. Miller and Inge remained together until her death in 2002. Miller's son-in-law, actor Daniel Day-Lewis, is said to have visited Daniel frequently and to have persuaded Miller to meet with him. At one point, Miller answered a question about his son by stating, "Well, he knows I’m a person, and he knows my name, but he doesn’t understand what it means to be a son.” When Inge died, Miller stated that they had only had one child together; Daniel did not attend her funeral. When Miller died, Daniel was named as an heir along with his three other children.
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Death.
Miller died on the evening of February 10, 2005 (the 56th anniversary of the Broadway debut of "Death of a Salesman") at age 89 of bladder cancer and heart failure, at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut. He had been in hospice care at his sister's apartment in New York since his release from hospital the previous month. He was surrounded by his companion (the painter Agnes Barley), family, and friends. His body was interred at Roxbury Center Cemetery in Roxbury. Within hours of her father's death, Rebecca Miller, who had been consistently opposed to the relationship with Barley, ordered her to vacate the home she shared with Arthur.
Legacy.
Miller's writing career spanned over seven decades, and at the time of his death, he was considered one of the 20th century's greatest dramatists. After his death, many respected actors, directors, and producers paid tribute to him, some calling him the last great practitioner of the American stage, and Broadway theatres darkened their lights in a show of respect.
Miller's alma mater, the University of Michigan, opened the Arthur Miller Theatre in March 2007. Per his express wish, it is the only theater in the world that bears his name.
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Miller's letters, notes, drafts and other papers are housed at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Miller is also a member of the American Theater Hall of Fame. He was inducted in 1979. In 1993, he received the Four Freedoms Award for Freedom of Speech. In 2017, his daughter, Rebecca Miller, a writer and filmmaker, completed a documentary about her father's life, "". Minor planet 3769 Arthurmiller is named after him. In the 2022 Netflix film "Blonde", Miller was portrayed by Adrien Brody.
Foundation.
The Arthur Miller Foundation was founded to honor the legacy of Miller and the New York City Public School education. Its mission is "Promoting increased access and equity to theater arts education in our schools and increasing the number of students receiving theater arts education as an integral part of their academic curriculum." Its other initiatives include certification of new theater teachers and their placement in public schools, increasing the number of theater teachers in the system from the current estimate of 180 teachers in 1800 schools, supporting professional development of all certified theater teachers, and providing teaching artists, cultural partners, physical spaces, and theater ticket allocations for students. The foundation's primary purpose is to provide arts education in the New York City school system. Its current chancellor is Carmen Farina, a prominent proponent of the Common Core State Standards Initiative. The Master Arts Council includes Alec Baldwin, Ellen Barkin, Bradley Cooper, Dustin Hoffman, Scarlett Johansson, Tony Kushner, Julianne Moore, Michael Moore, Liam Neeson, David O. Russell, and Liev Schreiber. Miller's son-in-law, Daniel Day-Lewis, has served on the current board of directors since 2016.
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The foundation celebrated Miller's 100th birthday with a one-night performance of his seminal works in November 2015. The Arthur Miller Foundation currently supports a pilot program in theater and film at the public school Quest to Learn, in partnership with the Institute of Play. The model is being used as an in-school elective theater class and lab. Its objective is to create a sustainable theater education model to disseminate to teachers at professional development workshops.
Archive.
Miller donated thirteen boxes of his earliest manuscripts to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin in 1961 and 1962. This collection included the original handwritten notebooks and early typed drafts for "Death of a Salesman", "The Crucible", "All My Sons", and other works. In January 2018, the Ransom Center announced the acquisition of the remainder of the Miller archive, totaling over 200 boxes. The full archive opened in November 2019.
Literary and public criticism.
Christopher Bigsby wrote "Arthur Miller: The Definitive Biography" based on boxes of papers Miller made available to him before his death in 2005. The book was published in November 2008, and is reported to reveal unpublished works in which Miller "bitterly attack[ed] the injustices of American racism long before it was taken up by the civil rights movement". In his book "Trinity of Passion", author Alan M. Wald conjectures that Miller was "a member of a writer's unit of the Communist Party around 1946", using the pseudonym Matt Wayne, and editing a drama column in the magazine "The New Masses".
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In 1999, the writer Christopher Hitchens attacked Miller for comparing the Monica Lewinsky investigation to the Salem witch hunt. Miller had asserted a parallel between the examination of physical evidence on Lewinsky's dress and the examinations of women's bodies for signs of the "Devil's Marks" in Salem. Hitchens scathingly disputed the parallel. In his memoir, "Hitch-22", Hitchens bitterly noted that Miller, despite his prominence as a left-wing intellectual, had failed to support author Salman Rushdie during the Iranian fatwa involving "The Satanic Verses".
Further reading.
Critical articles
External links.
Organizations
Archive
Databases
Websites
Interviews
Obituaries
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Anton Diabelli
Anton (or Antonio) Diabelli (5 September 17818 April 1858) was an Austrian music publisher, editor and composer. Best known in his time as a publisher, he is most familiar today as the composer of the waltz on which Ludwig van Beethoven wrote his set of thirty-three "Diabelli Variations".
Early life.
Diabelli was born in Mattsee in Austria, then in the Archbishopric of Salzburg. A musical child, he sang in the boys' choir at Salzburg Cathedral where he is believed to have taken music lessons with Michael Haydn. By the age of 19 Diabelli had already composed several important compositions including six masses.
Diabelli was trained to enter the priesthood and in 1800 joined the monastery at Raitenhaslach, Bavaria. He remained there until 1803, when Bavaria closed all its monasteries.
Career.
In 1803 Diabelli moved to Vienna and began teaching piano and guitar and found work as a proofreader for a music publisher. During this period he learned the music publishing business while continuing to compose. In 1809 he composed his comic opera, "Adam in der Klemme." In 1817 he started a music publishing business and in 1818 he formed a partnership with Pietro Cappi to create the music publishing firm of Cappi & Diabelli.
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Cappi & Diabelli became well known by arranging popular pieces so they could be played by amateurs at home. A master of promotion, Diabelli selected widely-accessible music such as famous opera tune arrangements, dance music and popular new comic theatre songs.
The firm soon established a reputation in more serious music circles by championing the works of Franz Schubert. Diabelli recognized the composer's potential and became the first to publish Schubert's work with "Erlkönig" in 1821. Diabelli's firm continued to publish Schubert's work until 1823 when an argument between Cappi and Schubert terminated their business. The following year Diabelli and Cappi parted ways, Diabelli launching a new publishing house, Diabelli & Co., in 1824. Following Schubert's early death in 1828 Diabelli purchased a large portion of the composer's massive musical estate from Schubert's brother Ferdinand. As Schubert had hundreds of unpublished works, Diabelli's firm was able to publish "new" Schubert works for more than 30 years after the composer's death.
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Diabelli's publishing house expanded throughout his life, before he retired in 1851, leaving it under the control of Carl Anton Spina. When Diabelli died in 1858 Spina changed the firm's name to “C.A. Spina Vormals Diabelli” and published much music by Johann Strauss II and Josef Strauss. In 1872 the firm was taken over by Friedrich Schreiber and in 1876 it merged with the firm of August Cranz who bought the company in 1879 and ran it under his name.
Diabelli died in Vienna at the age of 76.
Compositions.
Diabelli composed a number of well-known Classical works, including an operetta called "Adam in der Klemme", several masses, songs and numerous piano and classical guitar pieces. Numerically his guitar pieces form the largest part of his works. His pieces for piano four hands are popular.
Diabelli's composition "Pleasures of Youth: Six Sonatinas" is a collection of six sonatinas depicting a struggle between unknown opposing forces. This is suggested by the sharp and frequent change in dynamics from "forte" to "piano". When "forte" is indicated the pianist is meant to evoke a sense of wickedness, thus depicting the antagonist. In contrast the markings of "piano" represent the protagonist.
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Diabelli Variations.
The composition for which Diabelli is now best known was actually written as part of an adventuring story. In 1819, as a promotional idea, he decided to try to publish a volume of variations on a "patriotic" waltz he had penned expressly for this purpose, with one variation by every important Austrian composer living at the time, as well as several significant non-Austrians. The combined contributions would be published in an anthology called "Vaterländischer Künstlerverein". Fifty-one composers responded with pieces, including Beethoven, Schubert, Archduke Rudolph of Austria, Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart (jun.), Moritz, Prince of Dietrichstein, Heinrich Eduard Josef Baron von Lannoy, Ignaz Franz Baron von Mosel, Carl Czerny, Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Ignaz Moscheles, Simon Sechter, and the eight-year-old Franz Liszt (although it seems Liszt was not invited personally, but his teacher Czerny arranged for him to be involved). Czerny was also enlisted to write a coda. Beethoven, however, instead of providing just one variation, provided 33, and his formed Part I of "Vaterländischer Künstlerverein". They constitute what is generally regarded as one of the greatest of Beethoven's piano pieces and as the greatest set of variations of their time, and are generally known simply as the "Diabelli Variations", Op. 120. The other 50 variations were published as Part II of "Vaterländischer Künstlerverein".
Cultural references.
A sonatina of Diabelli's, presumably Sonatina in F major, Op. 168, No. 1 (I: Moderato cantabile), provides the title and a motif for the French novella "Moderato Cantabile" by Marguerite Duras.
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Anita Hill
Anita Faye Hill (born July 30, 1956) is an American lawyer, educator and author. She is a professor of social policy, law, and women's studies at Brandeis University and a faculty member of the university's Heller School for Social Policy and Management. She became a national figure in 1991 when she accused U.S. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, her supervisor at the United States Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, of sexual harassment.
Early life and education.
Anita Hill was born to a family of farmers in Lone Tree, Oklahoma, the youngest of Albert and Erma Hill's 13 children. Her family came from Arkansas, where her maternal grandfather Henry Eliot and all of her great-grandparents had been born into slavery. Hill was raised in the Baptist faith.
Hill graduated from Morris High School, Oklahoma, in 1973, where she was class valedictorian. Hill received her bachelor's degree in psychology in 1977 from Oklahoma State University. In 1980, she earned her Juris Doctor from Yale Law School in New Haven, Connecticut.
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Early career.
Hill was admitted to the District of Columbia Bar in 1980 and began her law career as an associate with the Washington, D.C. firm of Wald, Harkrader & Ross. In 1981, she became an attorney-adviser to Clarence Thomas, who was then the Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights. When Thomas became chairman of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in 1982, Hill served as his assistant, leaving the job in 1983.
Hill then became an assistant professor at the Evangelical Christian O. W. Coburn School of Law at Oral Roberts University where she taught from 1983 to 1986. In 1986, she joined the faculty at the University of Oklahoma College of Law where she taught commercial law and contracts.
In 1989, she became the first tenured African American professor at OU. She left the university in 1996 due to ongoing calls for her resignation that began after her 1991 testimony. In 1998, she became a visiting scholar at Brandeis University and, in 2015, a university professor at the school.
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Allegations of sexual harassment against Clarence Thomas.
In 1991, President George H. W. Bush nominated Clarence Thomas, a federal circuit judge, to succeed retiring Associate Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. Senate hearings on his confirmation were initially completed with Thomas's good character being presented as a primary qualification for the high court because he had been a judge for just slightly more than one year. There had been little organized opposition to Thomas's nomination, and his confirmation seemed assured until a report of a private interview of Hill by the FBI was leaked to the press. The hearings were then reopened, and Hill was called to testify publicly.
Hill said on October 11, 1991, in televised hearings that Thomas had sexually harassed her while he was her supervisor at the Department of Education and the EEOC. When questioned on why she followed Thomas to the second job after he had already allegedly harassed her, she said working in a reputable position within the civil rights field had been her ambition. The position was appealing enough to keep her from going back into private practice with her previous firm. She said that she realized only later in her life that the choice had represented poor judgment on her part, but that "at that time, it appeared that the sexual overtures... had ended."
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According to Hill, Thomas asked her out socially many times during her two years of employment as his assistant, and after she declined his requests, he used work situations to discuss sexual subjects and push advances. "He spoke about... such matters as women having sex with animals and films showing group sex or rape scenes," she said, adding that on several occasions Thomas graphically described "his own sexual prowess" and the details of his anatomy. Hill also recounted an instance in which Thomas examined a can of Coke on his desk and asked, "Who has put pubic hair on my Coke?" Thomas said he had considered Hill a friend whom he had helped at every turn, so when accusations of harassment came from her, they were particularly hurtful and he said, "I lost the belief that if I did my best, all would work out."
Four female witnesses waited in the wings to support Hill's credibility, but they were not called, due to what the "Los Angeles Times" described as a private, compromise deal between Republicans and the Senate Judiciary Committee chair, Democrat Joe Biden.
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Hill agreed to take a polygraph test. While senators and other authorities observed that polygraph results cannot be relied upon and are inadmissible in courts, Hill's results did support her statements. Thomas did not take a polygraph test. He made a vehement and complete denial, saying that he was being subjected to a "high-tech lynching for uppity blacks" by white liberals who were seeking to block a black conservative from taking a seat on the Supreme Court. After extensive debate, the United States Senate confirmed Thomas to the Supreme Court by a vote of 52–48, the narrowest margin since the 19th century.
Members questioned Hill's credibility after the timeline of her events came into question. They mentioned the time delay of ten years between the alleged behavior by Thomas and Hill's accusations, and observed that Hill had followed Thomas to a second job and later had personal contacts with Thomas, including giving him a ride to an airport — behavior which they said would be inexplicable if Hill's allegations were true. Hill countered that she had come forward because she felt an obligation to share information on the character and actions of a person who was being considered for the Supreme Court. She testified that after leaving the EEOC, she had had two "inconsequential" phone conversations with Thomas, and had seen him personally on two occasions, once to get a job reference and the second time when he made a public appearance in Oklahoma where she was teaching.
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Doubts about the veracity of Hill's 1991 testimony persisted among conservatives long after Thomas took his seat on the Court. They were furthered by right-wing magazine "American Spectator" writer David Brock in his 1993 book "The Real Anita Hill", though he later recanted the claims he had made which he described in his book as "character assassination," and apologized to Hill. After interviewing a number of women who alleged that Thomas had frequently subjected them to sexually explicit remarks, "The Wall Street Journal" reporters Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson wrote, "Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas", a book that concluded that Thomas had lied during his confirmation process. Richard Lacayo in his 1994 review of the book for "Time" magazine remarked, however, that "Their book doesn't quite nail that conclusion." In 2007, Kevin , a co-author of another book on Thomas, remarked that what happened between Thomas and Hill was "ultimately unknowable" by others, but that it was clear that "one of them lied, period." Writing in 2007, Neil Lewis of "The New York Times" remarked that, "To this day, each side in the epic he-said, she-said dispute has its unmovable believers."
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In 2007, Thomas published his autobiography, "My Grandfather's Son", in which he revisited the controversy, calling Hill his "most traitorous adversary", and writing that pro-choice liberals, who feared he would vote to overturn "Roe v. Wade" if he were seated on the Supreme Court, used the scandal against him. He described Hill as touchy and apt to overreact, and her work at the EEOC as mediocre. He acknowledged that three other former EEOC employees had backed Hill's story, but said they had all left the agency on bad terms. He also wrote that Hill "was a left-winger who'd never expressed any religious sentiments whatsoever ... and the only reason why she'd held a job in the Reagan administration was because I'd given it to her." Hill denied the accusations in an op-ed in "The New York Times" saying she would not "stand by silently and allow [Justice Thomas], in his anger, to reinvent me."
In October 2010, Thomas's wife Virginia, a conservative activist, left a voicemail at Hill's office asking that Hill apologize for her 1991 testimony. Hill initially believed the call was a hoax and referred the matter to the Brandeis University campus police who alerted the FBI. After being informed that the call was indeed from Virginia Thomas, Hill told the media that she did not believe the message was meant to be conciliatory and said, "I testified truthfully about my experience and I stand by that testimony." Virginia Thomas responded that the call had been intended as an "olive branch".
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Effects.
Shortly after the Thomas confirmation hearings, President George H. W. Bush dropped his opposition to a bill that gave harassment victims the right to seek federal damage awards, back pay, and reinstatement, and the law was passed by Congress. One year later, harassment complaints filed with the EEOC were up 50 percent and public opinion had shifted in Hill's favor. Private companies also started training programs to deter sexual harassment. When journalist Cinny Kennard asked Hill in 1991 if she would testify against Thomas all over again, Hill answered, "I'm not sure if I could have lived with myself if I had answered those questions any differently."
The manner in which the Senate Judiciary Committee challenged and dismissed Hill's accusations of sexual harassment angered female politicians and lawyers. According to D.C. Congressional Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, Hill's treatment by the panel was a contributing factor to the large number of women elected to Congress in 1992. "Women clearly went to the polls with the notion in mind that you had to have more women in Congress," she said. In their anthology, "All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave", editors Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott, and Barbara Smith described black feminists mobilizing "a remarkable national response to the Anita Hill–Clarence Thomas controversy.
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In 1992, a feminist group began a nationwide fundraising campaign and then obtained matching state funds to endow a professorship at the University of Oklahoma College of Law in honor of Hill. Conservative Oklahoma state legislators reacted by demanding Hill's resignation from the university, then introducing a bill to prohibit the university from accepting donations from out-of-state residents, and finally attempting to pass legislation to close down the law school. Elmer Zinn Million, a local activist, compared Hill to Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of President Kennedy. Certain officials at the university attempted to revoke Hill's tenure. After five years of pressure, Hill resigned. The University of Oklahoma Law School defunded the Anita F. Hill professorship in May 1999, without the position's having ever been filled.
On April 25, 2019, the presidential campaign team for Joe Biden for the 2020 United States presidential election disclosed that he had called Hill to express "his regret for what she endured" in his role as the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, presiding over the Thomas confirmation hearings. Hill said the call from Biden left her feeling "deeply unsatisfied". On June 13, 2019, Hill clarified that she did not consider Biden's actions disqualifying, and would be open to voting for him. In May 2020, Hill argued that sexual assault allegations made against Donald Trump as well as the sexual assault allegation against Biden should be investigated and their results "made available to the public."
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On September 5, 2020, it was reported that Hill had vowed to vote for Biden and to work with him on gender issues.
Continued work and advocacy.
Hill continued to teach at the University of Oklahoma, though she spent two years as a visiting professor in California. She resigned her post in October 1996 and finished her final semester of teaching there. In her final semester, she taught a law school seminar on civil rights. An endowed chair was created in her name, but was later defunded without ever having been filled.
Hill accepted a position as a visiting scholar at the Institute for the Study of Social Change at University of California, Berkeley in January 1997, but soon joined the faculty of Brandeis University—first at the Women's Studies Program, later moving to the Heller School for Social Policy and Management. In 2011, she also took a counsel position with the Civil Rights & Employment Practice group of the plaintiffs' law firm Cohen Milstein.
Over the years, Hill has provided commentary on gender and race issues on national television programs, including "60 Minutes", "Face the Nation", and "Meet the Press". She has been a speaker on the topic of commercial law as well as race and women's rights. She is also the author of articles that have been published in "The New York Times" and "Newsweek" and has contributed to many scholarly and legal publications in the areas of international commercial law, bankruptcy, and civil rights.
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In 1995, Hill co-edited "Race, Gender and Power in America: The Legacy of the Hill-Thomas Hearings" with Emma Coleman Jordan. In 1997 Hill published her autobiography, "Speaking Truth to Power", in which she chronicled her role in the Clarence Thomas confirmation controversy and wrote that creating a better society had been a motivating force in her life. She contributed the piece "The Nature of the Beast: Sexual Harassment" to the 2003 anthology "", edited by Robin Morgan. In 2011, Hill published her second book, "Reimagining Equality: Stories of Gender, Race, and Finding Home", which focuses on the sub-prime lending crisis that resulted in the foreclosure of many homes owned by African-Americans. She calls for a new understanding about the importance of a home and its place in the American Dream. On March 26, 2015, the Brandeis Board of Trustees unanimously voted to recognize Hill with a promotion to Private University Professor of Social Policy, Law, and Women's Studies.
On December 16, 2017, the Commission on Sexual Harassment and Advancing Equality in the Workplace was formed, selecting Hill to lead its charge against sexual harassment in the entertainment industry. The new initiative was spearheaded by co-chair of the Nike Foundation Maria Eitel, venture capitalist Freada Kapor Klein, Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy and talent attorney Nina Shaw. The report found not only a saddening prevalence of continued bias but also stark differences in how varying demographics perceived discrimination and harassment.
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In September 2018, Hill wrote an op-ed in "The New York Times" regarding sexual assault allegations made by Christine Blasey Ford during the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination. On November 8, 2018, Anita Hill spoke at the USC Dornsife's event, "From Social Movement to Social Impact: Putting an End to Sexual Harassment in the Workplace".
Writings.
In 1994, Hill wrote a tribute to Thurgood Marshall, the first African American Supreme Court Justice who preceded Clarence Thomas, titled "A Tribute to Thurgood Marshall: A Man Who Broke with Tradition on Issues of Race and Gender". She outlined Marshall's contributions to the principles of equality as a judge and how his work has affected the lives of African Americans, specifically African American women.
On October 20, 1998, Hill published the book "Speaking Truth to Power". Throughout much of the book she gives details on her side of the sexual harassment controversy, and her professional relationship with Clarence Thomas. Aside from that, she also provides a glimpse of what her personal life was like all the way from her childhood days growing up in Oklahoma to her position as a law professor.
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Hill became a proponent for women's rights and feminism. This can be seen through the chapter she wrote in the 2007 book "Women and leadership: the state of play and strategies for change". She wrote about women judges and why, in her opinion, they play such a large role in balancing the judicial system. She argues that since women and men have different life experiences, ways of thinking, and histories, both are needed for a balanced court system. She writes that in order for the best law system to be created in the United States, all people need the ability to be represented.
In 2011, Hill's second book, "Reimagining Equality: Stories of Gender, Race, and Finding Home" was published. She discusses the relationship between the home and the American Dream. She also exposes the inequalities within gender and race and home ownership. She argues that inclusive democracy is more important than debates about legal rights. She uses her own history and history of other African American women such as Nannie Helen Burroughs, in order to strengthen her argument for reimagining equality altogether.
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On September 28, 2021, Hill published the book "Believing: Our Thirty-Year Journey to End Gender Violence".
Awards and recognition.
Hill received the American Bar Association's Commission on Women in the Profession's "Women of Achievement" award in 1992. In 2005, Hill was selected as a Fletcher Foundation Fellow. In 2008 she was awarded the Louis P. and Evelyn Smith First Amendment Award by the Ford Hall Forum. She also serves on the board of trustees for Southern Vermont College in Bennington, Vermont. She was inducted into the Oklahoma Women's Hall of Fame in 1993. On January 7, 2017, Hill was inducted as an honorary member of Zeta Phi Beta sorority at their National Executive Board Meeting in Dallas, Texas. The Wing's Washington, D.C. location has a phone booth dedicated to Hill.
Minor planet 6486 Anitahill, discovered by Eleanor Helin, is named in her honor. The official naming citation was published by the Minor Planet Center on November 8, 2019 ().
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Audio file format
An audio file format is a file format for storing digital audio data on a computer system. The bit layout of the audio data (excluding metadata) is called the audio coding format and can be uncompressed, or compressed to reduce the file size, often using lossy compression. The data can be a raw bitstream in an audio coding format, but it is usually embedded in a container format or an audio data format with defined storage layer.
Format types.
It is important to distinguish between the audio coding format, the container containing the raw audio data, and an audio codec. A codec performs the encoding and decoding of the raw audio data while this encoded data is (usually) stored in a container file. Although most audio file formats support only one type of audio coding data (created with an audio coder), a multimedia container format (as Matroska or AVI) may support multiple types of audio and video data.
There are three major groups of audio file formats:
Uncompressed audio format.
One major uncompressed audio format, LPCM, is the same variety of PCM as used in Compact Disc Digital Audio and is the format most commonly accepted by low level audio APIs and D/A converter hardware. Although LPCM can be stored on a computer as a raw audio format, it is usually stored in a codice_3 file on Windows or in a codice_4 file on macOS. The Audio Interchange File Format (AIFF) format is based on the Interchange File Format (IFF), and the WAV format is based on the similar Resource Interchange File Format (RIFF). WAV and AIFF are designed to store a wide variety of audio formats, lossless and lossy; they just add a small, metadata-containing header before the audio data to declare the format of the audio data, such as LPCM with a particular sample rate, bit depth, endianness and number of channels. Since WAV and AIFF are widely supported and can store LPCM, they are suitable file formats for storing and archiving an original recording.
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BWF (Broadcast Wave Format) is a standard audio format created by the European Broadcasting Union as a successor to WAV. Among other enhancements, BWF allows more robust metadata to be stored in the file. See "European Broadcasting Union: Specification of the Broadcast Wave Format" (EBU Technical document 3285, July 1997). This is the primary recording format used in many professional audio workstations in the television and film industry. BWF files include a standardized timestamp reference which allows for easy synchronization with a separate picture element. Stand-alone, file based, multi-track recorders from AETA, Sound Devices, Zaxcom, HHB Communications Ltd, Fostex, Nagra, Aaton, and TASCAM all use BWF as their preferred format.
Lossless compressed audio format.
A lossless compressed audio format stores data in less space without losing any information. The original, uncompressed data can be recreated from the compressed version.
Uncompressed audio formats encode both sound and silence with the same number of bits per unit of time. Encoding an uncompressed minute of absolute silence produces a file of the same size as encoding an uncompressed minute of music. In a lossless compressed format, however, the music would occupy a smaller file than an uncompressed format and the silence would take up almost no space at all.
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Lossless compression formats include FLAC, WavPack, Monkey's Audio, ALAC (Apple Lossless). They provide a compression ratio of about 2:1 (i.e. their files take up half the space of PCM). Development in lossless compression formats aims to reduce processing time while maintaining a good compression ratio.
Lossy compressed audio format.
Lossy audio format enables even greater reductions in file size by removing some of the audio information and simplifying the data. This, of course, results in a reduction in audio quality, but a variety of techniques are used, mainly by exploiting psychoacoustics, to remove the parts of the sound that have the least effect on perceived quality, and to minimize the amount of audible noise added during the process. The popular MP3 format is probably the best-known example, but the AAC format found on the iTunes Music Store is also common. Most formats offer a range of degrees of compression, generally measured in bit rate. The lower the rate, the smaller the file and the more significant the quality loss.
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Antipope Victor IV
Two antipopes used the regnal name Victor IV:
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Area 51
Area 51 is the common name of a highly classified United States Air Force (USAF) facility within the Nevada Test and Training Range. A remote detachment administered by Edwards Air Force Base, the facility is officially called Homey Airport or Groom Lake (after the salt flat next to its airfield). Details of its operations are not made public, but the USAF says that it is an open training range, and it is commonly thought to support the development and testing of experimental aircraft and weapons systems. The USAF and CIA acquired the site in 1955, primarily for flight testing the Lockheed U-2 aircraft.
The intense secrecy surrounding the base has made it the frequent subject of conspiracy theories and a central component of unidentified flying object (UFO) folklore. It has never been declared a secret base, but all research and occurrences in Area 51 are Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI). The CIA publicly acknowledged the base's existence on 25 June 2013, following a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed in 2005, and declassified documents detailing its history and purpose.
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Area 51 is located in the southern portion of Nevada, north-northwest of Las Vegas. The surrounding area is a popular tourist destination, including the small town of Rachel on the "Extraterrestrial Highway".
Geography.
Area 51.
The original rectangular base of is now part of the so-called "Groom box", a rectangular area, measuring , of restricted airspace. The area is connected to the internal Nevada Test Site (NTS) road network, with paved roads leading south to Mercury and west to Yucca Flat. Leading northeast from the lake, the wide and well-maintained Groom Lake Road runs through a pass in the Jumbled Hills. The road formerly led to mines in the Groom basin but has been improved since their closure. Its winding course runs past a security checkpoint, but the restricted area around the base extends farther east. After leaving the restricted area, Groom Lake Road descends eastward to the floor of the Tikaboo Valley, passing the dirt-road entrances to several small ranches, before converging with State Route 375, the "Extraterrestrial Highway", south of Rachel.
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Area 51 shares a border with the Yucca Flat region of the Nevada Test Site, the location of 739 of the 928 nuclear tests conducted by the United States Department of Energy at NTS. The Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository is southwest of Groom Lake.
Groom Lake.
Groom Lake is a salt flat in Nevada used for runways of the Nellis Bombing Range Test Site airport (XTA/KXTA) on the north of the Area 51 USAF military installation. The lake at elevation is approximately from north to south and from east to west at its widest point. Located within the namesake Groom Lake Valley portion of the Tonopah Basin, the lake is south of Rachel, Nevada.
History.
The origin of the name "Area 51" is unclear. It is believed to be from an Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) numbering grid, although Area 51 is not part of this system; it is adjacent to Area 15. Another explanation is that 51 was used because it was unlikely that the AEC would use the number. According to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the correct names for the facility are Homey Airport (XTA/KXTA) and Groom Lake, though the name "Area 51" was used in a CIA document from the Vietnam War. The facility has also been referred to as "Dreamland" and "Paradise Ranch", among other nicknames, with the former also being the approach control call sign for the surrounding area. The USAF public relations has referred to the facility as "an operating location near Groom Dry Lake". The special use airspace around the field is referred to as Restricted Area 4808 North (R-4808N).
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Lead and silver were discovered in the southern part of the Groom Range in 1864, and the English company "Groome Lead Mines Limited" financed the Conception Mines in the 1870s, giving the district its name (nearby mines included Maria, Willow, and White Lake). J. B. Osborne and partners acquired the controlling interest in Groom in 1876, and Osborne's son acquired it in the 1890s. Mining continued until 1918, then resumed after World War II until the early 1950s.
The airfield on the Groom Lake site began service in 1942 as Indian Springs Air Force Auxiliary Field and consisted of two unpaved 5,000-foot (1,524 m) runways.
U-2 program.
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) established the Groom Lake test facility in April 1955 for Project AQUATONE: the development of the Lockheed U-2 strategic reconnaissance aircraft. Project director Richard M. Bissell Jr. understood that the flight test and pilot training programs could not be conducted at Edwards Air Force Base or Lockheed's Palmdale facility, given the extreme secrecy surrounding the project. He conducted a search for a suitable testing site for the U-2 under the same extreme security as the rest of the project. He notified Lockheed, who sent an inspection team out to Groom Lake. According to Lockheed's U-2 designer Kelly Johnson:
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The lake bed made an ideal strip for testing aircraft, and the Emigrant Valley's mountain ranges and the NTS perimeter protected the site from visitors; it was about north of Las Vegas. The CIA asked the AEC to acquire the land, designated "Area 51" on the map, and to add it to the Nevada Test Site.
Johnson named the area "Paradise Ranch" to encourage workers to move to "the new facility in the middle of nowhere", as the CIA later described it, and the name became shortened to "the Ranch". On 4May 1955, a survey team arrived at Groom Lake and laid out a north–south runway on the southwest corner of the lakebed and designated a site for a base support facility. The Ranch initially consisted of little more than a few shelters, workshops, and trailer homes in which to house its small team. A little over three months later, the base consisted of a single paved runway, three hangars, a control tower, and rudimentary accommodations for test personnel. The base's few amenities included a movie theater and volleyball court. There was also a mess hall, several wells, and fuel storage tanks. CIA, Air Force, and Lockheed personnel began arriving by July 1955. The Ranch received its first U-2 delivery on 24 July 1955 from Burbank on a C-124 Globemaster II cargo plane, accompanied by Lockheed technicians on a Douglas DC-3. Regular Military Air Transport Service flights were set up between Area 51 and Lockheed's offices in Burbank, California. To preserve secrecy, personnel flew to Nevada on Monday mornings and returned to California on Friday evenings.
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OXCART program.
Project OXCART was established in August 1959 for "antiradar studies, aerodynamic structural tests, and engineering designs" and all later work on the Lockheed A-12. This included testing at Groom Lake, which had inadequate facilities consisting of buildings for only 150 people, a asphalt runway, and limited fuel, hangar, and shop space. Groom Lake had received the name "Area 51" when A-12 test facility construction began in September 1960, including a new runway to replace the existing runway.
Reynolds Electrical and Engineering Company (REECo) began construction of "Project 51" on 1October 1960 with double-shift construction schedules. The contractor upgraded base facilities and built a new runway (14/32) diagonally across the southwest corner of the lakebed. They marked an Archimedean spiral on the dry lake approximately across so that an A-12 pilot approaching the end of the overrun could abort instead of plunging into the sagebrush. Area 51 pilots called it "The Hook". For crosswind landings, they marked two unpaved airstrips (runways 9/27 and 03/21) on the dry lakebed.
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By August 1961, construction of the essential facilities was complete; three surplus Navy hangars were erected on the base's north side while hangar7 was new construction. The original U-2 hangars were converted to maintenance and machine shops. Facilities in the main cantonment area included workshops and buildings for storage and administration, a commissary, a control tower, a fire station, and housing. The Navy also contributed more than 130 surplus Babbitt duplex housing units for long-term occupancy facilities. Older buildings were repaired, and additional facilities were constructed as necessary. A reservoir pond surrounded by trees served as a recreational area north of the base. Other recreational facilities included a gymnasium, a movie theater, and a baseball diamond. A permanent aircraft fuel tank farm was constructed by early 1962 for the special JP-7 fuel required by the A-12. Seven tanks were constructed, with a total capacity of .
Security was enhanced for the arrival of OXCART and the small mine was closed in the Groom basin. In January 1962, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) expanded the restricted airspace in the vicinity of Groom Lake, and the lakebed became the center of a addition to restricted area R-4808N. The CIA facility received eight USAF F-101 Voodoos for training, two T-33 Shooting Star trainers for proficiency flying, a C-130 Hercules for cargo transport, a U-3A for administrative purposes, a helicopter for search and rescue, and a Cessna 180 for liaison use, and Lockheed provided an F-104 Starfighter for use as a chase plane.
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The first A-12 test aircraft was covertly trucked from Burbank on 26 February 1962 and arrived at Groom Lake on 28 February. It made its first flight 26 April 1962 when the base had over 1,000 personnel. The closed airspace above Groom Lake was within the Nellis Air Force Range airspace, and pilots saw the A-12 20 to 30 times. Groom was also the site of the first Lockheed D-21 drone test flight on 22 December 1964. By the end of 1963, nine A-12s were at Area 51, assigned to the CIA-operated "1129th Special Activities Squadron".
D-21 Tagboard.
Following the loss of Gary Powers' U-2 over the Soviet Union, there were several discussions about using the A-12 OXCART as an unpiloted drone aircraft. Although Kelly Johnson had come to support the idea of drone reconnaissance, he opposed the development of an A-12 drone, contending that the aircraft was too large and complex for such a conversion. However, the Air Force agreed to fund the study of a high-speed, high-altitude drone aircraft in October 1962. The Air Force interest seems to have moved the CIA to take action, the project designated "Q-12". By October 1963, the drone's design had been finalized. At the same time, the Q-12 underwent a name change. To separate it from the other A-12-based projects, it was renamed the "D-21". (The "12" was reversed to "21"). "Tagboard" was the project's code name.
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The first D-21 was completed in the spring of 1964 by Lockheed. After four more months of checkouts and static tests, the aircraft was shipped to Groom Lake and reassembled. It was to be carried by a two-seat derivative of the A-12, designated the "M-21". When the D-21/M-21 reached the launch point, the first step would be to blow off the D-21's inlet and exhaust covers. With the D-21/M-21 at the correct speed and altitude, the LCO would start the ramjet and the other systems of the D-21. "With the D-21's systems activated and running, and the launch aircraft at the correct point, the M-21 would begin a slight pushover, the LCO would push a final button, and the D-21 would come off the pylon".
Difficulties were addressed throughout 1964 and 1965 at Groom Lake with various technical issues. Captive flights showed unforeseen aerodynamic difficulties. By late January 1966, more than a year after the first captive flight, everything seemed ready. The first D-21 launch was made on 5March 1966 with a successful flight, with the D-21 flying 120 miles with limited fuel. A second D-21 flight was successful in April 1966 with the drone flying 1,200 miles, reaching Mach 3.3 and 90,000 feet. An accident on 30 July 1966 with a fully fueled D-21, on a planned checkout flight, suffered from an unstart of the drone after its separation, causing it to collide with the M-21 launch aircraft. The two crewmen ejected and landed in the ocean 150 miles offshore. One crew member was picked up by a helicopter, but the other, having survived the aircraft breakup and ejection, drowned when sea water entered his pressure suit. Kelly Johnson personally cancelled the entire program, having had serious doubts about its feasibility from the start. A number of D-21s had already been produced, and rather than scrapping the whole effort, Johnson again proposed to the Air Force that they be launched from a B-52H bomber.
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By late summer of 1967, the modification work to both the D-21 (now designated D-21B) and the B-52Hs was complete. The test program could now resume. The test missions were flown out of Groom Lake, with the actual launches over the Pacific. The first D-21B to be flown was Article 501, the prototype. The first attempt was made on 28 September 1967 and ended in complete failure. As the B-52 was flying toward the launch point, the D-21B fell off the pylon. The B-52H gave a sharp lurch as the drone fell free. The booster fired and was "quite a sight from the ground". The failure was traced to a stripped nut on the forward right attachment point on the pylon. Several more tests were made, none of which met with success. However, the fact is that the resumptions of D-21 tests took place against a changing reconnaissance background. The A-12 had finally been allowed to deploy, and the SR-71 was soon to replace it. At the same time, new developments in reconnaissance satellite technology were nearing operation. Up to this point, the limited number of satellites available restricted coverage to the Soviet Union. A new generation of reconnaissance satellites could soon cover targets anywhere in the world. The satellites' resolution would be comparable to that of aircraft but without the slightest political risk. Time was running out for the Tagboard.
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Several more test flights, including two over China, were made from Beale AFB, California, in 1969 and 1970, to varying degrees of success. On 15 July 1971, Kelly Johnson received a wire canceling the D-21B program. The remaining drones were transferred by a C-5A and placed in dead storage. The tooling used to build the D-21Bs was ordered destroyed. Like the A-12 Oxcart, the D-21B Tagboard drones remained a Black airplane, even in retirement. Their existence was not suspected until August 1976, when the first group was placed in storage at the Davis-Monthan AFB Military Storage and Disposition Center. A second group arrived in 1977. They were labeled "GTD-21Bs" (GT stood for ground training).
Davis-Monthan is an open base, with public tours of the storage area at the time, so the odd-looking drones were soon spotted and photos began appearing in magazines. Speculation about the D-21Bs circulated within aviation circles for years, and it was not until 1982 that details of the Tagboard program were released. However, it was not until 1993 that the B-52/D-21B program was made public. That same year, the surviving D-21Bs were released to museums.
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Foreign technology evaluation.
During the Cold War, one of the missions carried out by the United States was the test and evaluation of captured Soviet fighter aircraft. Beginning in the late 1960s, and for several decades, Area 51 played host to an assortment of Soviet-built aircraft.
Munir Redfas defection with a Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-21 from Iraq for Israel's Mossad in Operation Diamond led to the HAVE DOUGHNUT, HAVE DRILL and HAVE FERRY programs. The first MiGs flown in the United States were used to evaluate the aircraft in performance, technical, and operational capabilities, pitting the types against U.S. fighters.
This was not a new mission, as testing of foreign technology by the USAF began during World War II. After the war, testing of acquired foreign technology was performed by the Air Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC, which became very influential during the Korean War), under the direct command of the Air Materiel Control Department. In 1961, ATIC became the Foreign Technology Division (FTD) and was reassigned to Air Force Systems Command. ATIC personnel were sent anywhere where foreign aircraft could be found.
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The focus of Air Force Systems Command limited the use of the fighter as a tool with which to train the front line tactical fighter pilots. Air Force Systems Command recruited its pilots from the Air Force Flight Test Center at Edwards Air Force Base, California, who were usually graduates from various test pilot schools. Tactical Air Command selected its pilots primarily from the ranks of the Weapons School graduates.
In August 1966, Iraqi Air Force fighter pilot Captain Munir Redfa defected, flying his MiG-21 to Israel after being ordered to attack Iraqi Kurd villages with napalm. His aircraft was transferred to Groom Lake in late 1967 for study. Israel loaned the MiG-21 to the US Air Force from January 1968 to April 1968.<ref name="jpost/330330"></ref> In 1968, the US Air Force and Navy jointly formed a project known as HAVE DOUGHNUT in which Air Force Systems Command, Tactical Air Command, and the U.S. Navy's Air Test and Evaluation Squadron Four (VX-4) flew this acquired Soviet-made aircraft in simulated air combat training. As U.S. possession of the Soviet MiG-21 was, itself, secret, it was tested at Groom Lake. A joint Air Force-Navy team was assembled for a series of dogfight tests.
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Comparisons between the F-4 and the MiG-21 indicated that, on the surface, they were evenly matched. The HAVE DOUGHNUT tests showed the skill of the man in the cockpit was what made the difference. When the Navy or Air Force pilots flew the MiG-21, the results were a draw; the F-4 would win some fights, the MiG-21 would win others. There were no clear advantages. The problem was not with the planes, but with the pilots flying them. The pilots would not fly either plane to its limits. One of the Navy pilots was Marland W. "Doc" Townsend, then commander of VF-121, the F-4 training squadron at NAS Miramar. He was an engineer and a Korean War veteran and had flown almost every Navy aircraft. When he flew against the MiG-21, he would outmaneuver it every time. The Air Force pilots would not go vertical in the MiG-21. The HAVE DOUGHNUT project officer was Tom Cassidy, a pilot with VX-4, the Navy's Air Development Squadron at Point Mugu. He had been watching as Townsend "waxed" the Air Force MiG-21 pilots. Cassidy climbed into the MiG-21 and went up against Townsend's F-4. This time the result was far different. Cassidy was willing to fight in the vertical, flying the plane to the point where it was buffeting, just above the stall. Cassidy was able to get on the F-4's tail. After the flight, they realized the MiG-21 turned better than the F-4 at lower speeds. The key was for the F-4 to keep its speed up. An F-4 had defeated the MiG-21; the weakness of the Soviet plane had been found. Further test flights confirmed what was learned. It was also clear that the MiG-21 was a formidable enemy. United States pilots would have to fly much better than they had been to beat it. This would require a special school to teach advanced air combat techniques.
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On 12 August 1968, two Syrian air force lieutenants, Walid Adham and Radfan Rifai, took off in a pair of MiG-17Fs on a training mission. They lost their way and, believing they were over Lebanon, landed at the Betzet Landing Field in northern Israel. (One version has it that they were led astray by an Arabic-speaking Israeli). Prior to the end of 1968 these MiG-17s were transferred from Israeli stocks and added to the Area 51 test fleet. The aircraft were given USAF designations and fake serial numbers so that they could be identified in DOD standard flight logs. As in the earlier program, a small group of Air Force and Navy pilots conducted mock dogfights with the MiG-17s. Selected instructors from the Navy's Top Gun school at NAS Miramar, California, were chosen to fly against the MiGs for familiarization purposes. Very soon, the MiG-17's shortcomings became clear. It had an extremely simple, even crude, control system that lacked the power-boosted controls of American aircraft. The F-4's twin engines were so powerful it could accelerate out of range of the MiG-17's guns in thirty seconds. It was important for the F-4 to keep its distance from the MiG-17. As long as the F-4 was one and a half miles from the MiG-17, it was outside the reach of the Soviet fighter's guns, but the MiG was within reach of the F-4's missiles.
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The data from the HAVE DOUGHNUT and HAVE DRILL tests were provided to the newly formed Top Gun school at NAS Miramar. By 1970, the HAVE DRILL program was expanded; a few selected fleet F-4 crews were given the chance to fight the MiGs. The most important result of Project HAVE DRILL is that no Navy pilot who flew in the project defeated the MiG-17 Fresco in the first engagement. The HAVE DRILL dogfights were by invitation only. The other pilots based at Nellis Air Force Base were not to know about the U.S.-operated MiGs. To prevent any sightings, the airspace above the Groom Lake range was closed. On aeronautical maps, the exercise area was marked in red ink. The forbidden zone became known as "Red Square".
During the remainder of the Vietnam War, the Navy kill ratio climbed to 8.33 to 1. In contrast, the Air Force rate improved only slightly to 2.83 to 1. The reason for this difference was Top Gun. The Navy had revitalized its air combat training, while the Air Force had stayed stagnant. Most of the Navy MiG kills were by Top Gun graduates.
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In May 1973, Project HAVE IDEA was formed, which took over from the older HAVE DOUGHNUT, HAVE FERRY and HAVE DRILL projects, and the project was transferred to the Tonopah Test Range Airport. At Tonopah, testing of foreign technology aircraft continued and expanded throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
Area 51 also hosted another foreign materiel evaluation program called HAVE GLIB. This involved testing Soviet tracking and missile control radar systems. A complex of actual and replica Soviet-type threat systems began to grow around "Slater Lake", a mile northwest of the main base, along with an acquired Soviet "Barlock" search radar placed at Tonopah Air Force Station. They were arranged to simulate a Soviet-style air defense complex.
The Air Force began funding improvements to Area 51 in 1977 under project SCORE EVENT. In 1979, the CIA transferred jurisdiction of the Area 51 site to the Air Force Flight Test Center at Edwards AFB, California. Sam Mitchell, the last CIA commander of Area 51, relinquished command to USAF Lt. Col. Larry D. McClain.
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In 2017, a USAF aircraft crashed at the site, killing the pilot, Lt. Colonel Eric "Doc" Schultz. The USAF refused to release further information regarding the crash. In 2022, unconfirmed reports emerged that the crash involved an SU-27 that was part of the classified Foreign Materials Exploitation program. The reports claimed that the aircraft suffered a technical issue that resulted in both crew members ejecting from the aircraft, resulting in the death of Schultz.
Have Blue/F-117 program.
The Lockheed Have Blue prototype stealth fighter (a smaller proof-of-concept model of the F-117 Nighthawk) first flew at Groom in December 1977.
In 1978, the Air Force awarded a full-scale development contract for the F-117 to Lockheed Corporation's Advanced Development Projects. On 17 January 1981 the Lockheed test team at Area 51 accepted delivery of the first full-scale development (FSD) prototype "79–780", designated YF-117A. At 6:05 am on 18 June 1981 Lockheed Skunk Works test pilot Hal Farley lifted the nose of YF-117A "79–780" off the runway of Area 51.
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Meanwhile, Tactical Air Command (TAC) decided to set up a group-level organization to guide the F-117A to an initial operating capability. That organization became the 4450th Tactical Group (Initially designated "A Unit"), which officially activated on 15 October 1979 at Nellis AFB, Nevada, although the group was physically located at Area 51. The 4450th TG also operated the A-7D Corsair II as a surrogate trainer for the F-117A, and these operations continued until 15 October 1982 under the guise of an avionics test mission.
Flying squadrons of the 4450th TG were the 4450th Tactical Squadron (Initially designated "I Unit") activated on 11 June 1981, and 4451st Tactical Squadron (Initially designated "P Unit") on 15 January 1983. The 4450th TS, stationed at Area 51, was the first F-117A squadron, while the 4451st TS was stationed at Nellis AFB and was equipped with A-7D Corsair IIs painted in a dark motif, tail coded "LV". Lockheed test pilots put the YF-117 through its early paces. A-7Ds were used for pilot training before any F-117As had been delivered by Lockheed to Area 51, later the A-7D's were used for F-117A chase testing and other weapon tests at the Nellis Range. On 15 October 1982, Major Alton C. Whitley Jr. became the first USAF 4450th TG pilot to fly the F-117A.
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Although ideal for testing, Area 51 was not a suitable location for an operational group, so a new covert base had to be established for F-117 operations. Tonopah Test Range Airport was selected for operations of the first USAF F-117 unit, the 4450th Tactical Group (TG). From October 1979, the Tonopah Airport base was reconstructed and expanded. The 6,000-foot runway was lengthened to 10,000 feet. Taxiways, a concrete apron, a large maintenance hangar, and a propane storage tank were added.
By early 1982, four more YF-117As were operating at the base. After finding a large scorpion in their offices, the testing team (Designated "R Unit") adopted it as their mascot and dubbed themselves the "Baja Scorpions". Testing of a series of ultra-secret prototypes continued at Area 51 until mid-1981 when testing transitioned to the initial production of F-117 stealth fighters. The F-117s were moved to and from Area 51 by C-5 during darkness to maintain security. The aircraft were defueled, disassembled, cradled, and then loaded aboard the C-5 at night, flown to Lockheed, and unloaded at night before reassembly and flight testing. Groom performed radar profiling, F-117 weapons testing, and training of the first group of frontline USAF F-117 pilots.
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While the "Baja Scorpions" were working on the F-117, there was also another group at work in secrecy, known as "the Whalers" working on Tacit Blue. A fly-by-wire technology demonstration aircraft with curved surfaces and composite material, to evade radar, was a prototype, and never went into production. Nevertheless, this strange-looking aircraft was responsible for many of the stealth technology advances that were used on several other aircraft designs, and had a direct influence on the B-2; with the first flight of Tacit Blue being performed on 5February 1982, by Northrop Grumman test pilot, Richard G. Thomas.
Production FSD airframes from Lockheed were shipped to Area 51 for acceptance testing. As the Baja Scorpions tested the aircraft with functional check flights and low observability (L.O.) verification, the operational airplanes were then transferred to the 4450th TG.
On 17 May 1982, the move of the 4450th TG from Groom Lake to Tonopah was initiated, with the final components of the move completed in early 1983. Production FSD airframes from Lockheed were shipped to Area 51 for acceptance testing. As the Baja Scorpions tested the aircraft with functional check flights and L.O. verification, the operational airplanes were then transferred to the 4450th TG at Tonopah.
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The R-Unit was inactivated on 30 May 1989. Upon inactivation, the unit was reformed as Detachment 1, 57th Fighter Weapons Wing (FWW). In 1990, the last F-117A ("843") was delivered from Lockheed. After completion of acceptance flights at Area 51 of this last new F-117A aircraft, the flight test squadron continued flight test duties of refurbished aircraft after modifications by Lockheed. In February/March 1992 the test unit moved from Area 51 to the USAF Palmdale Plant 42 and was integrated with the Air Force Systems Command 6510th Test Squadron. Some testing, especially RCS verification and other classified activity was still conducted at Area 51 throughout the operational lifetime of the F-117. The recently inactivated (2008) 410th Flight Test Squadron traces its roots, if not its formal lineage to the 4450th TG R-unit.
Later operations.
Since the F-117 became operational in 1983, operations at Groom Lake have continued. The base and its associated runway system were expanded, including the expansion of housing and support facilities. In 1995, the federal government expanded the exclusionary area around the base to include nearby mountains that had hitherto afforded the only decent overlook of the base, prohibiting access to of land formerly administered by the Bureau of Land Management.
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Legal status.
U.S. government's positions on Area 51.
The United States government has provided minimal information regarding Area 51. The area surrounding the lake is permanently off-limits to both civilian and normal military air traffic. Security clearances are checked regularly; cameras and weaponry are not allowed. Even military pilots training in the NAFR risk disciplinary action if they stray into the exclusionary "box" surrounding Groom's airspace. Surveillance is supplemented using buried motion sensors. Area 51 is a common destination for Janet, a small fleet of passenger aircraft operated on behalf of the Air Force to transport military personnel, primarily from Harry Reid International Airport.
The United States Geological Survey (USGS) topographic map for the area only shows the long-disused Groom Mine, but USGS aerial photographs of the site in 1959 and 1968 were publicly available. A civil aviation chart published by the Nevada Department of Transportation shows a large restricted area, defined as part of the Nellis restricted airspace. The National Atlas shows the area as lying within the Nellis Air Force Base. There are higher resolution and newer images available from other satellite imagery providers, including Russian providers and the IKONOS. These show the runway markings, base facilities, aircraft, and vehicles.
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In 1998 USAF officially acknowledged the site's existence. On 25 June 2013, the CIA released an official history of the U-2 and OXCART projects which acknowledged that the U-2 was tested at Area 51, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request submitted in 2005 by Jeffrey T. Richelson of George Washington University's National Security Archive. It contains numerous references to Area 51 and Groom Lake, along with a map of the area. Media reports stated that releasing the CIA history was the first governmental acknowledgement of Area 51's existence; rather, it was the first official acknowledgement of specific activity at the site.
Environmental lawsuit.
In 1994, five unnamed civilian contractors and the widows of contractors Walter Kasza and Robert Frost sued the Air Force and the United States Environmental Protection Agency. They alleged that they had been present when large quantities of unknown chemicals had been burned in open pits and trenches at Groom. Rutgers University biochemists analyzed biopsies from the complainants and found high levels of dioxin, dibenzofuran, and trichloroethylene in their body fat. The complainants alleged that they had sustained skin, liver, and respiratory injuries due to their work at Groom and that this had contributed to the deaths of Frost and Kasza. The suit sought compensation for the injuries, claiming that the Air Force had illegally handled toxic materials and that the EPA had failed in its duty to enforce the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act which governs the handling of dangerous materials. They also sought detailed information about the chemicals, hoping that this would facilitate the medical treatment of survivors. Congressman Lee H. Hamilton, former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told "60 Minutes" reporter Lesley Stahl, "The Air Force is classifying all information about Area 51 in order to protect themselves from a lawsuit."
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The government invoked the State Secrets Privilege and petitioned U.S. District Judge Philip Pro to disallow disclosure of classified documents or examination of secret witnesses, claiming that this would expose classified information and threaten national security. Judge Pro rejected the government's argument, so President Bill Clinton issued a Presidential Determination exempting what it called "the Air Force's Operating Location Near Groom Lake, Nevada" from environmental disclosure laws. Consequently, Pro dismissed the suit due to lack of evidence. Jonathan Turley, the attorney who was handling the lawsuit, appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on the grounds that the government was abusing its power to classify material. Secretary of the Air Force Sheila E. Widnall filed a brief which stated that disclosures of the materials present in the air and water near Groom "can reveal military operational capabilities or the nature and scope of classified operations." The Ninth Circuit rejected Turley's appeal and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear it, putting an end to the complainants' case.
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The President annually issues a determination continuing the Groom exception which is the only formal recognition that the government has ever given that Groom Lake is more than simply another part of the Nellis complex. An unclassified memo on the safe handling of F-117 Nighthawk material was posted on an Air Force web site in 2005. This discussed the same materials for which the complainants had requested information, which the government had claimed was classified. The memo was removed shortly after journalists became aware of it.
Civil aviation identification.
In December 2007, pilots noticed that the base had appeared in their aircraft navigation systems' latest Jeppesen database revision with the ICAO airport identifier code of KXTA and listed as "Homey Airport". The probably inadvertent release of the airport data led to advice by the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA) that student pilots should be explicitly warned about KXTA, not to consider it as a waypoint or destination for any flight even though it now appears in public navigation databases.
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Security.
The perimeter of the base is marked out by orange posts and patrolled by guards in white pickup trucks and camouflage fatigues. The guards are popularly referred to as "camo dudes" by enthusiasts. The guards will not answer questions about their employers; however, according to the New York "Daily News", there are indications they are employed through a contractor such as AECOM. Signage around the base perimeter advises that deadly force is authorized against trespassers.
Technology is also heavily used to maintain the border of the base; this includes surveillance cameras and motion detectors. Some of these motion detectors are placed some distance away from the base on public land to notify guards of people approaching.
1974 Skylab photography.
Dwayne A. Day published "Astronauts and Area 51: the Skylab Incident" in "The Space Review" in January 2006. It was based on a memo written in 1974 to CIA director William Colby by an unknown CIA official. The memo reported that astronauts on board Skylab had inadvertently photographed a certain location:
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The name of the location was obscured, but the context led Day to believe that the subject was Groom Lake. Day wrote that "the CIA considered no other spot on Earth to be as sensitive as Groom Lake". Even within the agency's National Photographic Interpretation Center that handled classified reconnaissance satellite photographs, images of the site were removed from film rolls and stored separately as not all photo interpreters had security clearance for the information. The memo details debate between federal agencies regarding whether the images should be classified, with Department of Defense agencies arguing that it should and NASA and the State Department arguing that it should not be classified. The memo itself questions the legality of retroactively classifying unclassified images.
The memo includes handwritten remarks, apparently by Director of Central Intelligence Colby:
The declassified documents do not disclose the outcome of discussions regarding the Skylab imagery. The debate proved moot, as the photograph appeared in the Federal Government's Archive of Satellite Imagery along with the remaining Skylab photographs.
2019 shooting incident.
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On 28 January 2019, an unidentified man drove through a security checkpoint near Mercury, Nevada, in an apparent attempt to enter the base. After an vehicle pursuit by base security, the man exited his vehicle carrying a "cylindrical object" and was shot dead by NNSS security officers and sheriff's deputies after refusing to obey requests to halt. There were no other injuries reported.
UFO and other conspiracy theories.
Area 51 has become a focus of modern conspiracy theories due to its secretive nature and connection to classified aircraft research. Theories include:
Many of the hypotheses concern underground facilities at Groom or at Papoose Lake (also known as "S-4 location"), south, and include claims of a transcontinental underground railroad system, a disappearing airstrip nicknamed the "Cheshire Airstrip", after Lewis Carroll's Cheshire cat, which briefly appears when water is sprayed onto its camouflaged asphalt, and engineering based on alien technology.
In the mid-1950s, civilian aircraft flew under 20,000 feet while military aircraft flew up to 40,000 feet. The U-2 began flying above 60,000 feet and there was an increasing number of UFO sighting reports. Sightings occurred most often during early evening hours, when airline pilots flying west saw the U-2's silver wings reflect the setting sun, giving the aircraft a "fiery" appearance. Many sighting reports came to the Air Force's Project Blue Book, which investigated UFO sightings, through air-traffic controllers and letters to the government. The project checked U-2 and later OXCART flight records to eliminate the majority of UFO reports that it received during the late 1950s and 1960s, although it could not reveal to the letter writers the truth behind what they saw. Similarly, veterans of experimental projects such as OXCART at Area 51 agree that their work inadvertently prompted many of the UFO sightings and other rumors:
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They believe that the rumors helped maintain secrecy over Area 51's actual operations. The veterans deny the existence of a vast underground railroad system.
On October 14, 1988, the syndicated television broadcast "UFO Coverup? Live" introduced Americans to the Majestic 12 hoax. It featured the first public mention of Nevada's Area 51 as a site associated with aliens.
Bob Lazar claimed in 1989 that he had worked at Area 51's "Sector Four (S-4)", said to be located underground inside the Papoose Range near Papoose Lake. He claimed that he was contracted to work with alien spacecraft that the government had in its possession. Similarly, the 1996 documentary "Dreamland" directed by Bruce Burgess included an interview with a 71-year-old mechanical engineer who claimed to be a former employee at Area 51 during the 1950s. His claims included that he had worked on a "flying disc simulator" which had been based on a disc originating from a crashed extraterrestrial craft and was used to train pilots. He also claimed to have worked with an extraterrestrial being named "J-Rod" and described as a "telepathic translator". In 2004, Dan Burisch (pseudonym of Dan Crain) claimed to have worked on cloning alien viruses at Area 51, also alongside the alien named "J-Rod". Burisch's scholarly credentials are the subject of much debate, as he was apparently working as a Las Vegas parole officer in 1989 while also earning a PhD at State University of New York (SUNY).
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In July 2019, more than 2,000,000 people responded to a joke proposal to storm Area 51 which appeared in an anonymous Facebook post. The event, scheduled for 20 September 2019, was billed as "Storm Area 51, They Can't Stop All of Us", an attempt to "see them aliens". Air Force spokeswoman Laura McAndrews said the government "would discourage anyone from trying to come into the area where we train American armed forces". Two music festivals in rural Nevada, AlienStock and Storm Area 51 Basecamp, were subsequently organized to capitalize on the popularity of the original Facebook event. Between 1,500 and 3,000 people showed up at the festivals, while over 150 people made the journey over several miles of rough roads to get near the gates to Area 51. Seven people were reportedly arrested at the event.
In popular culture.
Because of Area 51's prominence in relation to aliens and conspiracy theories, it has often been used as a setting and theme in popular culture, especially in science fiction works involving aliens.
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Audio signal processing
Audio signal processing is a subfield of signal processing that is concerned with the electronic manipulation of audio signals. Audio signals are electronic representations of sound waves—longitudinal waves which travel through air, consisting of compressions and rarefactions. The energy contained in audio signals or sound power level is typically measured in decibels. As audio signals may be represented in either digital or analog format, processing may occur in either domain. Analog processors operate directly on the electrical signal, while digital processors operate mathematically on its digital representation.
History.
The motivation for audio signal processing began at the beginning of the 20th century with inventions like the telephone, phonograph, and radio that allowed for the transmission and storage of audio signals. Audio processing was necessary for early radio broadcasting, as there were many problems with studio-to-transmitter links. The theory of signal processing and its application to audio was largely developed at Bell Labs in the mid 20th century. Claude Shannon and Harry Nyquist's early work on communication theory, sampling theory and pulse-code modulation (PCM) laid the foundations for the field. In 1957, Max Mathews became the first person to synthesize audio from a computer, giving birth to computer music.
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Major developments in digital audio coding and audio data compression include differential pulse-code modulation (DPCM) by C. Chapin Cutler at Bell Labs in 1950, linear predictive coding (LPC) by Fumitada Itakura (Nagoya University) and Shuzo Saito (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone) in 1966, adaptive DPCM (ADPCM) by P. Cummiskey, Nikil S. Jayant and James L. Flanagan at Bell Labs in 1973, discrete cosine transform (DCT) coding by Nasir Ahmed, T. Natarajan and K. R. Rao in 1974, and modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT) coding by J. P. Princen, A. W. Johnson and A. B. Bradley at the University of Surrey in 1987. LPC is the basis for perceptual coding and is widely used in speech coding, while MDCT coding is widely used in modern audio coding formats such as MP3 and Advanced Audio Coding (AAC).
Types.
Analog.
An analog audio signal is a continuous signal represented by an electrical voltage or current that is "analogous" to the sound waves in the air. Analog signal processing then involves physically altering the continuous signal by changing the voltage or current or charge via electrical circuits.
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Historically, before the advent of widespread digital technology, analog was the only method by which to manipulate a signal. Since that time, as computers and software have become more capable and affordable, digital signal processing has become the method of choice. However, in music applications, analog technology is often still desirable as it often produces nonlinear responses that are difficult to replicate with digital filters.
Digital.
A digital representation expresses the audio waveform as a sequence of symbols, usually binary numbers. This permits signal processing using digital circuits such as digital signal processors, microprocessors and general-purpose computers. Most modern audio systems use a digital approach as the techniques of digital signal processing are much more powerful and efficient than analog domain signal processing.
Applications.
Processing methods and application areas include storage, data compression, music information retrieval, speech processing, localization, acoustic detection, transmission, noise cancellation, acoustic fingerprinting, sound recognition, synthesis, and enhancement (e.g. equalization, filtering, level compression, echo and reverb removal or addition, etc.).
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Audio broadcasting.
Audio signal processing is used when broadcasting audio signals in order to enhance their fidelity or optimize for bandwidth or latency. In this domain, the most important audio processing takes place just before the transmitter. The audio processor here must prevent or minimize overmodulation, compensate for non-linear transmitters (a potential issue with medium wave and shortwave broadcasting), and adjust overall loudness to the desired level.
Active noise control.
Active noise control is a technique designed to reduce unwanted sound. By creating a signal that is identical to the unwanted noise but with the opposite polarity, the two signals cancel out due to destructive interference.
Audio synthesis.
Audio synthesis is the electronic generation of audio signals. A musical instrument that accomplishes this is called a synthesizer. Synthesizers can either imitate sounds or generate new ones. Audio synthesis is also used to generate human speech using speech synthesis.
Audio effects.
Audio effects alter the sound of a musical instrument or other audio source. Common effects include distortion, often used with electric guitar in electric blues and rock music; dynamic effects such as volume pedals and compressors, which affect loudness; filters such as wah-wah pedals and graphic equalizers, which modify frequency ranges; modulation effects, such as chorus, flangers and phasers; pitch effects such as pitch shifters; and time effects, such as reverb and delay, which create echoing sounds and emulate the sound of different spaces.
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Musicians, audio engineers and record producers use effects units during live performances or in the studio, typically with electric guitar, bass guitar, electronic keyboard or electric piano. While effects are most frequently used with electric or electronic instruments, they can be used with any audio source, such as acoustic instruments, drums, and vocals.
Computer audition.
Computer audition (CA) or machine listening is the general field of study of algorithms and systems for audio interpretation by machines. Since the notion of what it means for a machine to "hear" is very broad and somewhat vague, computer audition attempts to bring together several disciplines that originally dealt with specific problems or had a concrete application in mind. The engineer Paris Smaragdis, interviewed in "Technology Review", talks about these systems "software that uses sound to locate people moving through rooms, monitor machinery for impending breakdowns, or activate traffic cameras to record accidents."
Inspired by models of human audition, CA deals with questions of representation, transduction, grouping, use of musical knowledge and general sound semantics for the purpose of performing intelligent operations on audio and music signals by the computer. Technically this requires a combination of methods from the fields of signal processing, auditory modelling, music perception and cognition, pattern recognition, and machine learning, as well as more traditional methods of artificial intelligence for musical knowledge representation.
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Amdahl's law
In computer architecture, Amdahl's law (or Amdahl's argument) is a formula that shows how much faster a task can be completed when more resources are added to the system.
The law can be stated as:
"the overall performance improvement gained by optimizing a single part of a system is limited by the fraction of time that the improved part is actually used".
It is named after computer scientist Gene Amdahl, and was presented at the American Federation of Information Processing Societies (AFIPS) Spring Joint Computer Conference in 1967.
Amdahl's law is often used in parallel computing to predict the theoretical speedup when using multiple processors.
Definition.
In the context of Amdahl's law, speedup can be defined as:
formula_1
or
formula_2
Amdahl's law can be formulated in the following way:
where
The formula_7 is frequently much lower than one might expect. For instance, if a programmer enhances a part of the code that represents 10% of the total execution time (i.e. formula_8 of 0.10) and achieves a formula_9 of 10,000, then formula_10 becomes 1.11 which means only 11% improvement in total speedup of the program. So, despite a massive improvement in one section, the overall benefit is quite small. In another example, if the programmer optimizes a section that accounts for 99% of the execution time (i.e. formula_5 of 0.99) with a speedup factor of 100 (i.e. formula_6of 100), the formula_4 only reaches 50. This indicates that half of the potential performance gain (formula_4 will reach 100 if 100% of the execution time is covered) is lost due to the remaining 1% of execution time that was not improved.
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Implications.
Followings are implications of Amdahl's law:
Limitations.
Followings are limitations of Amdahl's law:
Amdahl's law applies only to the cases where the problem size is fixed. In practice, as more computing resources become available, they tend to get used on larger problems (larger datasets), and the time spent in the parallelizable part often grows much faster than the inherently serial work. In this case, Gustafson's law gives a less pessimistic and more realistic assessment of the parallel performance.
Universal Scalability Law (USL), developed by Neil J. Gunther, extends the Amdahl's law and accounts for the additional overhead due to inter-process communication. USL quantifies scalability based on parameters such as contention and coherency.
Derivation.
A task executed by a system whose resources are improved compared to an initial similar system can be split up into two parts:
An example is a computer program that processes files. A part of that program may scan the directory of the disk and create a list of files internally in memory. After that, another part of the program passes each file to a separate thread for processing. The part that scans the directory and creates the file list cannot be sped up on a parallel computer, but the part that processes the files can.
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The execution time of the whole task before the improvement of the resources of the system is denoted as formula_15. It includes the execution time of the part that would not benefit from the improvement of the resources and the execution time of the one that would benefit from it. The fraction of the execution time of the task that would benefit from the improvement of the resources is denoted by formula_16. The one concerning the part that would not benefit from it is therefore . Then:
It is the execution of the part that benefits from the improvement of the resources that is accelerated by the factor formula_18 after the improvement of the resources. Consequently, the execution time of the part that does not benefit from it remains the same, while the part that benefits from it becomes:
The theoretical execution time formula_20 of the whole task after the improvement of the resources is then:
Amdahl's law gives the theoretical speedup in latency of the execution of the whole task "at fixed workload formula_22", which yields
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Parallel programs.
If 30% of the execution time may be the subject of a speedup, "p" will be 0.3; if the improvement makes the affected part twice as fast, "s" will be 2. Amdahl's law states that the overall speedup of applying the improvement will be:
For example, assume that we are given a serial task which is split into four consecutive parts, whose percentages of execution time are , , , and respectively. Then we are told that the 1st part is not sped up, so , while the 2nd part is sped up 5 times, so , the 3rd part is sped up 20 times, so , and the 4th part is sped up 1.6 times, so . By using Amdahl's law, the overall speedup is
Notice how the 5 times and 20 times speedup on the 2nd and 3rd parts respectively don't have much effect on the overall speedup when the 4th part (48% of the execution time) is accelerated by only 1.6 times.
Serial programs.
For example, with a serial program in two parts "A" and "B" for which and ,
Therefore, making part "A" to run 2 times faster is better than making part "B" to run 5 times faster. The percentage improvement in speed can be calculated as
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Optimizing the sequential part of parallel programs.
If the non-parallelizable part is optimized by a factor of , then
It follows from Amdahl's law that the speedup due to parallelism is given by
When formula_31, we have formula_32, meaning that the speedup is
measured with respect to the execution time after the non-parallelizable part is optimized.
When formula_33,
If formula_35, formula_36 and formula_37, then:
Transforming sequential parts of parallel programs into parallelizable.
Next, we consider the case wherein the non-parallelizable part is reduced by a factor of , and the parallelizable part is correspondingly increased. Then
It follows from Amdahl's law that the speedup due to parallelism is given by
Relation to the law of diminishing returns.
Amdahl's law is often conflated with the law of diminishing returns, whereas only a special case of applying Amdahl's law demonstrates law of diminishing returns. If one picks optimally (in terms of the achieved speedup) what is to be improved, then one will see monotonically decreasing improvements as one improves. If, however, one picks non-optimally, after improving a sub-optimal component and moving on to improve a more optimal component, one can see an increase in the return. Note that it is often rational to improve a system in an order that is "non-optimal" in this sense, given that some improvements are more difficult or require larger development time than others.
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Amdahl's law does represent the law of diminishing returns if one is considering what sort of return one gets by adding more processors to a machine, if one is running a fixed-size computation that will use all available processors to their capacity. Each new processor added to the system will add less usable power than the previous one. Each time one doubles the number of processors the speedup ratio will diminish, as the total throughput heads toward the limit of 1/(1 − "p").
This analysis neglects other potential bottlenecks such as memory bandwidth and I/O bandwidth. If these resources do not scale with the number of processors, then merely adding processors provides even lower returns.
An implication of Amdahl's law is that to speed up real applications which have both serial and parallel portions, heterogeneous computing techniques are required. There are novel speedup and energy consumption models based on a more general representation of heterogeneity, referred to as the normal form heterogeneity, that support a wide range of heterogeneous many-core architectures. These modelling methods aim to predict system power efficiency and performance ranges, and facilitates research and development at the hardware and system software levels.
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Ayahuasca
Ayahuasca is a South American psychoactive beverage, traditionally used by Indigenous cultures and folk healers in the Amazon and Orinoco basins for spiritual ceremonies, divination, and healing a variety of psychosomatic complaints.
Originally restricted to areas of Peru, Brazil, Colombia and Ecuador, in the middle of the 20th century it became widespread in Brazil in the context of the appearance of syncretic religions that use ayahuasca as a sacrament, like Santo Daime, União do Vegetal and Barquinha, which blend elements of Amazonian Shamanism, Christianity, Kardecist Spiritism, and African-Brazilian religions such as Umbanda, Candomblé and Tambor de Mina, later expanding to several countries across all continents, notably the United States and Western Europe, and, more incipiently, in Eastern Europe, South Africa, Australia, and Japan.
More recently, new phenomena regarding ayahuasca use have evolved and moved to urban centers in North America and Europe, with the emergence of neoshamanic hybrid rituals and spiritual and recreational drug tourism. Also, anecdotal evidence, studies conducted among ayahuasca consumers and clinical trials suggest that ayahuasca has therapeutic potential, especially for the treatment of substance dependence, anxiety, and mood disorders. Thus, currently, despite continuing to be used in a traditional way, ayahuasca is also consumed recreationally worldwide, and is considered as a potential future treatment in modern medicine. Ayahuasca often causes nausea and vomiting and has a number of rarer more serious possible side effects including breathing difficulties and seizure; it may cause psychosis in those predisposed to the condition.
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Ayahuasca is a hallucinogen commonly made by the prolonged decoction of the stems of the "Banisteriopsis caapi" vine and the leaves of the "Psychotria viridis" shrub, although hundreds of species are used in addition or substitution (See "Preparation" below). "P. viridis" contains "N","N"-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT), a highly psychedelic substance. Although orally inactive, "B. caapi" is rich with harmala alkaloids, such as harmine, harmaline and tetrahydroharmine (THH), which can act as monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOI). This halts the liver and gastrointestinal metabolism of DMT, allowing it to reach the systemic circulation and the brain, where it activates 5-HT1A/2A/2C receptors in frontal and paralimbic areas.
Etymology.
"Ayahuasca" is the hispanicized spelling (i.e., spelled according to Spanish orthography) of a word that originates from the Quechuan languages, which are spoken in the Andean states of Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru, and Colombia. Speakers of Quechuan languages who use modern Quechuan orthography spell it "ayawaska". The word refers both to the liana "Banisteriopsis caapi", and to the brew prepared from it. In the Quechua languages, "aya" means "spirit, soul", or "corpse, dead body", and "waska" means "rope" or "woody vine", "liana". The word "ayahuasca" has been variously translated as "liana of the soul", "liana of the dead", and "spirit liana". In the cosmovision of its users, the ayahuasca is the vine that allows the spirit to wander detached from the body, entering the spiritual world, otherwise forbidden for the alive.
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Common names.
Although ayahuasca is the most widely used term in Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador and Brazil, the brew is known by many names throughout northern South America:
Other names in the Western world.
In the last decades, two new important terminologies emerged. Both are commonly used in the Western world in neoshamanic, recreative or pharmaceutical contexts to address ayahuasca-like substances created without the traditional botanical species, due to it being expensive and/or hard to find in these countries. These concepts are surrounded by some controversies involving ethnobotany, patents, commodification and biopiracy:
History.
Origins.
Archaeological evidence of the use of psychoactive plants in northeastern Amazon dates back to 1500–2000 BCE. Anthropomorphic figurines, snuffing trays and pottery vessels, often adorned with mythological figures and sacred animals, offer a glimpse of the pre-Columbian culture regarding use of the sacred plants, their preparation and ritual consumption [citar naranjo 86]. Although several botanical specimens (like tobacco, coca and "Anadenanthera spp.") were identified among these objects, there is no unequivocal evidence of this date referring directly to ayahuasca. "Banisteriopsis caapi" use is suggested from a pouch containing carved snuffing trays, bone spatulas and other paraphernalia with traces of harmine and DMT, discovered in a cave in southwestern Bolivia in 2008, and chemical traces of harmine in the hair of two mummies found in northern Chile. Both cases are linked to Tiwanaku people, circa 900 CE. There are several reports of oral and nasal use of "Anadenanthera spp." (rich in bufotenin) ritualistically and therapeutically during labor and infancy, and researchers suggest that addition of "Banisteriopsis spp." to catalyze its psychoactivity emerged later, due to contact between different groups of Amazon and Altiplano.
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Despite claims by numerous anthropologists and ethnologists, such as Plutarco Naranjo, regarding the millennial usage of ayahuasca, compelling evidence substantiating its pre-Columbian consumption is yet to be firmly established. As articulated by Dennis McKenna: "No one can say for certain where the practice may have originated, and about all that can be stated with certainty is that is already spread among numerous indigenous tribes throughout Amazon basin by the time ayahuasca came to the attention of Western ethnographers in the mid-nineteenth century" The first western references of the ayahuasca beverage dates back to seventeenth century, during the European colonization of the Americas. The earlier report is a letter from Vincente de Valverde to the Holy Office of the Inquisition. Jose Chantre y Herrera still in the seventeenth century, provided the first detailed description of a "devilish potion" cooked from bitter herbs and lianas (called "ayaguasca") and its rituals: "[...] In other nations, they set aside an entire night for divination.
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Jose Chantre y Herrera still in the seventeenth century, provided the first detailed description of a "devilish potion" cooked from bitter herbs and lianas (called "ayaguasca") and its rituals: "[...] In other nations, they set aside an entire night for divination. For this purpose, they select the most capable house in the vicinity because many people are expected to attend the event. The diviner hangs his bed in the middle and places an infernal potion, known as ayahuasca, by his side, which is particularly effective at altering one's senses. They prepare a brew from bitter vines or herbs, which, when boiled sufficiently, must become quite potent. Since it's so strong at altering one's judgment in small quantities, the precaution is not excessive, and it fits into two small pots.
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Since it's so strong at altering one's judgment in small quantities, the precaution is not excessive, and it fits into two small pots. They also occasionally use these substances for the treatment of common illnesses, especially headaches. So, the person who wants to divine drinks the chosen substance with certain rituals, and while deprived of their senses from the mouth downwards, to prevent the strength of the plant from harming them, they remain in this state for many hours and sometimes even two or three days until the effects run their course, and the intoxication subsides. After this, they reflect on what their imagination revealed, which occasionally remains with them for delirium. This is what they consider accomplished and propagate as an oracle." Latter reports were produced by Juan Magnin in 1740, describing ayahuasca use as a medicinal plant by the Jivaroan peoples (called "ayahuessa") and by Franz Xaver Veigl in 1768, that reports about several "dangerous plants", including a bitter liana used for precognition and sorcery.
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