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Many colleagues were unnerved by Housman's scathing attacks on those he thought guilty of shoddy scholarship. In his paper "The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism" (1921) he wrote: "A textual critic engaged upon his business is not at all like Newton investigating the motion of the planets: he is much more like a dog hunting for fleas". He declared many of his contemporary scholars to be stupid, lazy, vain, or all three, saying: "Knowledge is good, method is good, but one thing beyond all others is necessary; and that is to have a head, not a pumpkin, on your shoulders, and brains, not pudding, in your head". His younger colleague, A. S. F. Gow, quoted examples of these attacks, noting that they "were often savage in the extreme". Gow also related how Housman intimidated students, sometimes reducing the women to tears. According to Gow, Housman could never remember the names of female students, maintaining that "had he burdened his memory by the distinction between Miss Jones and Miss Robinson, he might have forgotten that between the second and fourth declension". Among the more notable students at his Cambridge lectures was Enoch Powell, one of whose own Classical emendations was later complimented by Housman.
In his private life, Housman enjoyed country walks, gastronomy, air travel and making frequent visits to France, where he read "books which were banned in Britain as pornographic" but he struck A. C. Benson, a fellow don, as being "descended from a long line of maiden aunts". His feelings about his poetry were ambivalent and he certainly treated it as secondary to his scholarship. He did not speak in public about his poems until 1933, when he gave a lecture "The Name and Nature of Poetry", arguing there that poetry should appeal to emotions rather than to the intellect. Housman died, aged 77, in Cambridge. His ashes are buried just outside St Laurence's Church, Ludlow. A cherry tree was planted there in his memory (see "A Shropshire Lad" II) and replaced by the Housman Society in 2003 with a new cherry tree nearby. Poetry. "A Shropshire Lad". During his years in London, Housman completed "A Shropshire Lad", a cycle of 63 poems. After one publisher had turned it down, he helped subsidise its publication in 1896. At first selling slowly, it rapidly became a lasting success. Its appeal to English musicians had helped to make it widely known before World War I, when its themes struck a powerful chord with English readers. The book has been in print continuously since May 1896.
The poems are marked by pessimism and preoccupation with death, without religious consolation (Housman had become an atheist while still an undergraduate). Housman wrote many of them while living in Highgate, London, before ever visiting Shropshire, which he presented in an idealised pastoral light as his 'land of lost content'. Housman himself acknowledged that "No doubt I have been unconsciously influenced by the Greeks and Latins, but [the] chief sources of which I am conscious are Shakespeare's songs, the Scottish Border ballads, and Heine". Later collections. Housman began collecting a new set of poems after the First World War. His early work was an influence on many British poets who became famous by their writing about the war, and he wrote several poems as occasional verse to commemorate the war dead. This included his "Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries", honouring the British Expeditionary Force, an elite but small force of professional soldiers sent to Belgium at the start of the war. In the early 1920s, when Moses Jackson was dying in Canada, Housman wanted to assemble his best unpublished poems so that Jackson could read them before his death. These later poems, mostly written before 1910, show a greater variety of subject and form than those in "A Shropshire Lad" but lack its consistency. He published his new collection as "Last Poems" (1922), feeling that his inspiration was exhausted and that he should not publish more in his lifetime.
After Housman's death in 1936, his brother, Laurence published further poems in "More Poems" (1936), "A. E .H.: Some Poems, Some Letters and a Personal Memoir by his Brother" (1937), and "Collected Poems" (1939). "A. E. H." includes humorous verse such as a parody of Longfellow's poem "Excelsior". Housman also wrote a parodic , in English, first published in 1883 in "The Bromsgrovian", the magazine of his old school, and frequently reprinted. John Sparrow quoted a letter written late in Housman's life that described the genesis of his poems: Sparrow himself adds, "How difficult it is to achieve a satisfactory analysis may be judged by considering the last poem in "A Shropshire Lad". Of its four stanzas, Housman tells us that two were 'given' him ready made; one was coaxed forth from his subconsciousness an hour or two later; the remaining one took months of conscious composition. No one can tell for certain which was which." "De Amicitia" (Of Friendship). In 1942, Laurence Housman also deposited an essay entitled "A. E. Housman's 'De Amicitia'" in the British Library, with the proviso that it was not to be published for 25 years. The essay discussed A. E. Housman's homosexuality and his love for Moses Jackson. Despite the conservative nature of the times and his own caution in public life, Housman was quite open in his poetry, and especially in "A Shropshire Lad", about his deeper sympathies. Poem XXX of that sequence, for instance, speaks of how "Fear contended with desire": "Others, I am not the first, / Have willed more mischief than they durst". In "More Poems", he buries his love for Moses Jackson in the very act of commemorating it, as his feelings of love are not reciprocated and must be carried unfulfilled to the grave:
His poem "Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?", written after the trial of Oscar Wilde, addressed more general attitudes towards homosexuals. In the poem the prisoner is suffering "for the colour of his hair", a natural quality that, in a coded reference to homosexuality, is reviled as "nameless and abominable" (recalling the legal phrase "peccatum illud horribile, inter Christianos non nominandum", "that horrible sin, not to be named amongst Christians"). Musical settings. Housman's poetry, especially "A Shropshire Lad", was set to music by many British, and in particular English, composers in the first half of the 20th century. The national, pastoral and traditional elements of his style resonated with similar trends in English music. In 1904, the cycle "A Shropshire Lad" was set by Arthur Somervell, who in 1898 had begun to develop the concept of the English song-cycle in his version of Tennyson's "Maud". Stephen Banfield believes it was acquaintance with Somervell's cycle that led other composers to set Housman: Ralph Vaughan Williams is likely to have attended the first performance at the Aeolian Hall on 3 February 1905. His well-known cycle of six songs "On Wenlock Edge", for string quartet, tenor and piano, was published in 1909. Between 1909 and 1911, George Butterworth produced settings in two collections, "Six Songs from A Shropshire Lad" and "Bredon Hill and Other Songs". He also wrote the orchestral tone poem "A Shropshire Lad", first performed at Leeds Festival in 1912.
Ivor Gurney was another composer who made renowned settings of Housman's poems. Towards the end of World War I, he was working on his cycle "Ludlow and Teme", for voice and string quartet (published in 1919), and went on to compose the eight-song cycle "The Western Playland" in 1921. One more who set Housman songs during this period was John Ireland in the song cycle, "The Land of Lost Content" (192021). Charles Wilfred Orr produced 24 Housman settings in songs and song cycles composed from the 1920s into the 1950s. Even composers not directly associated with the 'pastoral' tradition, such as Arnold Bax, Lennox Berkeley and Arthur Bliss, were attracted to Housman's poetry. Housman's attitude to musical interpretations of his poetry, and indeed to music in general, was either indifference or torment. He told his friend Percy Withers that he knew nothing of music and it meant nothing to him. Withers once played him a record of the Vaughan Williams setting, but realised he had made a mistake when he saw the look of disgust on the poet's face. Nevertheless, by 1976, a catalogue listed 400 musical settings of Housman's poems. As of 2024, Lieder Net Archive records 678 settings of 188 texts.
Commemorations. The earliest commemoration of Housman was in the chapel of Trinity College in Cambridge, where there is a memorial brass on the south wall. The Latin inscription was composed by his colleague there, A. S. F. Gow, who was also the author of a biographical and bibliographical sketch published immediately following his death. Translated into English, the memorial reads: From 1947, University College London's academic common room was dedicated to his memory as the Housman Room. Blue plaques followed later elsewhere, the first being on Byron Cottage in Highgate in 1969, recording the fact that "A Shropshire Lad" was written there. More followed, placed on his Worcestershire birthplace, his homes and school in Bromsgrove. The latter were encouraged by the Housman Society, which was founded in the town in 1973. Another initiative was the statue in Bromsgrove High Street, showing the poet striding with walking stick in hand. The work of local sculptor Kenneth Potts, it was unveiled on 22 March 1985. The blue plaques in Worcestershire were set up on the centenary of "A Shropshire Lad" in 1996. In September of the same year, a memorial window lozenge was dedicated at Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey The following year saw the première of Tom Stoppard's play "The Invention of Love", whose subject is the relationship between Housman and Moses Jackson.
As the 150th anniversary of his birth approached, London University inaugurated its Housman lectures on classical subjects in 2005, initially given every second year then annually after 2011. The anniversary itself in 2009 saw the publication of a new edition of "A Shropshire Lad", including pictures from across Shropshire taken by local photographer Gareth Thomas. Among other events, there were performances of Vaughan Williams's "On Wenlock Edge" and Ivor Gurney's "Ludlow and Teme" at St Laurence's Church in Ludlow. Works. Published lectures. These lectures are listed by date of delivery, with date of first publication given separately if different. Prose collections. "Selected Prose", edited by John Carter, Cambridge University Press, 1961
Causes of climate change The scientific community has been investigating the causes of climate change for decades. After thousands of studies, the scientific consensus is that it is "unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land since pre-industrial times." This consensus is supported by around 200 scientific organizations worldwide. The scientific principle underlying current climate change is the greenhouse effect, which provides that greenhouse gases pass sunlight that heats the earth, but trap some of the resulting heat that radiates from the planet's surface. Large amounts of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane have been released into the atmosphere through burning of fossil fuels since the industrial revolution. Indirect emissions from land use change, emissions of other greenhouse gases such as nitrous oxide, and increased concentrations of water vapor in the atmosphere, also contribute to climate change. The warming from the greenhouse effect has a logarithmic relationship with the concentration of greenhouse gases. This means that every additional fraction of and the other greenhouse gases "in the atmosphere" has a slightly smaller warming effect than the fractions before it as the "total" concentration increases. However, only around half of emissions continually reside in the atmosphere in the first place, as the other half is quickly absorbed by carbon sinks in the land and oceans. Further, the warming per unit of greenhouse gases is also affected by feedbacks, such as the changes in water vapor concentrations or Earth's albedo (reflectivity).
As the warming from increases, carbon sinks absorb a smaller fraction of total emissions, while the "fast" climate change feedbacks amplify greenhouse gas warming. Thus, the effects counteract one another, and the warming from each unit of emitted by humans increases temperature in linear proportion to the total amount of emissions. Further, some fraction of the greenhouse warming has been "masked" by the human-caused emissions of sulfur dioxide, which forms aerosols that have a cooling effect. However, this masking has been receding in the recent years, due to measures to combat acid rain and air pollution caused by sulfates. Factors affecting Earth's climate. A forcing is something that is imposed externally on the climate system. External forcings include natural phenomena such as volcanic eruptions and variations in the sun's output. Human activities can also impose forcings, for example, through changing the composition of Earth's atmosphere. Radiative forcing is a measure of how various factors alter the energy balance of planet Earth. A positive radiative forcing will lead towards a warming of the surface and, over time, the climate system. Between the start of the Industrial Revolution in 1750, and the year 2005, the increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (chemical formula: ) led to a positive radiative forcing, averaged over the Earth's surface area, of about 1.66 watts per square metre (abbreviated W m−2).
Climate feedbacks can either amplify or dampen the response of the climate to a given forcing. There are many feedback mechanisms in the climate system that can either amplify (a positive feedback) or diminish (a negative feedback) the effects of a change in climate forcing. The climate system will vary in response to changes in forcings. The climate system will show internal variability both in the presence and absence of forcings imposed on it. This internal variability is a result of complex interactions between components of the climate system, such as the coupling between the atmosphere and ocean. An example of internal variability is the El Niño–Southern Oscillation. Human-caused influences. Factors affecting Earth's climate can be broken down into forcings, feedbacks and internal variations. Four main lines of evidence support the dominant role of human activities in recent climate change: Greenhouse gases. Greenhouse gases are transparent to sunlight, and thus allow it to pass through the atmosphere to heat the Earth's surface. The Earth radiates it as heat, and greenhouse gases absorb a portion of it. This absorption slows the rate at which heat escapes into space, trapping heat near the Earth's surface and warming it over time. While water vapour and clouds are the biggest contributors to the greenhouse effect, they primarily change as a function of temperature. Therefore, they are considered to be feedbacks that change climate sensitivity. On the other hand, gases such as , tropospheric ozone, CFCs and nitrous oxide are added or removed independently from temperature. Hence, they are considered to be external forcings that change global temperatures.
Human activity since the Industrial Revolution (about 1750), mainly extracting and burning fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas), has increased the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, resulting in a radiative imbalance. Over the past 150 years human activities have released increasing quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. By 2019, the concentrations of and methane had increased by about 48% and 160%, respectively, since 1750. These levels are higher than they have been at any time during the last 2 million years. Concentrations of methane are far higher than they were over the last 800,000 years. This has led to increases in mean global temperature, or global warming. The likely range of human-induced surface-level air warming by 2010–2019 compared to levels in 1850–1900 is 0.8 °C to 1.3 °C, with a best estimate of 1.07 °C. This is close to the observed overall warming during that time of 0.9 °C to 1.2 °C. Temperature changes during that time were likely only ±0.1 °C due to natural forcings and ±0.2 °C due to variability in the climate.
Global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions in 2019 were equivalent to 59 billion tonnes of . Of these emissions, 75% was , 18% was methane, 4% was nitrous oxide, and 2% was fluorinated gases. Carbon dioxide. emissions primarily come from burning fossil fuels to provide energy for transport, manufacturing, heating, and electricity. Additional emissions come from deforestation and industrial processes, which include the released by the chemical reactions for making cement, steel, aluminum, and fertiliser. is absorbed and emitted naturally as part of the carbon cycle, through animal and plant respiration, volcanic eruptions, and ocean-atmosphere exchange. Human activities, such as the burning of fossil fuels and changes in land use (see below), release large amounts of carbon to the atmosphere, causing concentrations in the atmosphere to rise. The high-accuracy measurements of atmospheric concentration, initiated by Charles David Keeling in 1958, constitute the master time series documenting the changing composition of the atmosphere. These data, known as the Keeling Curve, have iconic status in climate change science as evidence of the effect of human activities on the chemical composition of the global atmosphere.
Keeling's initial 1958 measurements showed 313 parts per million by volume (ppm). Atmospheric concentrations, commonly written "ppm", are measured in parts-per-million by volume (ppmv). In May 2019, the concentration of in the atmosphere reached 415 ppm. The last time when it reached this level was 2.6–5.3 million years ago. Without human intervention, it would be 280 ppm. In 2022–2024, the concentration of in the atmosphere increased faster than ever before according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, as a result of sustained emissions and El Niño conditions. Methane and nitrous oxide. Methane emissions come from livestock, manure, rice cultivation, landfills, wastewater, and coal mining, as well as oil and gas extraction. Nitrous oxide emissions largely come from the microbial decomposition of fertiliser. Methane and to a lesser extent nitrous oxide are also major forcing contributors to the greenhouse effect. The Kyoto Protocol lists these together with hydrofluorocarbon (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs), and sulfur hexafluoride (SF6), which are entirely artificial gases, as contributors to radiative forcing. The chart at right attributes anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions to eight main economic sectors, of which the largest contributors are power stations (many of which burn coal or other fossil fuels), industrial processes, transportation fuels (generally fossil fuels), and agricultural by-products (mainly methane from enteric fermentation and nitrous oxide from fertilizer use).
Aerosols. Air pollution, in the form of aerosols, affects the climate on a large scale. Aerosols scatter and absorb solar radiation. From 1961 to 1990, a gradual reduction in the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth's surface was observed. This phenomenon is popularly known as "global dimming", and is primarily attributed to sulfate aerosols produced by the combustion of fossil fuels with heavy sulfur concentrations like coal and bunker fuel. Smaller contributions come from black carbon, organic carbon from combustion of fossil fuels and biofuels, and from anthropogenic dust. Globally, aerosols have been declining since 1990 due to pollution controls, meaning that they no longer mask greenhouse gas warming as much. Aerosols also have indirect effects on the Earth's energy budget. Sulfate aerosols act as cloud condensation nuclei and lead to clouds that have more and smaller cloud droplets. These clouds reflect solar radiation more efficiently than clouds with fewer and larger droplets. They also reduce the growth of raindrops, which makes clouds more reflective to incoming sunlight. Indirect effects of aerosols are the largest uncertainty in radiative forcing.
While aerosols typically limit global warming by reflecting sunlight, black carbon in soot that falls on snow or ice can contribute to global warming. Not only does this increase the absorption of sunlight, it also increases melting and sea-level rise. Limiting new black carbon deposits in the Arctic could reduce global warming by 0.2 °C by 2050. Land surface changes. According to Food and Agriculture Organization, around 30% of Earth's land area is largely unusable for humans (glaciers, deserts, etc.), 26% is forests, 10% is shrubland and 34% is agricultural land. Deforestation is the main land use change contributor to global warming, Between 1750 and 2007, about one-third of anthropogenic emissions were from changes in land use - primarily from the decline in forest area and the growth in agricultural land. primarily deforestation. as the destroyed trees release , and are not replaced by new trees, removing that carbon sink. Between 2001 and 2018, 27% of deforestation was from permanent clearing to enable agricultural expansion for crops and livestock. Another 24% has been lost to temporary clearing under the shifting cultivation agricultural systems. 26% was due to logging for wood and derived products, and wildfires have accounted for the remaining 23%. Some forests have not been fully cleared, but were already degraded by these impacts. Restoring these forests also recovers their potential as a carbon sink.
Local vegetation cover impacts how much of the sunlight gets reflected back into space (albedo), and how much heat is lost by evaporation. For instance, the change from a dark forest to grassland makes the surface lighter, causing it to reflect more sunlight. Deforestation can also modify the release of chemical compounds that influence clouds, and by changing wind patterns. In tropic and temperate areas the net effect is to produce significant warming, and forest restoration can make local temperatures cooler. At latitudes closer to the poles, there is a cooling effect as forest is replaced by snow-covered (and more reflective) plains. Globally, these increases in surface albedo have been the dominant direct influence on temperature from land use change. Thus, land use change to date is estimated to have a slight cooling effect. Livestock-associated emissions. More than 18% of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are attributed to livestock and livestock-related activities such as deforestation and increasingly fuel-intensive farming practices. Specific attributions to the livestock sector include:
Ripple effects. Carbon sinks. The Earth's surface absorbs as part of the carbon cycle. Despite the contribution of deforestation to greenhouse gas emissions, the Earth's land surface, particularly its forests, remain a significant carbon sink for . Land-surface sink processes, such as carbon fixation in the soil and photosynthesis, remove about 29% of annual global emissions. The ocean also serves as a significant carbon sink via a two-step process. First, dissolves in the surface water. Afterwards, the ocean's overturning circulation distributes it deep into the ocean's interior, where it accumulates over time as part of the carbon cycle. Over the last two decades, the world's oceans have absorbed 20 to 30% of emitted . Thus, around half of human-caused emissions have been absorbed by land plants and by the oceans. This fraction of absorbed emissions is not static. If future emissions decrease, the Earth will be able to absorb up to around 70%. If they increase substantially, it'll still absorb more carbon than now, but the overall fraction will decrease to below 40%. This is because climate change increases droughts and heat waves that eventually inhibit plant growth on land, and soils will release more carbon from dead plants when they are warmer. The rate at which oceans absorb atmospheric carbon will be lowered as they become more acidic and experience changes in thermohaline circulation and phytoplankton distribution.
Climate change feedbacks. The response of the climate system to an initial forcing is modified by feedbacks: increased by "self-reinforcing" or "positive" feedbacks and reduced by "balancing" or "negative" feedbacks. The main reinforcing feedbacks are the water-vapour feedback, the ice–albedo feedback, and the net effect of clouds. The primary balancing mechanism is radiative cooling, as Earth's surface gives off more heat to space in response to rising temperature. In addition to temperature feedbacks, there are feedbacks in the carbon cycle, such as the fertilizing effect of on plant growth. Uncertainty over feedbacks, particularly cloud cover, is the major reason why different climate models project different magnitudes of warming for a given amount of emissions. As air warms, it can hold more moisture. Water vapour, as a potent greenhouse gas, holds heat in the atmosphere. If cloud cover increases, more sunlight will be reflected back into space, cooling the planet. If clouds become higher and thinner, they act as an insulator, reflecting heat from below back downwards and warming the planet.
Another major feedback is the reduction of snow cover and sea ice in the Arctic, which reduces the reflectivity of the Earth's surface. More of the Sun's energy is now absorbed in these regions, contributing to amplification of Arctic temperature changes. Arctic amplification is also thawing permafrost, which releases methane and into the atmosphere. Climate change can also cause methane releases from wetlands, marine systems, and freshwater systems. Overall, climate feedbacks are expected to become increasingly positive. Natural variability. Already in 2001, the IPCC Third Assessment Report had found that, "The combined change in radiative forcing of the two major natural factors (solar variation and volcanic aerosols) is estimated to be negative for the past two, and possibly the past four, decades." Solar irradiance has been measured directly by satellites, and indirect measurements are available from the early 1600s onwards. Yet, since 1880, there has been no upward trend in the amount of the Sun's energy reaching the Earth, in contrast to the warming of the lower atmosphere (the troposphere). Similarly, volcanic activity has the single largest natural impact (forcing) on temperature, yet it is equivalent to less than 1% of current human-caused CO2 emissions. Volcanic activity as a whole has had negligible impacts on global temperature trends since the Industrial Revolution.
Between 1750 and 2007, solar radiation may have at most increased by 0.12 W/m2, compared to 1.6 W/m2 for the net anthropogenic forcing. Consequently, the observed rapid rise in global mean temperatures seen after 1985 cannot be ascribed to solar variability." Further, the upper atmosphere (the stratosphere) would also be warming if the Sun was sending more energy to Earth, but instead, it has been cooling. This is consistent with greenhouse gases preventing heat from leaving the Earth's atmosphere. Explosive volcanic eruptions can release gases, dust and ash that partially block sunlight and reduce temperatures, or they can send water vapor into the atmosphere, which adds to greenhouse gases and increases temperatures. Because both water vapor and volcanic material have low persistence in the atmosphere, even the largest eruptions only have an effect for several years.
Achduart Achduart (Gaelic: Achadh Dhubhaird) is a coastal hamlet in Coigach, Wester Ross in northwestern Scotland, now within the Highland council area. It is situated about 4 km southeast of the village of Achiltibuie, at the end of a minor road. A footpath continues on to the hamlet of Culnacraig, then along the coast past Ben More Coigach to Strathcanaird. Achduart has accommodation facilities for tourists, who come for its proximity to the sea and its seclusion and remoteness. There is a hostel in Acheninver, a short distance to the north, formerly run by the Scottish Youth Hostels Association. The name of Achduart comes from the Gaelic for "the field at the black headland". Achduart was part of the Estate of Coigach, Lochbroom, belonging to the Countess of Cromartie. The dominant geographical feature in the area is Cairn Conmheall, which rises to 541 metres.
Achiltibuie Achiltibuie (; or "Field of the yellow-haired boy") is a long linear village in Ross and Cromarty, Highland, on the Coigach coast of northwestern Scotland, overlooking Badentarbet Bay to the west. Loch Broom and the Summer Isles lie to the south. Located 10 miles (16 km) northwest of Ullapool as the crow flies. Achiltibuie is the central community of a series of townships and communities stretching from Culnacraig, through Badenscallie and Polglass (where the community hall, the primary school and the Piping School Cafe are located), Polbain, and Reiff to Achnahaird. History. The first post office in the village opened on 28 July 1884. Smokehouse. For a time the "Summer Isles Smokehouse" attracted visitors. In 2013 the community had hopes to re-establish the business. Hydroponicum. The Hydroponicum, a facility for growing fresh fruit and vegetables indoors using hydroponics, was built in the village in the 1980s by Robert Irvine, then owner of the Summer Isles Hotel. The Hydroponicum was known for growing exotic fruit such as bananas all year round. It attracted up to 10,000 visitors a year until it was sold in 2007 to a company based in the Isle of Man. New greenhouses have since been built apart from the original hydroponicum buildings, and the new owners continue to grow fruit and vegetables for local businesses and residents. A community buyout attempt in 2011 by the Coigach Community Development Company fell through when the site's sellers pulled out. The building has now been demolished. Some of the former staff of the Hydroponicum run a small-scale activity known as The Achiltibuie Garden, situated nearby.
Notable recent achievements. 'Coigach Community Rowing' the crew members of which coastal rowing club are all local, won the World St. Ayles Skiff Rowing Championships in July 2013 and a mixed crew from the club won the Alan Spong Trophy for 1st Mixed crew 4-oar rowing at the Thames Great River Race in September 2013. Coigach Community Rowing hand-built their two St Ayles rowing skiffs, the 'Coigach Lass' and the 'Lily~Rose' and race under the auspices of the Scottish Coastal Rowing Association, which is the governing body of St Ayles class coastal rowing around the world. The Brochs of Coigach designed by SBA Architects Ltd were shortlisted in 2011 for the RIAS Andrew Doolan Best Building in Scotland Award. They are two unique buildings landscaped into a hillside. They were Regional Finalist of the Civic Trust Awards 2013. In 2015, they were highly commended in the inaugural Scottish Rural Awards. Cultural connections. The Roman epic movie "The Eagle", based on the 1954 novel "The Eagle of the Ninth" by Rosemary Sutcliff, was filmed on location in Achiltibuie for a week in October 2009. The main location was Fox Point, Old Dornie. The Pictish village which was constructed at Fox Point was used on most days of the filming. Other sites included Achnahaird beach where a horse chase was filmed and Loch Lurgainn. The village and its residents featured in "The Wee Mad Road" (2008) by Jack and Barbara Maloney. Achiltibuie is also the setting of a humorous German book about Scotland by Reiner Luyken, "Schotten dicht" (2015) published by Ullstein Verlag, Berlin.
Adaptive expectations In economics, adaptive expectations is a hypothesized process by which people form their expectations about what will happen in the future based on what has happened in the past. For example, if people want to create an expectation of the inflation rate in the future, they can refer to past inflation rates to infer some consistencies and could derive a more accurate expectation the more years they consider. One simple version of adaptive expectations is stated in the following equation, where formula_1 is the next year's rate of inflation that is currently expected; formula_2 is this year's rate of inflation that was expected last year; and formula_3 is this year's actual rate of inflation: where formula_5 is between 0 and 1. This says that current expectations of future inflation reflect past expectations and an "error-adjustment" term, in which current expectations are raised (or lowered) according to the gap between actual inflation and previous expectations. The error-adjustment term, also called "partial adjustment", allows for variations in inflation rates over the previous years, especially years that have abnormally high or low rates.
The above term is the "partial adjustment" error term, this term allows for variances that occur between actual values and expected values. The importance of considering the error prevents over and under expecting values of in the above example inflation rates. The adjustment means that the expectation can tend toward the direction of the future expected value that would be closer to the actual value, this allows a prediction to be made and consideration to be added or removed so as to be accurate of the future expectation. This consideration or error term is what allows the predicted value to be adaptable, thus creating an equation that is "adaptive" of the expectation being inferred. The theory of adaptive expectations can be applied to all previous periods so that current inflationary expectations equal: where formula_8 equals actual inflation formula_9 years in the past. The adding of a time series portion to the expectation equations accounts for multiple previous years and their respective rates in forecasting like the above example of the future inflation rate. Thus, current expected inflation reflects a weighted average of all past inflation rates, where the weights get smaller and smaller as we move further in to the past. The initial previous year has the highest weighting and the subsequent years take lesser weighting the further back the equation accounts for.
When an agent makes a forecasting error (as in incorrectly recording a value or mistyping), the stochastic shock will cause the agent to incorrectly forecast the price expectation level again even if the price level experiences no further shocks, since the previous expectations only ever incorporates part of their errors. The backward nature of expectation formulation and the resultant systematic errors made by agents (see cobweb model) had become unsatisfactory to economists such as John Muth, who was pivotal in the development of an alternative model of how expectations are formed, called rational expectations. The use of rational expectations have largely replaced adaptive expectations in macroeconomic theory since its assumptions rely on an optimal expectations approach which is consistent with economic theory. However, it must be stressed that confronting adaptive expectations and rational expectations aren't necessarily justified by either use, in other words, there are situations in which following the adaptive scheme is a rational response.
The first use adaptive expectations hypothesis was to describe agent behavior in "The Purchasing Power of Money" by Irving Fisher (1911), then later used to describe models such as hyperinflation by Philip Cagan (1956). Adaptive expectations were instrumental in the consumption function (1957) and Phillips curve outlined by Milton Friedman. Friedman suggests that workers form adaptive expectations of the inflation rate, the government can easily surprise them through unexpected monetary policy changes. As agents are trapped by the money illusion, they are unable to correctly perceive price and wage dynamics, so based on Friedman's theory, unemployment can always be reduced through monetary expansions. If the government chooses to fix a low unemployment rate the result is an increasing level of inflation for an extended period of time. However, in this framework, it is clear why and how adaptive expectations are problematic. Agents are arbitrarily supposed to ignore sources of information which, otherwise, would affect their expectations. For example, government announcements are such sources. Agents are expected to modify their expectations and break with the former trends when changes in economic policy necessitate it. This is the reason why the theory of adaptive expectations is often regarded as a deviation from the rational tradition of economics.
Mexican tetra The Mexican tetra (Astyanax mexicanus), also known as the blind cave fish, blind cave characin or the blind cave tetra, is a freshwater fish in the Characidae family (tetras and relatives) of the order Characiformes. The type species of its genus, it is native to the Nearctic realm, originating in the lower Rio Grande, and the Neueces and Pecos Rivers in Texas, into the Central Plateau and eastern states of Mexico. Maturing at a total length of about , the Mexican tetra is of typical characin form, albeit with silvery, unremarkable scalation, likely an evolutionary adaptation to its natural environment. By comparison, the species' blind "cave" form has scales which evolved a pale, pinkish-white color, somewhat resembling an albino, as it inhabits pitch-black caverns and subterranean streams and has no need for a colorful appearance (i.e. for attracting mates). Likewise, the blind cave tetra has fully "devolved" (lost) the use of its eyes by living in an environment completely devoid of natural light, with only empty sockets in their place. The blind tetra instead has sensory organs along its body, as well as a heightened nervous system (and senses of smell and touch), and can immediately detect where objects or other animals are located by slight changes in the surrounding water pressure, a process vaguely similar to echolocation—another adaptation known from cave-dwelling, as well as aquatic, species, such as the bats and cetaceans.
The Mexican tetra's blind variant has experienced a steady surge in popularity among modern aquarists. "A. mexicanus" is a peaceful, sociable schooling species, like most tetras, that spends most of its time in midlevel waters above the rocky and sandy bottoms of pools, and backwaters of creeks and streams. Coming from an environment somewhere between subtropical climate, it prefers water with 6.5–8 pH, a hardness of up to 30 dGH, and a temperature range of . In the winter, some populations migrate to warmer waters. The species' natural diet consists largely of crustaceans, annelids and arthropods and their larvae, including both aquatic insects, such as water beetles, and those that land on or fall in the water, like flies or arachnids. It will also supplement its diet with algae or aquatic vegetation; in captivity, it is largely omnivorous, often doing well on a variety of foods such as frozen/thawed or live cultured blackworms, bloodworms, brine shrimp, daphnia, and mysis shrimp, among other commercially available fish foods.
The Mexican tetra has been treated as a subspecies of "A. fasciatus", though this is not widely accepted. Additionally, the hypogean blind cave form is sometimes recognized as a separate species, "A. jordani", but this directly contradicts the phylogenetic evidence. Blind cave form. "A. mexicanus" is famous for its blind cave form, which is known by such names as blind cave tetra, blind tetra (leading to easy confusion with the Brazilian "Stygichthys typhlops"), blind cave characin and blind cavefish. Depending on the exact population, cave forms can have degenerated sight or have total loss of sight and even their eyes, due to down-regulation of the protein αA-crystallin and consequent lens cell death. Despite losing their eyes, cavefish cells respond to light and show an endogenous circadian rhythm. During the start of development, larvae still exhibit a shadow response which is controlled by the pineal eye. The fish in the Pachón caves have lost their eyes completely whilst the fish from the Micos cave only have limited sight. Cave fish and surface fish are able to produce fertile offspring.
These fish can still, however, find their way around by means of their lateral lines, which are highly sensitive to fluctuating water pressure. Blindness in A. "mexicanus" induces a disruption of early neuromast patterning, which further causes asymmetries in cranial bone structure. One such asymmetry is a bend in the dorsal region of their skull, which is propounded to increase water flow to the opposite side of the face, functionally enhancing sensory input and spatial mapping in the dark waters of caves. Scientists suggest that gene cystathionine beta synthase-a mutation restricts blood flow to cavefish eyes during a critical stage of growth so the eyes are covered by skin. Currently, about 30 cave populations are known, dispersed over three geographically distinct areas in a karst region of San Luis Potosí and far southern Tamaulipas, northeastern Mexico. Among the various cave population are at least three with only full cave forms (blind and without pigment), at least eleven with cave, "normal" and intermediate forms, and at least one with both cave and "normal" forms but no intermediates. Studies suggest at least two distinct genetic lineages occur among the blind populations, and the current distribution of populations arose by at least five independent invasions. Furthermore, cave populations have a very recent origin (< 20,000 years) in which blindness or reduced vision evolved convergently after surface ancestors populated several caves independently at different times. This recent origin suggests that the phenotypic changes in cavefish populations, namely eye degeneration, arose as a result of the high fixation of genetic variants present in surface fish populations in a short period of time.
The eyed and eyeless forms of "A. mexicanus", being members of the same species, are closely related and can interbreed making this species an excellent model organism for examining convergent and parallel evolution, regressive evolution in cave animals, and the genetic basis of regressive traits. This, combined with the ease of maintaining the species in captivity, has made it the most studied cavefish and likely also the most studied cave organism overall. The blind and colorless cave form of "A. mexicanus" is sometimes recognized as a separate species, "A. jordani", but this leaves the remaining "A. mexicanus" as a paraphyletic species and "A. jordani" as polyphyletic. The Cueva Chica Cave in the southern part of the Sierra del Abra system is the type locality for "A. jordani". Other blind populations were initially also recognized as separate species, including "antrobius" described in 1946 from the Pachón Cave and "hubbsi" described in 1947 from the Los Sabinos Cave (both subsequently merged into "jordani"/"mexicanus"). The most divergent cave population is the one in Los Sabinos.
Another cave-adapted population of "Astyanax", varying from blind and depigmented to individuals showing intermediate features, is known from the Granadas Cave, part of the Balsas River drainage in Guerrero, southern Mexico, but it is a part of "A. aeneus" (itself sometimes included in "A. mexicanus"). Evolution research. The surface and cave forms of the Mexican tetra have proven powerful subjects for scientists studying evolution. When the surface-dwelling ancestors of current cave populations entered the subterranean environment, the change in ecological conditions rendered their phenotype—which included many biological functions dependent on the presence of light—subject to natural selection and genetic drift. One of the most striking changes to evolve was the loss of eyes. This is referred to as a "regressive trait" because the surface fish that originally colonized caves possessed eyes. In addition to regressive traits, cave forms evolved "constructive traits". In contrast to regressive traits, the purpose or benefit of constructive traits is generally accepted. Active research focuses on the mechanisms driving the evolution of regressive traits, such as the loss of eyes, in "A. mexicanus". Recent studies have produced evidence that the mechanism may be direct selection, or indirect selection through antagonistic pleiotropy, rather than genetic drift and neutral mutation, the traditionally favored hypothesis for regressive evolution.
Pleiotropy is hypothesized to be important in cave fish because there are genes that might be selected for one trait and automatically cause another trait to be selected for it if it is governed by the same gene. As selective pressure on one trait can coordinate change in others, pleiotropy could explain why independent adaptation to the cave environment has been observed in multiple populations of the species. One example is the relationship between taste bud amplification and eye loss controlled by sonic hedgehog expression ("Shh") in cave fish. It has been shown that with an over expression of "Shh" there is an increased number of taste buds and reduced eye development. It is hypothesized that since caves are food and nutrient limited, having an increased amount of taste buds is important and may be under strong selection while at the same time causing evolution of eye loss. The blind form of the Mexican tetra is different from the surface-dwelling form in a number of ways, including having unpigmented skin, having a better olfactory sense by having taste buds all over its head, and by being able to store four times more energy as fat, allowing it to deal with irregular food supplies more effectively.
Darwin said of sightless fish: Modern genetics has made clear that the lack of use does not, in itself, necessitate a feature's disappearance. In this context, the positive genetic benefits have to be considered, i.e., what advantages are obtained by cave-dwelling tetras by losing their eyes? Possible explanations include: It is important to note that even if natural selection is positively acting to reduce eye growth drift is still present. Another likely explanation for the loss of its eyes is that of selective neutrality and genetic drift; in the dark environment of the cave, the eyes are neither advantageous nor disadvantageous and thus any genetic factors that might impair the eyes (or their development) can take hold with no consequence on the individual or species. Because there is no selection pressure for sight in this environment, any number of genetic abnormalities that give rise to the damage or loss of eyes could proliferate among the population with no effect on the fitness of the population. Among some creationists, the cave tetra is seen as evidence 'against' evolution. One argument claims this is an instance of "devolution"—showing an evolutionary trend of decreasing complexity. But evolution is a non-directional process, and while increased complexity is a common effect, there is no reason why evolution cannot tend towards simplicity if that makes an organism better suited to its environment.
Inhibition of the HSP90 protein has a dramatic effect in the development of the blind tetra. In the aquarium. The blind cave tetras seen in the aquarium trade are all based on stock collected in the Cueva Chica Cave in the southern part of the Sierra del Abra system in 1936. These were sent to an aquarium company in Texas, who soon started to distribute them to aquarists. Since then, these have been selectively bred for their troglomorphic traits. Today large numbers are bred at commercial facilities, especially in Asia. The blind cave tetra is a hardy species. Their lack of sight does not hinder their ability to get food. They prefer subdued lighting with a rocky substrate, like gravel, mimicking their natural environment. They become semi-aggressive as they age, and are by nature schooling fish. Experiments have shown that keeping these fish in bright aquarium set-ups has no effect on the development of the skin flap that forms over their eyes as they grow.
Atom probe The atom probe was introduced at the 14th Field Emission Symposium in 1967 by Erwin Wilhelm Müller and J. A. Panitz. It combined a field ion microscope with a mass spectrometer having a single particle detection capability and, for the first time, an instrument could “... determine the nature of one single atom seen on a metal surface and selected from neighboring atoms at the discretion of the observer”. Atom probes are unlike conventional optical or electron microscopes, in that the magnification effect comes from the magnification provided by a highly curved electric field, rather than by the manipulation of radiation paths. The method is destructive in nature removing ions from a sample surface in order to image and identify them, generating magnifications sufficient to observe individual atoms as they are removed from the sample surface. Through coupling of this magnification method with time of flight mass spectrometry, ions evaporated by application of electric pulses can have their mass-to-charge ratio computed.
Through successive evaporation of material, layers of atoms are removed from a specimen, allowing for probing not only of the surface, but also through the material itself. Computer methods are used to rebuild a three-dimensional view of the sample, prior to it being evaporated, providing atomic scale information on the structure of a sample, as well as providing the type atomic species information. The instrument allows the three-dimensional reconstruction of up to billions of atoms from a sharp tip (corresponding to specimen volumes of 10,000-10,000,000 nm3). Overview. Atom probe samples are shaped to implicitly provide a highly curved electric potential to induce the resultant magnification, as opposed to direct use of lensing, such as via magnetic lenses. Furthermore, in normal operation (as opposed to a field ionization modes) the atom probe does not utilize a secondary source to probe the sample. Rather, the sample is evaporated in a controlled manner (field evaporation) and the evaporated ions are impacted onto a detector, which is typically 10 to 100 cm away.
The samples are required to have a needle geometry and are produced by similar techniques as TEM sample preparation electropolishing, or focused ion beam methods. Since 2006, commercial systems with laser pulsing have become available and this has expanded applications from metallic only specimens into semiconducting, insulating such as ceramics, and even geological materials. Preparation is done, often by hand, to manufacture a tip radius sufficient to induce a high electric field, with radii on the order of 100 nm. To conduct an atom probe experiment a very sharp needle shaped specimen is placed in an ultra high vacuum chamber. After introduction into the vacuum system, the sample is reduced to cryogenic temperatures (typically 20-100 K) and manipulated such that the needle's point is aimed towards an ion detector. A high voltage is applied to the specimen, and either a laser pulse is applied to the specimen or a voltage pulse (typically 1-2 kV) with pulse repetition rates in the hundreds of kilohertz range is applied to a counter electrode. The application of the pulse to the sample allows for individual atoms at the sample surface to be ejected as an ion from the sample surface at a known time. Typically the pulse amplitude and the high voltage on the specimen are computer controlled to encourage only one atom to ionize at a time, but multiple ionizations are possible. The delay between application of the pulse and detection of the ion(s) at the detector allow for the computation of a mass-to-charge ratio.
Whilst the uncertainty in the atomic mass computed by time-of-flight methods in atom probe is sufficiently small to allow for detection of individual isotopes within a material this uncertainty may still, in some cases, confound definitive identification of atomic species. Effects such as superposition of differing ions with multiple electrons removed, or through the presence of complex species formation during evaporation may cause two or more species to have sufficiently close time-of-flights to make definitive identification impossible. History. Field ion microscopy. Field ion microscopy is a modification of field emission microscopy where a stream of tunneling electrons is emitted from the apex of a sharp needle-like "tip" cathode when subjected to a sufficiently high electric field (~3-6 V/nm). The needle is oriented towards a phosphor screen to create a projected image of the work function at the tip apex. The image resolution is limited to (2-2.5 nm), due to quantum mechanical effects and lateral variations in the electron velocity.
In field ion microscopy, the tip is cooled by a cryogen and its polarity is reversed. When an "imaging gas" (usually hydrogen or helium) is introduced at low pressures (< 0.1 Pascal) gas ions in the high electric field at the tip apex are "field ionized" and produce a projected image of protruding atoms at the tip apex. The image resolution is determined primarily by the temperature of the tip but even at 78 Kelvin atomic resolution is achieved. 10-cm Atom Probe. The 10-cm Atom Probe, invented in 1973 by J. A. Panitz was a “new and simple atom probe which permits rapid, in depth species identification or the more usual atom-by atom analysis provided by its predecessors ... in an instrument having a volume of less than two liters in which tip movement is unnecessary and the problems of evaporation pulse stability and alignment common to previous designs have been eliminated.” This was accomplished by combining a time of flight (TOF) mass spectrometer with a proximity focussed, dual channel plate detector, an 11.8 cm drift region and a 38° field of view. An FIM image or a desorption image of the atoms removed from the apex of a field emitter tip could be obtained. The 10-cm Atom Probe has been called the "progenitor" of later atom probes including the commercial instruments.
Imaging Atom Probe. The Imaging Atom-Probe (IAP) was introduced in 1974 by J. A. Panitz. It incorporated the features of the 10-cm Atom-Probe yet “... departs completely from [previous] atom probe philosophy. Rather than attempt to determine the identity of a surface species producing a preselected ion-image spot, we wish to determine the complete crystallographic distribution of a surface species of preselected mass-to-charge ratio. Now suppose that instead of operating the [detector] continuously, it is turned on for a short time coincidentally with the arrival of a preselected species of interest by applying a "gate pulse" a time T after the evaporation pulse has reached the specimen. If the duration of the gate pulse is shorter than the travel time between adjacent species, only that surface species having the unique travel time T will be detected and its complete crystallographic distribution displayed.” It was patented in 1975 as the Field Desorption Spectrometer. The Imaging Atom-Probe moniker was coined by A. J. Waugh in 1978 and the instrument was described in detail by J. A. Panitz in the same year.
Atom Probe Tomography (APT). Modern day atom probe tomography uses a position sensitive detector aka a FIM in a box to deduce the lateral location of atoms. The idea of the APT, inspired by J. A. Panitz's "Field Desorption Spectrometer" patent, was developed by Mike Miller starting in 1983 and culminated with the first prototype in 1986. Various refinements were made to the instrument, including the use of a so-called position-sensitive (PoS) detector by Alfred Cerezo, Terence Godfrey, and George D. W. Smith at Oxford University in 1988. The Tomographic Atom Probe (TAP), developed by researchers at the University of Rouen in France in 1993, introduced a multichannel timing system and multianode array. Both instruments (PoSAP and TAP) were commercialized by Oxford Nanoscience and CAMECA respectively. Since then, there have been many refinements to increase the field of view, mass and position resolution, and data acquisition rate of the instrument. The Local Electrode Atom Probe was first introduced in 2003 by Imago Scientific Instruments. In 2005, the commercialization of the pulsed laser atom probe (PLAP) expanded the avenues of research from highly conductive materials (metals) to poor conductors (semiconductors like silicon) and even insulating materials. AMETEK acquired CAMECA in 2007 and Imago Scientific Instruments (Madison, WI) in 2010, making the company the sole commercial developer of APTs with more than 110 instruments installed around the world in 2019.
The first few decades of work with APT focused on metals. However, with the introduction of the laser pulsed atom probe systems applications have expanded to semiconductors, ceramic and geologic materials, with some work on biomaterials. The most advanced study of biological material to date using APT involved analyzing the chemical structure of teeth of the radula of chiton "Chaetopleura apiculata". In this study, the use of APT showed chemical maps of organic fibers in the surrounding nano-crystalline magnetite in the chiton teeth, fibers which were often co-located with sodium or magnesium. This has been furthered to study elephant tusks, dentin and human enamel. Theory. Field evaporation. Field evaporation is an effect that can occur when an atom bonded at the surface of a material is in the presence of a sufficiently high and appropriately directed electric field, where the electric field is the differential of electric potential (voltage) with respect to distance. Once this condition is met, it is sufficient that local bonding at the specimen surface is capable of being overcome by the field, allowing for evaporation of an atom from the surface to which it is otherwise bonded.
Ion flight. Whether evaporated from the material itself, or ionised from the gas, the ions that are evaporated are accelerated by electrostatic force, acquiring most of their energy within a few tip-radii of the sample. Subsequently, the accelerative force on any given ion is controlled by the electrostatic equation, where "n" is the ionisation state of the ion, and "e" is the fundamental electric charge. This can be equated with the mass of the ion, "m", via Newton's law (F=ma): Relativistic effects in the ion flight are usually ignored, as realisable ion speeds are only a very small fraction of the speed of light. Assuming that the ion is accelerated during a very short interval, the ion can be assumed to be travelling at constant velocity. As the ion will travel from the tip at voltage V1 to some nominal ground potential, the speed at which the ion is travelling can be estimated by the energy transferred into the ion during (or near) ionisation. Therefore, the ion speed can be computed with the following equation, which relates kinetic energy to energy gain due to the electric field, the negative arising from the loss of electrons forming a net positive charge.
Where "U" is the ion velocity. Solving for "U", the following relation is found: Let's say that for at a certain ionization voltage, a singly charged hydrogen ion acquires a resulting velocity of 1.4x10^6 ms−1 at 10~kV. A singly charged deuterium ion under the sample conditions would have acquired roughly 1.4x10^6/1.41 ms−1. If a detector was placed at a distance of 1 m, the ion flight times would be 1/1.4x10^6 and 1.41/1.4x10^6 s. Thus, the time of the ion arrival can be used to infer the ion type itself, if the evaporation time is known. From the above equation, it can be re-arranged to show that given a known flight distance. F, for the ion, and a known flight time, t, and thus one can substitute these values to obtain the mass-to-charge for the ion. Thus for an ion which traverses a 1 m flight path, across a time of 2000 ns, given an initial accelerating voltage of 5000 V (V in Si units is kg.m^2.s^-3.A^-1) and noting that one amu is 1×10−27 kg, the mass-to-charge ratio (more correctly the mass-to-ionisation value ratio) becomes ~3.86 amu/charge. The number of electrons removed, and thus net positive charge on the ion is not known directly, but can be inferred from the histogram (spectrum) of observed ions.
Magnification. The magnification in an atom is due to the projection of ions radially away from the small, sharp tip. Subsequently, in the far-field, the ions will be greatly magnified. This magnification is sufficient to observe field variations due to individual atoms, thus allowing in field ion and field evaporation modes for the imaging of single atoms. The standard projection model for the atom probe is an emitter geometry that is based upon a revolution of a conic section, such as a sphere, hyperboloid or paraboloid. For these tip models, solutions to the field may be approximated or obtained analytically. The magnification for a spherical emitter is inversely proportional to the radius of the tip, given a projection directly onto a spherical screen, the following equation can be obtained geometrically. Where rscreen is the radius of the detection screen from the tip centre, and rtip the tip radius. A practical tip to screen distances may range from several centimeters to several meters, with increased detector area required at larger to subtend the same field of view.
Practically speaking, the usable magnification will be limited by several effects, such as lateral vibration of the atoms prior to evaporation. Whilst the magnification of both the field ion and atom probe microscopes is extremely high, the exact magnification is dependent upon conditions specific to the examined specimen, so unlike for conventional electron microscopes, there is often little direct control on magnification, and furthermore, obtained images may have strongly variable magnifications due to fluctuations in the shape of the electric field at the surface. Reconstruction. The computational conversion of the ion sequence data, as obtained from a position-sensitive detector to a three-dimensional visualisation of atomic types, is termed "reconstruction". Reconstruction algorithms are typically geometrically based and have several literature formulations. Most models for reconstruction assume that the tip is a spherical object, and use empirical corrections to stereographic projection to convert detector positions back to a 2D surface embedded in 3D space, R3. By sweeping this surface through R3 as a function of the ion sequence input data, such as via ion-ordering, a volume is generated onto which positions the 2D detector positions can be computed and placed three-dimensional space.
Typically the sweep takes the simple form of advancement of the surface, such that the surface is expanded in a symmetric manner about its advancement axis, with the advancement rate set by a volume attributed to each ion detected and identified. This causes the final reconstructed volume to assume a rounded-conical shape, similar to a badminton shuttlecock. The detected events thus become a point cloud data with attributed experimentally measured values, such as ion time of flight or experimentally derived quantities, e.g. time of flight or detector data. This form of data manipulation allows for rapid computer visualisation and analysis, with data presented as point cloud data with additional information, such as each ion's mass to charge (as computed from the velocity equation above), voltage or other auxiliary measured quantity or computation therefrom. Data features. The canonical feature of atom probe data, is its high spatial resolution in the direction through the material, which has been attributed to an ordered evaporation sequence. This data can therefore image near atomically sharp buried interfaces with the associated chemical information.
The data obtained from the evaporative process is however not without artefacts that form the physical evaporation or ionisation process. A key feature of the evaporation or field ion images is that the data density is highly inhomogeneous, due to the corrugation of the specimen surface at the atomic scale. This corrugation gives rise to strong electric field gradients in the near-tip zone (on the order of an atomic radii or less from the tip), which during ionisation deflects ions away from the electric field normal. The resultant deflection means that in these regions of high curvature, atomic terraces are belied by a strong anisotropy in the detection density. Where this occurs due to a few atoms on a surface is usually referred to as a "pole", as these are coincident with the crystallographic axes of the specimen (FCC, BCC, HCP) etc. Where the edges of an atomic terrace causes deflection, a low density line is formed and is termed a "zone line". These poles and zone-lines, whilst inducing fluctuations in data density in the reconstructed datasets, which can prove problematic during post-analysis, are critical for determining information such as angular magnification, as the crystallographic relationships between features are typically well known.
When reconstructing the data, owing to the evaporation of successive layers of material from the sample, the lateral and in-depth reconstruction values are highly anisotropic. Determination of the exact resolution of the instrument is of limited use, as the resolution of the device is set by the physical properties of the material under analysis. Systems. Many designs have been constructed since the method's inception. Initial field ion microscopes, precursors to modern atom probes, were usually glass blown devices developed by individual research laboratories. System layout. At a minimum, an atom probe will consist of several key pieces of equipment. Optionally, an atom probe may also include laser-optical systems for laser beam targeting and pulsing, if using laser-evaporation methods. In-situ reaction systems, heaters, or plasma treatment may also be employed for some studies as well as a pure noble gas introduction for FIM. Performance. Collectable ion volumes were previously limited to several thousand, or tens of thousands of ionic events. Subsequent electronics and instrumentation development has increased the rate of data accumulation, with datasets of hundreds of million atoms (dataset volumes of 107 nm3). Data collection times vary considerably depending upon the experimental conditions and the number of ions collected. Experiments take from a few minutes, to many hours to complete.
Applications. Metallurgy. Atom probe has typically been employed in the chemical analysis of alloy systems at the atomic level. This has arisen as a result of voltage pulsed atom probes providing good chemical and sufficient spatial information in these materials. Metal samples from large grained alloys may be simple to fabricate, particularly from wire samples, with hand-electropolishing techniques giving good results. Subsequently, atom probe has been used in the analysis of the chemical composition of a wide range of alloys. Such data is critical in determining the effect of alloy constituents in a bulk material, identification of solid-state reaction features, such as solid phase precipitates. Such information may not be amenable to analysis by other means (e.g. TEM) owing to the difficulty in generating a three-dimensional dataset with composition. Semiconductors. Semi-conductor materials are often analysable in atom probe, however sample preparation may be more difficult, and interpretation of results may be more complex, particularly if the semi-conductor contains phases which evaporate at differing electric field strengths. Applications such as ion implantation may be used to identify the distribution of dopants inside a semi-conducting material, which is increasingly critical in the correct design of modern nanometre scale electronics.
Al Capone Alphonse Gabriel Capone ( ; ; January 17, 1899 – January 25, 1947), sometimes known by the nickname "Scarface", was an American gangster and businessman who attained notoriety during the Prohibition era as the co-founder and boss of the Chicago Outfit from 1925 to 1931. His seven-year reign as a crime boss ended when he went to prison at the age of 33. Capone was born in New York City in 1899 to Italian immigrants. He joined the Five Points Gang as a teenager and became a bouncer in organized crime premises such as brothels. In his early twenties, Capone moved to Chicago and became a bodyguard of Johnny Torrio, head of a criminal syndicate that illegally supplied alcohol—the forerunner of the Outfit—and was politically protected through the Unione Siciliana. A conflict with the North Side Gang was instrumental in Capone's rise and fall. Torrio went into retirement after North Side gunmen almost killed him, handing control to Capone. Although Capone expanded the bootlegging business through increasingly violent means, his mutually profitable relationships with Mayor William Hale Thompson and the Chicago Police Department meant he seemed safe from law enforcement.
Capone apparently reveled in attention, such as the cheers from spectators when he appeared at baseball games. He made donations to various charities and was viewed by many as a "modern-day Robin Hood". The Saint Valentine's Day Massacre, in which seven people from rival gangs were murdered in broad daylight, damaged the public image of Chicago and Capone, leading influential citizens to demand government action and newspapers to dub Capone "Public Enemy No. 1". Federal authorities became intent on jailing Capone and charged him with twenty-two counts of tax evasion. He was convicted of five counts in 1931. During a highly publicized case, the judge admitted as evidence Capone's admissions of his income and unpaid taxes, made during prior and ultimately abortive negotiations to pay the government taxes he owed. He was convicted and sentenced to eleven years in federal prison. After conviction, he replaced his defense team with experts in tax law, and his grounds for appeal were strengthened by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling, although his appeal ultimately failed. Capone showed signs of neurosyphilis early in his sentence and became increasingly debilitated before being released after almost eight years of incarceration. In 1947, he died of cardiac arrest after a stroke.
Early life. Alphonse Gabriel Capone was born in Brooklyn, a borough of New York City, on January 17, 1899. His parents were Italian immigrants Teresa (; 1867–1952) and Gabriele Capone (1865–1920), both born in Angri, a small municipality outside of Naples in the province of Salerno. His father was a barber and his mother was a seamstress. Capone's family had immigrated to the United States in 1893 by ship, first going through the port city of Fiume, Austria-Hungary (modern-day Rijeka, Croatia). The family settled at 95 Navy Street, in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. When Capone was aged 11, he and his family moved to 38 Garfield Place in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Capone's parents had eight other children: James Vincenzo Capone, who later changed his name to Richard Hart and became a Prohibition agent in Homer, Nebraska; Raffaele James Capone, also known as Ralph Capone or "Bottles", who took charge of his brother's beverage industry; Salvatore "Frank" Capone; Ermina Capone, who died at the age of one; Ermino "John" Capone; Albert Capone; Matthew Capone and Mafalda Capone. Ralph and Frank worked with Al in his criminal empire. Frank did so until his death on April 1, 1924. Ralph ran Al's bottling companies (both legal and illegal) early on and was also the front man for the Chicago Outfit until he was imprisoned for tax evasion in 1932.
Capone showed promise as a student but had trouble with the rules at his strict parochial Catholic school. His schooling ended at the age of 14 after he was expelled for hitting a female teacher in the face. Capone worked at odd jobs around Brooklyn, including a candy store and a bowling alley. From 1916 to 1918, he played semi-professional baseball. Following this, Capone was influenced by gangster Johnny Torrio, whom he came to regard as a mentor. Capone married Mae Josephine Coughlin at age 19, on December 30, 1918. She was Irish Catholic and earlier that month had given birth to their son Albert Francis "Sonny" Capone (1918–2004). Albert lost most of his hearing in his left ear as a child. Capone was under the age of 21, and his parents had to consent in writing to the marriage. By all accounts, the two had a happy marriage. Career. New York City. Capone initially became involved with small-time gangs that included the Junior Forty Thieves and the Bowery Boys. He then joined the Brooklyn Rippers, and then the powerful Five Points Gang based in Lower Manhattan. During this time he was employed and mentored by fellow racketeer Frankie Yale, a bartender in a Coney Island dance hall and saloon called the Harvard Inn. Capone inadvertently insulted a woman while working the door, and he was slashed with a knife three times on the left side of his face by her brother, Frank Galluccio; the wounds led to the nickname "Scarface", which Capone loathed. The date when this occurred has been reported with inconsistencies. When Capone was photographed, he hid the scarred left side of his face, saying that the injuries were war wounds. He was called "Snorky" by his closest friends, a term for a sharp dresser.
Move to Chicago. In 1919, Capone left New York City for Chicago at the invitation of Torrio, who was imported by crime boss James "Big Jim" Colosimo as an enforcer. Capone began in Chicago as a bouncer in a brothel, which is thought to be most likely where he contracted syphilis. Capone was aware of being infected at an early stage and timely use of Salvarsan probably could have cured the infection, but he apparently never sought treatment. In 1923, Capone purchased a small house at 7244 South Prairie Avenue in the Park Manor neighborhood in Chicago's South Side for . As originally reported in the "Chicago Tribune", hijacker Joe Howard was killed on May 8, 1924, after he tried to interfere with the Capone-Torrio bootlegging business. In a 1936 article highlighting Capone's criminal career, the "Tribune" erroneously reported the date as May 7, 1923. In the early years of the decade, Capone's name began appearing in newspaper sports pages where he was described as a boxing promoter. Torrio took over Colosimo's criminal empire after the latter's murder on May 11, 1920, in which Capone was suspected of being involved.
Torrio headed an essentially Italian organized crime group that was the biggest in Chicago, with Capone as his right-hand man. Torrio was wary of being drawn into gang wars and tried to negotiate agreements over territory between rival crime groups. The smaller North Side Gang, led by Dean O'Banion, came under pressure from the Genna brothers who were allied with Torrio. O'Banion found that Torrio was unhelpful with the Gennas' encroachment, despite his pretensions to be a settler of disputes. In a fateful step, Torrio arranged the murder of O'Banion at his flower shop on November 10, 1924. This placed Hymie Weiss at the head of the gang, backed by Vincent Drucci and Bugs Moran. Weiss had been a close friend of O'Banion, and the North Siders made it a priority to get revenge on his killers. During Prohibition, Capone was involved with Canadian bootleggers who helped him smuggle liquor into the U.S. When Capone was asked if he knew Rocco Perri, billed as Canada's "King of the Bootleggers", he replied: "Why, I don't even know which street Canada is on." Other sources claim that Capone had certainly visited Canada, where he maintained some hideaways, although the Royal Canadian Mounted Police states that there is no "evidence that he ever set foot on Canadian soil".
Boss. An ambush in January 1925 left Capone shaken, but unhurt. Twelve days later, Torrio was returning from a shopping trip when he was shot several times. After recovering, he effectively resigned and handed control over to Capone, aged 26, who became the new boss of an organization that took in illegal breweries and a transportation network that reached to Canada, with political and law-enforcement protection. In turn, he was able to use more violence to increase revenue. Any establishment that refused to purchase liquor from Capone often got blown up, and as many as 100 people were killed in such bombings during the 1920s. Rivals saw Capone as responsible for the proliferation of brothels in the city. Capone often enlisted the help of local members of the black community into his operations; jazz musicians Milt Hinton and Lionel Hampton had uncles who worked for Capone on Chicago's South Side. A fan of jazz as well, Capone once asked clarinetist Johnny Dodds to play a number that Dodds did not know; Capone split a $100 bill in half and told Dodds that he would get the other half when he learned it. Capone also sent two bodyguards to accompany jazz pianist Earl Hines on a road trip.
Capone indulged in custom suits, cigars, gourmet food and drink, and female companionship. He was particularly known for his flamboyant and costly jewelry. His favorite responses to questions about his activities were "I am just a businessman, giving the people what they want" and "All I do is satisfy a public demand". Capone had become a national celebrity and talking point. Capone based himself in Cicero, Illinois, after using bribery and widespread intimidation to take over town council elections, making it difficult for the North Siders to target him. Capone's driver was found tortured and murdered, and there was an attempt on Weiss' life in the Chicago Loop. On September 20, 1926, the North Siders used a ploy outside Capone's headquarters at the Hawthorne Inn aimed at drawing him to the windows. Gunmen in several cars then opened fire with Thompson submachine guns and shotguns at the windows of the first-floor restaurant. Capone was unhurt and called for a truce, but the negotiations fell flat. Three weeks later, on October 11, Weiss was killed outside the North Siders' headquarters at O'Banion's former flower shop. The owner of Hawthorne's restaurant was a friend of Capone's, and he was kidnapped and killed by Moran and Drucci in January 1927.
Capone became increasingly security-minded and desirous of getting away from Chicago. As a precaution, he and his entourage would often show up suddenly at one of Chicago's train depots and buy up an entire Pullman sleeper car on a night train to Cleveland, Omaha, Kansas City, Little Rock, or Hot Springs, Arkansas, where they would spend a week in luxury hotel suites under assumed names. In 1928, Capone paid $40,000 to Clarence Busch of the Anheuser-Busch brewing family for a home at 93 Palm Avenue on Palm Island, Florida, between Miami and Miami Beach. Feud with Aiello. In November 1925, Antonio Lombardo, who was Capone's "consigliere", was named head of the Unione Siciliana, a Sicilian-American benevolent society that had been corrupted by gangsters. An infuriated Joe Aiello, who had wanted the position himself, believed Capone was responsible for Lombardo's ascension and resented the non-Sicilian's attempts to manipulate affairs within the Unione. Aiello severed all personal and business ties with Lombardo and entered into a feud with Capone.
Aiello allied himself with several of Capone enemies, including Jack Zuta, who ran vice and gambling houses together. Aiello plotted to eliminate both Lombardo and Capone, and starting in the spring of 1927, made several attempts to assassinate Capone. On one occasion, Aiello offered money to the chef of Joseph "Diamond Joe" Esposito's Bella Napoli Café, Capone's favorite restaurant, to put prussic acid in Capone's and Lombardo's soup; reports indicated he offered between $10,000 and $35,000. Instead, the chef exposed the plot to Capone, who responded by dispatching men to destroy Aiello's bakery on West Division Street with machine-gun fire. More than 200 bullets were fired into the bakery on May 28, 1927, wounding Aiello's brother Antonio. During the summer and autumn of 1927, a number of hitmen Aiello hired to kill Capone were themselves slain. Among them were Anthony Russo and Vincent Spicuzza, each of whom had been offered $25,000 by Aiello to kill Capone and Lombardo. Aiello eventually offered a $50,000 bounty to anyone who eliminated Capone. At least ten gunmen tried to collect on the bounty, but ended up dead. Capone's ally Ralph Sheldon attempted to kill both Capone and Lombardo for Aiello's reward, but Capone henchman, Frank Nitti, had an intelligence network that learned of the transaction and had Sheldon shot in front of a West Side hotel, although he survived the incident.
In November 1927, Aiello organized machine-gun ambushes across from Lombardo's home and a cigar store frequented by Capone, but those plans were foiled after an anonymous tip led police to raid several addresses and arrest Milwaukee gunman Angelo La Mantio and four other Aiello gunmen. After the police discovered receipts for the apartments in La Mantio's pockets, he confessed that Aiello had hired him to kill Capone and Lombardo, leading the police to arrest Aiello himself and bring him to the South Clark Street police station. Upon learning of the arrest, Capone dispatched nearly two dozen gunmen to stand guard outside the station and await Aiello's release. The men made no attempt to conceal their purpose there, and reporters and photographers rushed to the scene to observe Aiello's expected murder. When released, Aiello was given a police escort out of the station to safety. He later failed to make a court appearance after his attorney claimed he suffered a nervous breakdown. Aiello disappeared with some family members to Trenton, New Jersey, where he continued his campaign against Capone and Lombardo.
Political alliances. Chicago politicians had long been associated with questionable methods, and even newspaper circulation "wars", but the need for bootleggers to have protection in city hall introduced a far more serious level of violence and graft. Capone is generally seen as having an appreciable effect in bringing about the victory of Republican mayoral candidate William Hale Thompson, who had campaigned on a platform of not enforcing Prohibition and at one time hinted that he'd reopen illegal saloons. Thompson allegedly accepted a contribution of $250,000 from Capone. Thompson beat Democratic candidate William Emmett Dever in the 1927 mayoral race by a relatively slim margin. On the day of the Pineapple Primary on April 10, 1928, voting booths were targeted by Capone's bomber, James Belcastro, in wards where Thompson's opponents were thought to have support, causing the deaths of at least fifteen people. Belcastro was accused of murdering lawyer Octavius Granady, an African-American, who challenged Thompson's candidate for the Black vote, and was chased through the streets on polling day by cars of gunmen before being shot dead. Four policemen were among those charged along with Belcastro, but all charges were dropped after key witnesses recanted their statements. An indication of the attitude of local law enforcement toward Capone's organization came in 1931 when Belcastro was wounded in a shooting; police suggested to skeptical journalists that Belcastro was an independent operator. A 1929 report by "The New York Times" connected Capone to the 1926 murder of Assistant State Attorney William H. McSwiggin, the 1928 murders of chief investigator Ben Newmark, and former mentor Frankie Yale.
Saint Valentine's Day Massacre. Capone was widely assumed to have been responsible for ordering the 1929 Saint Valentine's Day Massacre, despite being at his Florida home at the time of the massacre. The massacre was an attempt to eliminate Bugs Moran, head of the North Side Gang, and the motivation for the plan may have been the fact that some expensive whisky that was illegally imported from Canada via the Detroit River had been hijacked while it was being transported to Cook County, Illinois. Moran was the last survivor of the North Side gunmen; his succession had come about because his similarly aggressive predecessors, Weiss and Vincent Drucci, had been killed in the violence that followed the murder of original leader Dean O'Banion. To monitor their targets' habits and movements, Capone's men rented an apartment across from the trucking warehouse and garage at 2122 North Clark Street, which served as Moran's headquarters. On the morning of Thursday, February 14, 1929, Capone's lookouts signaled four gunmen, disguised as police officers, to initiate a "police raid". The "faux" police lined the seven victims along a wall and signaled for accomplices armed with machine guns and shotguns. Moran was not among the victims. Photos of the slain victims shocked the public and damaged Capone's image. Within days, Capone received a summons to testify before a Chicago grand jury on charges of federal Prohibition violations, but he claimed to be too unwell to attend. In an effort to clean up his image, Capone donated to charities and sponsored a soup kitchen in Chicago during the Depression. The Saint Valentine's Day Massacre led to public outcry about Thompson's alliance with Capone, and this was a factor in Anton J. Cermak winning the mayoral election on April 6, 1931.
Feud with Aiello ends. Capone was known for ordering other men to do his dirty work for him. In May 1929, one of Capone's bodyguards, Frank Rio, uncovered a plot by three of his men; Albert Anselmi, John Scalise and Joseph Giunta. They had been persuaded by Aiello to depose Capone and take over the Chicago Outfit. Later on, Capone beat the men with a baseball bat and then ordered his bodyguards to shoot them, a scene that was included in the 1987 film "The Untouchables". Deirdre Bair, along with writers and historians such as William Elliot Hazelgrove, have questioned the veracity of the claim. Bair questioned why "three trained killers could sit quietly and let this happen", while Hazelgrove stated that Capone would have been "hard pressed to beat three men to death with a baseball bat" and that he would have instead let an enforcer perform the murders; however, despite claims that the story was first reported by author Walter Noble Burns in his 1931 book "The One-Way Ride: The Red Trail of Chicago Gangland from Prohibition to Jake Lingle", Capone biographers Max Allan Collins and A. Brad Schwartz have found versions of the story in press coverage shortly after the crime. Collins and Schwartz suggest that similarities among reported versions of the story indicate a basis in truth and that the Outfit deliberately spread the tale to enhance Capone's fearsome reputation. George Meyer, an associate of Capone's, also claimed to have witnessed both the planning of the murders and the event itself.
In 1930, upon learning of Aiello's continued plotting against him, Capone resolved to finally eliminate him. In the weeks before Aiello's death, Capone's men tracked him to Rochester, New York, where he had connections through Buffalo crime family boss Stefano Magaddino, and plotted to kill him there, but Aiello returned to Chicago before the plot could be executed. Aiello, angst-ridden from the constant need to hide out and the killings of several of his men, set up residence in the Chicago apartment of Unione Siciliana treasurer Pasquale "Patsy Presto" Prestogiacomo at 205 N. Kolmar Ave. On October 23, upon exiting Prestogiacomo's building to enter a taxicab, a gunman in a second-floor window across the street started firing at Aiello with a submachine gun. Aiello was said to have been shot at least 13 times before he toppled off the building steps and moved around the corner, attempting to move out of the line of fire. Instead, he moved directly into the range of a second submachine gun positioned on the third floor of another apartment block, and was subsequently gunned down.
Federal intervention. In the wake of the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre, Walter A. Strong, publisher of the "Chicago Daily News", asked his friend President Herbert Hoover for federal intervention to stem Chicago's lawlessness. He arranged a secret meeting at the White House, just two weeks after Hoover's inauguration. On March 19, 1929, Strong, joined by Frank Loesch of the Chicago Crime Commission, and Laird Bell, made their case to the President. In Hoover's 1952 "Memoir," the former President reported that Strong argued "Chicago was in the hands of the gangsters, that the police and magistrates were completely under their control, …that the Federal government was the only force by which the city's ability to govern itself could be restored. At once I directed that all the Federal agencies concentrate upon Mr. Capone and his allies." That meeting launched a multi-agency attack on Capone. Treasury and Justice Departments developed plans for income tax prosecutions against Chicago gangsters, and a small, elite squad of Prohibition Bureau agents (whose members included Eliot Ness) were deployed against bootleggers. In a city used to corruption, these lawmen were incorruptible. Charles Schwarz, a writer for the "Chicago Daily News", dubbed them Untouchables. To support Federal efforts, Strong secretly used his newspaper's resources to gather and share intelligence on the Capone outfit.
Trials. On March 27, 1929, Capone was arrested by FBI agents as he left a Chicago courtroom after testifying to a grand jury that was investigating violations of federal prohibition laws. He was charged with contempt of court for feigning illness to avoid an earlier appearance. On May 16, 1929, Capone was arrested in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for carrying a concealed weapon. On May 17, 1929, Capone was indicted by a grand jury and a trial was held before Philadelphia Municipal Court Judge John E Walsh. Entering a guilty plea by his attorney, Capone was sentenced to a prison term of one year. On August 8, 1929, Capone was transferred to Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary. A week after his release in March 1930, Capone was listed as "Public Enemy #1" on the unofficial Chicago Crime Commission's widely publicized list. In April 1930, Capone was arrested on vagrancy charges when visiting Miami Beach; the governor had ordered sheriffs to run him out of the state. Capone claimed that Miami police had refused him food and water and threatened to arrest his family. He was charged with perjury for making these statements, but was acquitted after a three-day trial in July. In September, a Chicago judge issued a warrant for Capone's arrest on charges of vagrancy and then used the publicity to run against Thompson in the Republican primary. In February 1931, Capone was tried on the contempt of court charge. In court, Judge James Herbert Wilkerson, intervened to reinforce questioning of Capone's doctor by the prosecutor. Wilkerson sentenced Capone to six months, but he remained free while on appeal of the contempt conviction.
In February 1930, Capone's organization was linked to the murder of Julius Rosenheim, who served as a police informant in the Chicago Outfit for 20 years. Tax evasion. U.S. Assistant Attorney General Mabel Walker Willebrandt is said to have originated the tactic of charging obviously wealthy crime figures with federal tax evasion on the basis of their luxurious lifestyles. In 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in "United States v. Sullivan" that the approach was legally sound: illegally earned income was subject to income tax. The key to Capone's conviction on tax charges was not his spending, but proving his income, and the most valuable evidence in that regard originated in his offer to pay tax. Ralph, his brother and a gangster in his own right, was tried for tax evasion in 1930. Ralph spent the next 18 months in prison after being convicted in a two-week trial over which Wilkerson presided. Seeking to avoid the same fate, Capone ordered his lawyer to regularize his tax position, and although it was not done, his lawyer made crucial admissions when stating the income that Capone was willing to pay tax on for various years, admitting income of $100,000 for 1928 and 1929, for instance; hence, without any investigation, the government had been given a letter from a lawyer acting for Capone conceding his large taxable income for certain years he had paid no tax on. On March 13, 1931, Capone was charged with income tax evasion for 1924, in a secret grand jury. On June 5, 1931, Capone was indicted by a federal grand jury on 22 counts of income tax evasion from 1925 through 1929; he was released on $50,000 bail. Capone was then indicted on 5,000 violations of the Volstead Act (Prohibition laws).
On June 16, 1931, at the Chicago Federal Building in the courtroom of Wilkerson, Capone pleaded guilty to income tax evasion and the 5,000 Volstead Act violations as part of a -year prison sentence plea bargain. On July 30, 1931, Wilkerson refused to honor the plea bargain, and Capone's counsel rescinded the guilty pleas. On the second day of the trial, Wilkerson deemed that the 1930 letter to federal authorities could be admitted into evidence, overruling objections that a lawyer could not confess for his client. Wilkerson later tried Capone only on the income tax evasion charges as he determined they took precedence over the Volstead Act charges. Much was later made of other evidence, such as witnesses and ledgers, but these strongly implied Capone's control rather than stating it. Capone's lawyers, who had relied on the plea bargain Wilkerson refused to honor, therefore had mere hours to prepare for the trial, ran a weak defense focused on claiming that essentially all his income was lost to gambling. This would have been irrelevant regardless, since gambling losses can only be subtracted from gambling winnings, but it was further undercut by Capone's expenses, which were well beyond what his claimed income could support; Wilkerson allowed Capone's spending to be presented at very great length.
The government charged Capone with evasion of $215,000 in taxes on a total income of $1,038,654, during the five-year period. Capone was convicted on five counts of income tax evasion on October 17, 1931, and was sentenced a week later to 11 years in federal prison, fined $50,000 plus $7,692 for court costs, and was held liable for $215,000 plus interest due on his back taxes. The contempt of court sentence was served concurrently. New lawyers hired to represent Capone were Washington-based tax experts. They filed a writ of "habeas corpus" based on a Supreme Court ruling that tax evasion was not fraud, which apparently meant that Capone had been convicted on charges relating to years that were actually outside the time limit for prosecution; however, a judge interpreted the law so that the time that Capone had spent in Miami was subtracted from the age of the offences, thereby denying the appeal of both Capone's conviction and sentence. Imprisonment. Capone was sent to Atlanta U.S. Penitentiary in May 1932, aged 33. Upon his arrival at Atlanta, Capone was officially diagnosed with syphilis and gonorrhea. He was also experiencing withdrawal symptoms from cocaine addiction, the use of which had perforated his nasal septum. Capone was competent at his prison job of stitching soles on shoes for eight hours a day, but his letters were barely coherent. He was seen as a weak personality, and so out of his depth dealing with bullying at the hands of fellow inmates that his cellmate, seasoned convict Red Rudensky, feared that Capone would have a breakdown.
Rudensky was formerly a small-time criminal associated with the Capone gang and found himself becoming a protector for Capone. The conspicuous protection by Rudensky and other prisoners drew accusations from less friendly inmates and fueled suspicion that Capone was receiving special treatment. No solid evidence ever emerged, but it formed part of the rationale for moving Capone to the recently opened Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary off the coast of San Francisco, in August 1934. On June 23, 1936, Capone was stabbed and superficially wounded by fellow Alcatraz inmate James C. Lucas. Due to his good behavior, Capone was permitted to play banjo in the Alcatraz prison band, the Rock Islanders, which gave regular Sunday concerts for other inmates. Capone also transcribed the song "Madonna Mia" creating his own arrangement as a tribute to his wife Mae. At Alcatraz, Capone's decline became increasingly evident, as neurosyphilis progressively eroded his mental faculties; his formal diagnosis of syphilis of the brain was made in February 1938. He spent the last year of his Alcatraz sentence in the hospital section, confused and disoriented. Capone completed his term in Alcatraz on January 6, 1939, and was transferred to the Federal Correctional Institution at Terminal Island in California to serve out his sentence for contempt of court. He was paroled on November 16, 1939, after his wife Mae appealed to the court, based on his reduced mental capabilities.
Chicago aftermath. The main effect of Capone's conviction was that he ceased to be boss immediately on his imprisonment, but those involved in the jailing of Capone portrayed it as a considerable undermining of the city's organized crime syndicate. Capone's underboss, Frank Nitti, took over as boss of the Outfit after he was released from prison in March 1932, having also been convicted of tax evasion charges. Far from being smashed, the Outfit continued without being troubled by the Chicago police, but at a lower level and without the open violence that had marked Capone's rule. Organized crime in the city had a lower profile once Prohibition was repealed, already wary of attention after seeing Capone's notoriety bring him down, to the extent that there is a lack of consensus among writers about who was actually in control and who was a figurehead "front boss". Prostitution, labor union racketeering, and gambling became moneymakers for organized crime in the city without incurring serious investigation. In the late 1950s, FBI agents discovered an organization led by Capone's former lieutenants reigning supreme over the Chicago underworld. Some historians have speculated that Capone ordered the 1939 murder of Edward J. O'Hare a week before his release, for helping federal prosecutors convict Capone of tax evasion, though there are other theories for O'Hare's death.
Illness and death. Due to his failing health, Capone was released from prison on November 16, 1939, and referred to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore for the treatment of syphilitic paresis. Because of his unsavory reputation, Johns Hopkins refused to treat him, but Baltimore's Union Memorial Hospital did. Capone was grateful for the compassionate care that he received and donated two Japanese weeping cherry trees to Union Memorial Hospital in 1939. After a few weeks of inpatient and outpatient care, on March 20, 1940, a very sickly Capone left Baltimore and travelled to his mansion in Palm Island, Florida. In 1942, after mass production of penicillin was started in the United States, Capone was one of the first American patients treated by the new drug. Though it was too late for him to reverse the damage to his brain, it did slow down the progression of the disease. In 1946, his physician and a Baltimore psychiatrist examined him and concluded that Capone had the mentality of a 12-year-old child. He spent the last years of his life at his Palm Island mansion, spending time with his wife and grandchildren. On January 21, 1947, Capone had a stroke. He regained consciousness and started to improve, but contracted bronchopneumonia. He suffered a cardiac arrest on January 22, and on January 25, surrounded by his family in his home, died after his heart failed as a result of apoplexy. His body was transported back to Chicago a week later and a private funeral was held. He was originally buried at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Chicago. In 1950, Capone's remains, along with those of his father, Gabriele, and brother, Frank, were moved to Mount Carmel Cemetery in Hillside, Illinois. In popular culture. Capone is one of the most notorious American gangsters of the 20th century and has been the major subject of numerous articles, books, and films. Particularly, from 1925 to 1929, shortly after he moved to Chicago, he enjoyed his status as the most notorious mobster in the country. He cultivated a certain image of himself in the media that made him a subject of fascination.
Amplifier figures of merit In electronics, the figures of merit of an amplifier are numerical measures that characterize its properties and performance. Figures of merit can be given as a list of specifications that include properties such as gain, bandwidth, noise and linearity, among others listed in this article. Figures of merit are important for determining the suitability of a particular amplifier for an intended use. Gain. The gain of an amplifier is the ratio of output to input power or amplitude, and is usually measured in decibels. When measured in decibels it is logarithmically related to the power ratio: "G"(dB)=10 log("Pout" /"Pin"). RF amplifiers are often specified in terms of the maximum "power gain" obtainable, while the voltage gain of audio amplifiers and instrumentation amplifiers will be more often specified. For example, an audio amplifier with a gain given as 20 dB will have a "voltage gain" of ten. The use of voltage gain figure is appropriate when the amplifier's input impedance is much higher than the source impedance, and the load impedance higher than the amplifier's output impedance.
If two equivalent amplifiers are being compared, the amplifier with higher gain settings would be more sensitive as it would take less input signal to produce a given amount of power. Bandwidth. The bandwidth of an amplifier is the range of frequencies for which the amplifier gives "satisfactory performance". The definition of "satisfactory performance" may be different for different applications. However, a common and well-accepted metric is the half-power points (i.e. frequency where the power goes down by half its peak value) on the output vs. frequency curve. Therefore, bandwidth can be defined as the difference between the lower and upper half power points. This is therefore also known as the bandwidth. Bandwidths (otherwise called "frequency responses") for other response tolerances are sometimes quoted (, etc.) or "plus or minus 1dB" (roughly the sound level difference people usually can detect). The gain of a good quality full-range audio amplifier will be essentially flat between 20 Hz to about 20 kHz (the range of normal human hearing). In ultra-high-fidelity amplifier design, the amplifier's frequency response should extend considerably beyond this (one or more octaves either side) and might have points < 10 Hz and > . Professional touring amplifiers often have input and/or output filtering to sharply limit frequency response beyond ; too much of the amplifier's potential output power would otherwise be wasted on infrasonic and ultrasonic frequencies, and the danger of AM radio interference would increase. Modern switching amplifiers need steep low pass filtering at the output to get rid of high-frequency switching noise and harmonics.
The range of frequency over which the gain is equal to or greater than 70.7% of its maximum gain is termed as bandwidth. Efficiency. Efficiency is a measure of how much of the power source is usefully applied to the amplifier's output. Class A amplifiers are very inefficient, in the range of 10–20% with a max efficiency of 25% for direct coupling of the output. Inductive coupling of the output can raise their efficiency to a maximum of 50%. Drain efficiency is the ratio of output RF power to input DC power when primary input DC power has been fed to the drain of a field-effect transistor. Based on this definition, the drain efficiency cannot exceed 25% for a class A amplifier that is supplied drain bias current through resistors (because RF signal has its zero level at about 50% of the input DC). Manufacturers specify much higher drain efficiencies, and designers are able to obtain higher efficiencies by providing current to the drain of the transistor through an inductor or a transformer winding. In this case the RF zero level is near the DC rail and will swing both above and below the rail during operation. While the voltage level is above the DC rail current is supplied by the inductor.
Class B amplifiers have a very high efficiency but are impractical for audio work because of high levels of distortion (See: Crossover distortion). In practical design, the result of a tradeoff is the class AB design. Modern Class AB amplifiers commonly have peak efficiencies between 30 and 55% in audio systems and 50-70% in radio frequency systems with a theoretical maximum of 78.5%. Commercially available Class D switching amplifiers have reported efficiencies as high as 90%. Amplifiers of Class C-F are usually known to be very high-efficiency amplifiers. RCA manufactured an AM broadcast transmitter employing a single class-C low-mu triode with an RF efficiency in the 90% range. More efficient amplifiers run cooler, and often do not need any cooling fans even in multi-kilowatt designs. The reason for this is that the loss of efficiency produces heat as a by-product of the energy lost during the conversion of power. In more efficient amplifiers there is less loss of energy so in turn less heat. In RF linear Power Amplifiers, such as cellular base stations and broadcast transmitters, special design techniques can be used to improve efficiency. Doherty designs, which use a second output stage as a "peak" amplifier, can lift efficiency from the typical 15% up to 30-35% in a narrow bandwidth. Envelope Tracking designs are able to achieve efficiencies of up to 60%, by modulating the supply voltage to the amplifier in line with the envelope of the signal.
Linearity. An ideal amplifier would be a totally linear device, but real amplifiers are only linear within limits. When the signal drive to the amplifier is increased, the output also increases until a point is reached where some part of the amplifier becomes saturated and cannot produce any more output; this is called clipping, and results in distortion. In most amplifiers a reduction in gain takes place before hard clipping occurs; the result is a "compression" effect, which (if the amplifier is an audio amplifier) sounds much less unpleasant to the ear. For these amplifiers, the 1 dB compression point is defined as the input power (or output power) where the gain is 1 dB less than the small signal gain. Sometimes this non linearity is deliberately designed in to reduce the audible unpleasantness of hard clipping under overload. Ill effects of non-linearity can be reduced with negative feedback. Linearization is an emergent field, and there are many techniques, such as feed forward, predistortion, postdistortion, in order to avoid the undesired effects of the non-linearities.
Noise. This is a measure of how much noise is introduced in the amplification process. Noise is an undesirable but inevitable product of the electronic devices and components; also, much noise results from intentional economies of manufacture and design time. The metric for noise performance of a circuit is noise figure or noise factor. Noise figure is a comparison between the output signal to noise ratio and the thermal noise of the input signal. Output dynamic range. Output dynamic range is the range, usually given in dB, between the smallest and largest useful output levels. The lowest useful level is limited by output noise, while the largest is limited most often by distortion. The ratio of these two is quoted as the amplifier dynamic range. More precisely, if "S" = maximal allowed signal power and "N" = noise power, the dynamic range "DR" is "DR = (S + N ) /N". In many switched mode amplifiers, dynamic range is limited by the minimum output step size. Slew rate. Slew rate is the maximum rate of change of the output, usually quoted in volts per second (or microsecond). Many amplifiers are ultimately slew rate limited (typically by the impedance of a drive current having to overcome capacitive effects at some point in the circuit), which sometimes limits the full power bandwidth to frequencies well below the amplifier's small-signal frequency response.
Rise time. The rise time, tr, of an amplifier is the time taken for the output to change from 10% to 90% of its final level when driven by a step input. For a Gaussian response system (or a simple RC roll off), the rise time is approximated by: tr * BW = 0.35, where tr is rise time in seconds and BW is bandwidth in Hz. Settling time and ringing. The time taken for the output to settle to within a certain percentage of the final value (for instance 0.1%) is called the settling time, and is usually specified for oscilloscope vertical amplifiers and high-accuracy measurement systems. Ringing refers to an output variation that cycles above and below an amplifier's final value and leads to a delay in reaching a stable output. Ringing is the result of overshoot caused by an underdamped circuit. Overshoot. In response to a step input, the overshoot is the amount the output exceeds its final, steady-state value. Stability. Stability is an issue in all amplifiers with feedback, whether that feedback is added intentionally or results unintentionally. It is especially an issue when applied over multiple amplifying stages. Stability is a major concern in RF and microwave amplifiers. The degree of an amplifier's stability can be quantified by a so-called stability factor. There are several different stability factors, such as the Stern stability factor and the Linvil stability factor, which specify a condition that must be met for the absolute stability of an amplifier in terms of its two-port parameters.
Army of Darkness Army of Darkness is a 1992 American dark fantasy comedy film directed, co-written, and co-edited by Sam Raimi. The film is the third installment in the "Evil Dead" film series and the sequel to "Evil Dead II" (1987). Starring Bruce Campbell and Embeth Davidtz, it follows Ash Williams (Campbell) as he is trapped in the Middle Ages and battles the undead in his quest to return to the present. The film was produced as part of a production deal with Universal Pictures after the financial success of "Darkman" (1990). Filming took place in California in 1991. The makeup and creature effects for the film were handled by two different companies: Tony Gardner and his company Alterian, Inc. were responsible for the makeup effects for Ash and Sheila, while Kurtzman, Nicotero & Berger EFX Group was credited for the remaining special makeup effects characters. Tom Sullivan, who had previously worked on "Within the Woods", "The Evil Dead", and "Evil Dead II", also contributed to the visual effects. "Army of Darkness" had its premiere at the Sitges Film Festival on October 9, 1992, and was released in the United States on February 19, 1993. It grossed $21.5 million total over its $11 million budget and received generally positive reviews from critics, who praised Raimi's direction, humor, visuals and Campbell's performance, though criticism was aimed at the lighter tone compared to the previous films.
Despite not being a box office success in the U.S., it became a success on video release and later garnered a cult following from fans of the series, along with the other two films in the trilogy. The film was dedicated to "The Evil Dead" sales agent and "Evil Dead II" executive producer Irvin Shapiro, who died before the film's production in 1989. Plot. Having been accidentally transported to the Middle Ages, Ash Williams is captured by Lord Arthur's men, who suspect him of being a spy for Duke Henry, with whom Arthur is at war. He is enslaved along with the captured Henry, his shotgun and chainsaw are confiscated, and he is taken to Arthur's castle. Ash is thrown in a pit where he kills a Deadite and regains his weapons from Arthur's Wise Man. After demanding that Henry and his men be set free and killing a Deadite publicly, Ash is celebrated as a hero. He grows attracted to Sheila, the sister of one of Arthur's fallen knights. According to the Wise Man, the only way that Ash can return to his time is through the magical "Necronomicon Ex-Mortis". Ash then starts his search for the "Necronomicon". As he enters a haunted forest, an unseen force pursues Ash into a windmill, and he crashes into a mirror. Small reflections of Ash in the mirror shards come to life and antagonize him, with one becoming a life-sized copy of him, which Ash dismembers and buries.
When he arrives at the "Necronomicon"s location, he finds three books instead of one, and has to determine which one is real. Realizing at the last moment that he has forgotten the last word of the phrase that will allow him to remove the book safely "Klaatu barada nikto" he tries to mumble and cough his way through the pronunciation. He grabs the book and begins rushing back. Meanwhile, unknown to Ash, his ruse has failed and his body's copy rises from the dead, uniting other Deadites into the Army of Darkness. Upon his return, Ash demands to be returned to his own time. However, Sheila is abducted by a flying Deadite and later transformed into one by "Evil Ash". Ash becomes determined to lead the outnumbered humans against the Army, and the people reluctantly agree. Using knowledge from textbooks in his 1973 Oldsmobile Delta 88 and enlisting the help of Duke Henry, Ash successfully leads the soldiers to victory over the Deadites, blows up "Evil Ash", saves Sheila, and brings peace between Arthur and Henry. Using a passage from the "Necronomicon", the Wise Man tells him how to return to the present by giving him a potion after reciting the same phrase as earlier.
Back in the present, Ash recounts his story to a fellow employee at the S-Mart department store. As he talks to a female co-worker who is interested in his story, a surviving Deadite, present because Ash once again forgot the last word, attacks the customers. Ash kills it using a Winchester rifle and exclaims, "Hail to the king, baby", before passionately kissing the co-worker. Original ending. For the film's original ending, using a passage from the "Necronomicon", the Wise Man tells Ash to swallow six drops of the potion to return to the present; unfortunately, due to a distraction by falling rocks, Ash miscalculates the amount of potion needed to be able to correctly return to his own time, swallowing seven instead of six. As a result, Ash wakes up in a post-apocalyptic London where human civilization is destroyed, and he screams in dismay at having overslept. Universal Pictures objected to this climax, feeling that it was too negative and depressing in tone; as such, a more positive and optimistic ending was filmed and ultimately incorporated into the theatrical cut.
Production. Development. Plans to make a third "Evil Dead" film had been circulating for a number of years, even prior to the production of "Darkman". "Evil Dead II" made enough money internationally that Dino De Laurentiis was willing to finance a sequel. Director and script writer Sam Raimi drew from a variety of sources, including literature with "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" and Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" and films like "The 7th Voyage of Sinbad", "Jason and the Argonauts", The Three Stooges, and "Conan the Barbarian". "Evil Dead II", according to Bruce Campbell, "was originally designed to go back into the past to 1300, but we couldn't muster it at the time, so we decided to make an interim version, not knowing if the 1300 story would ever get made". Promotional drawings were created and published in "Variety" during the casting process before the budget was deemed too little for the plot. The working title for the project was "Medieval Dead", before it was later known as "Evil Dead III: Army of Darkness". The title "Army of Darkness" came from an idea by Irvin Shapiro, during the production of "Evil Dead II".
Writing. Initially, Raimi invited Scott Spiegel to co-write "Army of Darkness" because he had done a good job on "Evil Dead II", but he was busy on rewrites for the Clint Eastwood film "The Rookie". After the good experience of writing the screenplay for a film called "Easy Wheels", Sam and his brother Ivan decided to co-write the film together. They worked on the script throughout the pre-production and production of "Darkman". After filming "Darkman", they took the script out and worked on it in more detail. Raimi says that Ivan "has a good sense of character" and that he brought more comedy into the script. Campbell remembers, "We all decided, 'Get him out of the cabin.' There were earlier drafts where part three still took place there, but we thought, 'Well, we all know that cabin, it's time to move on.' The three of us decided to keep it in 1300, because it's more interesting". Campbell and Tapert would read the script drafts, give Raimi their notes and he would decide which suggestions to keep and which ones to discard.
Pre-production. The initial budget was $8 million; during pre-production, however, it became obvious that this was not going to be enough. "Darkman" was also a financial success and De Laurentiis had a multi-picture deal with Universal and so "Army of Darkness" became one of the films. The studio decided to contribute half of the film's $12 million budget. However, the film's ambitious scope and its extensive effects work forced Campbell, Raimi and producer Robert Tapert to put up $1 million of their collective salaries to shoot a new ending and not film a scene where a possessed woman pushes down some giant pillars. Visual effects supervisor William Mesa showed Raimi storyboards he had from Victor Fleming's film "Joan of Arc" that depicted huge battle scenes and he picked out 25 shots to use in "Army of Darkness". A storyboard artist worked closely with the director in order to blend the shots from the "Joan of Arc" storyboards with the battle scenes in his film. Traci Lords was among the actresses auditioning for the film, saying in 2001, "I didn't get the part but I clicked with Bruce [Campbell]," with whom she would later work as a guest star in the TV series "".
Filming. Principal photography took place between soundstage and on-location work. "Army of Darkness" was filmed in Bronson Canyon and Vasquez Rocks Natural Area Park. The interior shots were filmed on an Introvision stage in Hollywood. Raimi's use of the Introvision process was a tribute to the stop-motion animation work of Ray Harryhausen. Introvision uses front-projected images with live actors instead of the traditional rear projection that Harryhausen and others used. Introvision blended components with more realistic-looking results. To achieve this effect, Raimi used 60-foot-tall Scotchlite front-projection screens, miniatures and background plates. According to the director, the advantage of using this technique was "the incredible amount of interaction between the background, which doesn't exist, and the foreground, which is usually your character". Shooting began in mid-1991, and it lasted for about 100 days. It was a mid-summer shoot and while on location on a huge castle set that was built near Acton, California, on the edge of the Mojave Desert, the cast and crew endured very hot conditions during the day and very cold temperatures at night. Most of the film took place at night and the filmmakers shot most of the film during the summer when the days were longest and the nights were the shortest. It would take an hour and a half to light an area leaving the filmmakers only six hours left to shoot a scene. Money problems forced cinematographer Bill Pope to shoot only for certain hours Monday through Friday because he could not be paid his standard fee. Mesa shot many of the action sequences on the weekend.
It was a difficult shoot for Campbell who had to learn elaborate choreography for the battle scenes, which involved him remembering a number system because the actor was often fighting opponents that were not really there. Mesa remembers, "Bruce was cussing and swearing some of the time because you had to work on the number system. Sam would tell us to make it as complicated and hard for Bruce as possible. 'Make him go through torture!' So we'd come up with these shots that were really, really difficult, and sometimes they would take thirty-seven takes". Some scenes, like Evil Ash walking along the graveyard while his skeleton minions come to life, blended stop-motion animation with live-action skeleton puppets that were mechanically rigged, with prosthetics and visual effects. During the filming of a scene in which Campbell flipped a stuntman down a set of stairs, the lower part of his face contacted with a piece of armor, which resulted in him bleeding. Campbell was brought to a local emergency room to have the wound mended by a plastic surgeon, who, upon seeing the number of artificial cuts and slashes on Campbell's face, asked, "Which one is it?" In order to maintain the continuity of the injuries and dirt on Ash's face, the on-set makeup specialist utilized a plastic template that fit over Campbell's face.
The filmmakers initially intended to reshoot the shot from "Evil Dead II" in which Ash and the Oldsmobile fall from the sky onto the ground of medieval England, with Campbell later stating that the reason they sought to reshoot it rather than reusing the footage from the previous film was due to "a rights issue". Campbell was initially supposed to jump from a ladder onto the ground, and the Oldsmobile dropped from its suspension on an aircraft cable attached to a crane on a nearby access road. However, the support legs under the crane gave out, causing the car to prematurely crash to the ground and the crane to fall off a cliff into a gravel pit. Campbell noted that, "Ironically, after all the hassle, we wound up using the footage from 1986." Post-production. While Dino De Laurentiis gave Raimi and his crew freedom to shoot the film the way they wanted, Universal took over during post-production. Universal was not happy with Raimi's cut, specifically its ending in which Ash wakes up in a futuristic, post-apocalyptic wasteland, as they felt it was too negative. A more upbeat ending was shot a month later in a lumber store in Malibu, California. (Raimi later noted, "Actually, I kind of like the fact that there are two endings, that in one alternate universe Bruce is screwed, and in another universe he's some cheesy hero".) Two months after principal filming was finished, a round of re-shoots began in Santa Monica and involved Ash in the windmill and the scenes with Bridget Fonda.
Raimi needed $3 million to finish his film, but Universal was not willing to give him the money and delayed its release due to a dispute with De Laurentiis over the rights to the Hannibal Lecter character which Universal needed so that they could film a sequel to "The Silence of the Lambs". The matter was finally resolved, but the release date for "Army of Darkness" was pushed back from summer of 1992 to February 1993. For the film's poster, Universal brought Campbell in to take several reference head shots and asked him to strike a sly look on his face. They showed him a rough of the Frank Frazetta-like painting. The actor had a day to approve it or, as he was told, there would be no ad campaign for the film. Raimi ran into further troubles when the Motion Picture Association of America gave it an NC-17 rating for a shot of a female Deadite being killed early on in the film. Universal wanted a PG-13 rating, so Raimi made a few cuts and was still stuck with an R rating. In response, Universal turned the film over to outside film editors who cut the film to 81 minutes and another version running 87 minutes that was eventually released in theaters, still with an R rating.
Music. Danny Elfman, who composed the score for "Darkman", wrote the "March of the Dead" theme for "Army of Darkness". After the re-shoots were completed, Joseph LoDuca, who composed the music for "The Evil Dead" and "Evil Dead II", returned to score the film. The composer used his knowledge of synthesizers and was able to present many cues in a mock-up form before he recorded them with the Seattle Symphony. A vinyl release of the score was revealed during the MondoCon in Austin, Texas, on October 3 and 4, 2015 over Mondo Records. Reception. Box office. "Army of Darkness" was released by Universal on February 19, 1993, in 1,387 theaters in the United States, grossing $4.4 million (38.5% of total gross) in its first weekend. On a budget of $11 million, the film earned $11.5 million in the US and $21.5 million worldwide. Critical response. On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 68% based on 87 reviews, with an average rating of 6.6/10. The site's critics consensus reads, "Some of the evil magic is gone as this trilogy capper dispenses with most of the scares, but Bruce Campbell's hammy charm and Sam Raimi's homage to classic visual effects make for a fun enough adventure." On Metacritic, the film holds a weighted average score of 59 out of 100, based on 32 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".
Roger Ebert gave the film two out of four stars and wrote, "The movie isn't as funny or entertaining as "Evil Dead II", however, maybe because the comic approach seems recycled." In her review for "The New York Times", Janet Maslin wrote that "Mr. Campbell's manly, mock-heroic posturing is perfectly in keeping with the director's droll outlook." Desson Howe, in his review for "The Washington Post" praised the film's style: "Bill Pope's cinematography is gymnastic and appropriately frenetic. The visual and make-up effects (from artist-technicians William Mesa, Tony Gardner and others) are incredibly imaginative." However, "Entertainment Weekly" gave the film a "C+" rating and wrote, "This spoofy cast of thousands looks a little too much like a crew of bland Hollywood extras. By the time "Army of Darkness" turns into a retread of "Jason and the Argonauts", featuring an army of fighting skeletons, the film has fallen into a ditch between parody and spectacle." Accolades. "Army of Darkness" won the Saturn Award for Best Horror Film (1994). It was also nominated for Best Make-Up. "Army of Darkness" was nominated for the Grand Prize at Avoriaz Fantastic Film Festival, and won the Golden Raven at the Brussels International Festival of Fantasy Film in 1993. The film also won the Critics' Award at Fantasporto, and was nominated for the International Fantasy Film Award in the category of Best Film in 1993. It was also nominated for Best Film at Sitges, the Spanish International Film Festival.
Other media. Future. In March 2013, shortly before the release of "Evil Dead", a loose continuation of the franchise, Raimi stated that the next "Evil Dead" film will be "Army of Darkness 2". Campbell confirmed that he would star as an older, but not necessarily wiser, Ash. At a WonderCon panel in March, Campbell and Fede Álvarez, director of the 2013 film, stated that their ultimate plan was for Álvarez's "Evil Dead 2" and Raimi's "Army of Darkness 2" to be followed by a seventh film which would merge the narratives of Ash and Mia. Later in October, Campbell once again confirmed in an interview with ComicBook.com that he will be reprising his role as Ash in the sequel. Fede Álvarez posted a status update on his Twitter account that Raimi will direct the sequel. Campbell later commented that the rumor about him returning is false. In July 2014, Campbell stated it was likely the planned sequel would instead be a TV series with him as the star. The ten-episode season of "Ash vs Evil Dead" premiered on Starz on October 31, 2015, with the pilot co-written and directed by Sam Raimi. Due to legal issues with Universal, the events from "Army of Darkness" could not specifically be mentioned in the first season; it was later resolved and the events from that film were mentioned in the second season. In addition to Campbell, the series stars Dana DeLorenzo, Ray Santiago, and Lucy Lawless. The series was later canceled after three seasons, with Campbell officially retiring from the role of Ash.
A new "Evil Dead" film, entitled "Evil Dead Rise", written and directed by Lee Cronin and starring Alyssa Sutherland, Lily Sullivan, Gabrielle Echols, Morgan Davies, Nell Fisher, and Mia Challis was theatrically released on April 21, 2023. Comics. "Army of Darkness" had a comic book adaptation and several comic book sequels. The movie adaptation, from publisher Dark Horse Comics, was published before the film's theatrical release. Role-playing game. Eden Studios, Inc. published the "Army of Darkness Roleplaying Game" in 2005. Video games. The 2000 video game ', and its 2003 sequel ', act as sequels to "Army of Darkness", taking place several years after the events of the film. Both games were published by THQ; "Hail to the King" was released for PlayStation, Dreamcast, and Microsoft Windows, and "A Fistful of Boomstick" was released for PlayStation 2 and Xbox. In 2011, a tower defense mobile game titled ", developed by Backflip Studios and published by MGM Interactive, was released for iOS and Android. The 2022 video game "—published by Saber Interactive for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S—includes playable characters from "Army of Darkness", including Ash, Lord Arthur, Duke Henry the Red, and Evil Ash. A "Castle Kandar" map, featuring locations from "Army of Darkness", was made available as downloadable content (DLC).
RUR-5 ASROC The RUR-5 ASROC (for "Anti-Submarine Rocket") is an all-weather, all sea-conditions anti-submarine missile system. Developed by the United States Navy in the 1950s, it was deployed in the 1960s, updated in the 1990s, and eventually installed on over 200 USN surface ships, specifically cruisers, destroyers, and frigates. The ASROC has been deployed on scores of warships of many other navies, including Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan, Taiwan, Greece, Pakistan and others. History. ASROC started development as the Rocket Assisted Torpedo (RAT) program by Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake in the early 1950s to develop a surface warship anti-submarine warfare (ASW) weapon to counter the new post-World War II submarines which ran quieter, at much higher speed and could attack from much longer range with high speed homing torpedoes. In addition, the goal was to take advantage of modern sonars with a much larger detection range. An extended range torpedo delivered by parachute from the air would allow warships the stand-off capability to attack hostile submarines with very little advance notice to the hostile submarine.
The RAT program came in three phases: RAT-A, RAT-B and RAT-C. RAT-A and its follow-on, RAT-B, were compact and economical stand-off weapons for smaller warships, but were determined to be either unreliable or had too short a range. RAT-C was developed as a stand-off ASW weapon that used a nuclear depth charge. This required a range of at least to escape potential damage from the underwater blast. The RAT-C was considerably larger than the previous RAT program rockets to accommodate the extended range needed and was for larger warships. After the failure of both the RAT-A and RAT-B programs, RAT-C was redesigned to use not only a nuclear depth charge but also a homing ASW torpedo. To obtain the accuracy needed, the RAT-C rocket booster had to be redesigned with larger side fins. This program finally combined reliability and accuracy, along with the required stand-off range. Before RAT-C reached operational status in 1960, aboard the large US Navy destroyer leader , its name was changed to ASROC. ASROC was deployed in 1961 and eventually made the majority of USN surface combatants nuclear-capable.

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