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Developments of "*ub". The sequence "*ub" > "*uβ" remained as such when followed by a consonant, for instance in Proto-Celtic "*dubros" "water" > "*duβr" > Welsh "dwfr", "dŵr" and Breton "dour". However, if no consonant exists after a "*ub" sequence, the "*u" merges with whatever Proto-Celtic "*ou" and "*oi" became, the result of which is written in the Brittonic languages. The lenited "*b" > "*β" is lost word-finally after this happens. Schrijver dates this development between the 6th to 8th centuries, with subsequent loss of "*β" datable to the 9th century. a-affection. In Brittonic, final a-affection was triggered by final-syllable "*ā" or "*a", which was later apocopated. This process lowered "*i" and "*u" in the preceding syllable to "*e" and "*o", respectively. A-affection, by affecting feminine forms of adjectives and not their masculine counterparts, created root vowel alternations by gender such as "*windos", feminine "*windā" > "*gwɪnn", feminine "*gwenn" > Welsh "gwyn", feminine "gwen".
i-affection. There were two separate processes of i-affection in Brittonic: final i-affection and internal i-affection. Both processes caused the fronting of vowels. Simplified summary of consonantal outcomes. The regular consonantal sound changes from Proto-Celtic to Welsh, Cornish, and Breton are summarised in the following table. Where the graphemes have a different value from the corresponding IPA symbols, the IPA equivalent is indicated between slashes. V represents a vowel; C represents a consonant. Remnants in England, Scotland and Ireland. Place names and river names. The principal legacy left behind in those territories from which the Brittonic languages were displaced is that of toponyms (place names) and hydronyms (names of rivers and other bodies of water). There are many Brittonic place names in lowland Scotland and in the parts of England where it is agreed that substantial Brittonic speakers remained (Brittonic names, apart from those of the former Romano-British towns, are scarce over most of England). Names derived (sometimes indirectly) from Brittonic include London, Penicuik, Perth, Aberdeen, York, Dorchester, Dover, and Colchester. Brittonic elements found in England include and for 'hill', while some such as "co[o]mb[e]" (from ) for 'small deep valley' and "tor" for 'hill, rocky headland' are examples of Brittonic words that were borrowed into English. Others reflect the presence of Britons such as Dumbarton – from the Scottish Gaelic meaning 'Fort of the Britons', and Walton meaning (in Anglo-Saxon) a 'settlement' where the 'Britons' still lived.
The number of Celtic river names in England generally increases from east to west, a map showing these being given by Jackson. These include Avon, Chew, Frome, Axe, Brue and Exe, but also river names containing the elements "der-/dar-/dur-" and "-went" e.g. Derwent, Darwen, Deer, Adur, Dour, Darent, and Went. These names exhibit multiple different Celtic roots. One is * 'water' (Breton , Cumbric , Welsh ), also found in the place-name Dover (attested in the Roman period as ); this is the source of rivers named Dour. Another is 'oak' or 'true' (Bret. , Cumb. , W. ), coupled with two agent suffixes, and ; this is the origin of Derwent, Darent, and Darwen (attested in the Roman period as ). The final root to be examined is . In Roman Britain, there were three tribal capitals named (modern Winchester, Caerwent, and Caistor St Edmunds), whose meaning was 'place, town'. Brittonicisms in English. Some, including J. R. R. Tolkien, have argued that Celtic has acted as a substrate to English for both the lexicon and syntax. It is generally accepted that Brittonic effects on English are lexically few, aside from toponyms, consisting of a small number of domestic and geographical words, which "may" include "bin", "brock", "carr", "comb", "crag" and "tor". Another legacy may be the sheep-counting system "yan tan tethera" in the north, in the traditionally Celtic areas of England such as Cumbria. Several words of Cornish origin are still in use in English as mining-related terms, including costean, gunnies, and vug.
Those who argue against the theory of a more significant Brittonic influence than is widely accepted point out that many toponyms have no semantic continuation from the Brittonic language. A notable example is "Avon" which comes from the Celtic term for river or the Welsh term for river, , but was used by the English as a personal name. Likewise the River Ouse, Yorkshire, contains the Celtic word which merely means 'water' and the name of the river Trent simply comes from the Welsh word for a 'trespasser' (figuratively suggesting 'overflowing river'). Scholars supporting a Brittonic substrate in English argue that the use of periphrastic constructions (using auxiliary verbs such as "do" and "be" in the continuous/progressive) of the English verb, which is more widespread than in the other Germanic languages, is traceable to Brittonic influence. Others, however, find this unlikely since many of these forms are only attested in the later Middle English period; these scholars claim a native English development rather than Celtic influence.
Others, however, find this unlikely since many of these forms are only attested in the later Middle English period; these scholars claim a native English development rather than Celtic influence. Ian G. Roberts postulates Northern Germanic influence, despite such constructions not existing in Norse. Literary Welsh has the simple present = 'I love' and the present stative (al. continuous/progressive) = 'I am loving', where the Brittonic syntax is partly mirrored in English. (However, English "I am loving" comes from older "I am a-loving", from still older 'I am in the process of loving'). In the Germanic sister languages of English, there is only one form, for example in German, though in "colloquial" usage in some German dialects, a progressive aspect form has evolved which is formally similar to those found in Celtic languages, and somewhat less similar to the Modern English form, e.g. 'I am working' is , literally: 'I am on the working'. The same structure is also found in modern Dutch (), alongside other structures (e.g. 'I am working' is , literally: 'I am on the working'. The same structure is also found in modern Dutch (), alongside other structures (e.g. , lit. 'I sit to working'). These parallel developments suggest that the English progressive is not necessarily due to Celtic influence; moreover, the native English development of the structure can be traced over 1000 years and more of English literature.
Some researchers (Filppula, et al., 2001) argue that other elements of English syntax reflect Brittonic influences. For instance, in English tag questions, the form of the tag depends on the verb form in the main statement ("aren't I?", "isn't he?", "won't we?", etc.). The German and the French , by contrast, are fixed forms which can be used with almost any main statement. It has been claimed that the English system has been borrowed from Brittonic, since Welsh tag questions vary in almost exactly the same way. Brittonic effect on the Goidelic languages. Far more notable, but less well known, are Brittonic influences on Scottish Gaelic, though Scottish and Irish Gaelic, with their wider range of preposition-based periphrastic constructions, suggest that such constructions descend from their common Celtic heritage. Scottish Gaelic contains several P-Celtic loanwords, but, as there is a far greater overlap in terms of Celtic vocabulary than with English, it is not always possible to disentangle P- and Q-Celtic words. However, some common words such as = Welsh , Cumbric are particularly evident.
The Brittonic influence on Scots Gaelic is often indicated by considering Irish language usage, which is not likely to have been influenced so much by Brittonic. In particular, the word (anglicised as "strath") is a native Goidelic word, but its usage appears to have been modified by the Welsh cognate whose meaning is slightly different. The effect on Irish has been the loan from British of many Latin-derived words. This has been associated with the Christianisation of Ireland from Britain.
Bronski Beat Bronski Beat were a British synth-pop band formed in 1983 in London, England. The initial lineup, which recorded the majority of their hits, consisted of Scottish musicians Jimmy Somerville (vocals) and Steve Bronski (keyboards, percussion) and English musician Larry Steinbachek (keyboards, percussion). Simon Davolls contributed backing vocals to many songs. Throughout the band's career, Bronski was the only member to appear in every lineup. Bronski Beat achieved success in the mid-1980s, particularly with the 1984 single "Smalltown Boy", from their debut album, "The Age of Consent". "Smalltown Boy" was their only US "Billboard" Hot 100 single. All members of the band were openly gay and their songs reflected this, often containing political commentary on gay issues. Somerville left Bronski Beat in 1985 and went on to have success as lead singer of the Communards and as a solo artist. He was replaced by vocalist John Foster, with whom the band continued to have hits in the UK and Europe through 1986. Foster left Bronski Beat after their second album, and the band were joined by Jonathan Hellyer before dissolving in 1995.
Steve Bronski revived the band in 2016, recording new material with 1990s member Ian Donaldson. Steinbachek died later that year; Bronski died in 2021. As of 2025, Somerville is the last surviving member of the band's original lineup and one of six surviving members of the band. History. 1983–1985: early years and "The Age of Consent". Bronski Beat formed in 1983 when Jimmy Somerville, Steve Bronski (both from Glasgow) and Larry Steinbachek (from Southend, Essex) shared a three-bedroom flat at Lancaster House in Brixton, London. Steinbachek had heard Somerville singing during the making of "" and suggested they make some music. They first performed publicly at an arts festival, "September in the Pink". The trio were unhappy with the inoffensive nature of contemporary gay performers and sought to be more outspoken and political. Bronski Beat signed a recording contract with London Records in 1984 after doing only nine live gigs. The band's debut single, "Smalltown Boy", about a gay teenager leaving his family and fleeing his home town, was a hit, peaking at No 3 in the UK Singles Chart, and topping charts in Belgium and the Netherlands. The single was accompanied by a promotional video directed by Bernard Rose, showing Somerville trying to befriend an attractive diver at a swimming pool, then being attacked by the diver's homophobic associates, being returned to his family by the police and having to leave home. (The police officer was played by Colin Bell, then the marketing manager of London Records.) "Smalltown Boy" reached 48 in the U.S. chart and peaked at 8 in Australia.
The follow-up single, "Why?", adopted a hi-NRG sound and was more lyrically focused on anti-gay prejudice. It also achieved Top 10 status in the UK, reaching 6, and was another Top 10 hit for the band in Australia, Switzerland, Germany, France and the Netherlands. At the end of 1984, the trio released an album titled "The Age of Consent". The inner sleeve listed the varying ages of consent for consensual gay sex in different nations around the world. At the time, the age of consent for sexual acts between men in the UK was 21 compared with 16 for heterosexual acts, with several other countries having more liberal laws on gay sex. The album peaked at 4 in the UK Albums Chart, 36 in the U.S., and 12 in Australia. Around the same time, the band headlined "Pits and Perverts", a concert at the Electric Ballroom in London to raise funds for the Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners campaign. This event is featured in the film "Pride". The third single, released before Christmas 1984, was a revival of "It Ain't Necessarily So", the George and Ira Gershwin classic (from "Porgy and Bess"). The song questions the accuracy of biblical tales. It also reached the UK Top 20.
In 1985, the trio joined up with Marc Almond to record a version of Donna Summer's "I Feel Love". The full version was actually a medley that also incorporated snippets of Summer's "Love to Love You Baby" and John Leyton's "Johnny Remember Me". It was a big success, reaching 3 in the UK and equalling the chart achievement of "Smalltown Boy". Although the original had been one of Marc Almond's all-time favourite songs, he had never read the lyrics and thus incorrectly sang "What’ll it be, what’ll it be, you and me" instead of "Falling free, falling free, falling free" on the finished record. The band and their producer Mike Thorne had gone back into the studio in early 1985 to record a new single, "Run from Love", and PolyGram (London Records' parent company at that time) had pressed a number of promo singles and 12" versions of the song and sent them to radio and record stores in the UK. However, the single was shelved as tensions in the band, both personal and political, resulted in Somerville leaving Bronski Beat in the summer of that year.
"Run from Love" was subsequently released in remix form on the Bronski Beat album "Hundreds & Thousands", a collection of mostly remixes (LP) and B-sides (as bonus tracks on the CD version) as well as the hit "I Feel Love". Somerville went on to form the Communards with Richard Coles while the remaining members of Bronski Beat searched for a new vocalist. 1985–1995: Somerville's departure, John Foster and Jonathan Hellyer eras. Bronski Beat recruited John Foster as Somerville's replacement (Foster is credited as "Jon Jon"). A single, "Hit That Perfect Beat", was released in November 1985, reaching 3 in the UK. It repeated this success on the Australian chart and was also featured in the film "Letter to Brezhnev". A second single, "C'mon C'mon", also charted in the UK Top 20 and an album, "Truthdare Doubledare", released in May 1986, peaked at 18. The film "Parting Glances" (1986) included Bronski Beat songs "Love and Money", "Smalltown Boy" and "Why?" During this period, the band teamed up with producer Mark Cunningham on the first-ever BBC Children In Need single, a cover of David Bowie's "Heroes", released in 1986 under the name of The County Line.
Foster left the band in 1987. Following Foster's departure, Bronski Beat began work on their next album, "Out and About". The tracks were recorded at Berry Street studios in London with engineer Brian Pugsley. Some of the song titles were "The Final Spin" and "Peace and Love". The latter track featured Strawberry Switchblade vocalist Rose McDowall and appeared on several internet sites in 2006. One of the other songs from the project called "European Boy" was recorded in 1987 by disco group Splash. The lead singer of Splash was former Tight Fit singer Steve Grant. Steinbachek and Bronski toured extensively with the new material with positive reviews, however the project was abandoned as the group was dropped by London Records. Also in 1987, Bronski Beat and Somerville performed at a reunion concert for "International AIDS Day", supported by New Order, at the Brixton Academy, London. In 1989, Jonathan Hellyer became lead singer, and the band extensively toured the U.S. and Europe with back-up vocalist Annie Conway. They achieved one minor hit with the song "Cha Cha Heels", a one-off collaboration sung by American actress and singer Eartha Kitt, which peaked at 32 in the UK. The song was originally written for movie and recording star Divine, who was unable to record the song before his death in 1988. 1990–91 saw Bronski Beat release three further singles on the Zomba record label, "I'm Gonna Run Away", "One More Chance" and "What More Can I Say". The singles were produced by Mike Thorne.
Foster and Bronski Beat teamed up again in 1994, and released a techno "Tell Me Why '94" and an acoustic "Smalltown Boy '94" on the German record label, ZYX Music. The album "Rainbow Nation" was released the following year with Hellyer returning as lead vocalist, as Foster had dropped out of the project and Ian Donaldson was brought on board to do keyboards and programming. After a few years of touring, Bronski Beat then dissolved, with Steve Bronski going on to become a producer for other artists and Ian Donaldson becoming a successful DJ (Sordid Soundz). Larry Steinbachek became the musical director for Michael Laub's theatre company, 'Remote Control Productions'. 2007–2016: Bronski solo activities and resurrection of Bronski Beat. In 2007, Steve Bronski remixed the song "Stranger to None" by the UK alternative rock band, All Living Fear. Four different mixes were made, with one appearing on their retrospective album, "Fifteen Years After". Bronski also remixed the track "Flowers in the Morning" by Northern Irish electronic band Electrobronze in 2007, changing the style of the song from classical to Hi-NRG disco.
In 2015, Steve Bronski teamed up as a one-off with Jessica James (aka Barbara Bush) and said that she reminded him of Divine, because of her look and Eartha Kitt-like sound. The one-off project was to cover the track he made in 1989. In 2016, Steve Bronski again teamed up with Ian Donaldson, with the aim of bringing Bronski Beat back, enlisting a new singer, Stephen Granville. In 2017, the new Bronski Beat released a reworked version of "Age of Consent" entitled "Age of Reason". "Out & About", the unreleased Bronski Beat album from 1987, was released digitally via Steve Bronski's website. The album features the original tracks plus remixes by Bronski. 2017–present: deaths of Steinbachek and Bronski. On 12 January 2017, it was revealed that Steinbachek had died the previous month after a short battle with cancer, with his family and friends at his bedside. He was 56. Bronski died on 7 December 2021, at the age of 61, in a Central London flat fire. Awards and nominations. ! Year !! Awards !! Work !! Category !! Result !! Ref.
Barrel (disambiguation) A barrel is a cylindrical container, traditionally made with wooden material. Barrel may also refer to:
Binary prefix A binary prefix is a unit prefix that indicates a multiple of a unit of measurement by an integer power of two. The most commonly used binary prefixes are kibi (symbol Ki, meaning ), mebi (), and gibi (). They are most often used in information technology as multipliers of bit and byte, when expressing the capacity of storage devices or the size of computer files. The binary prefixes "kibi", "mebi", etc. were defined in 1999 by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), in the IEC 60027-2 standard (Amendment 2). They were meant to replace the metric (SI) decimal power prefixes, such as "kilo" (), "mega" () and "giga" (), that were commonly used in the computer industry to indicate the nearest powers of two. For example, a memory module whose capacity was specified by the manufacturer as "2 megabytes" or "2 MB" would hold = , instead of = . On the other hand, a hard disk whose capacity is specified by the manufacturer as "10 gigabytes" or "10 GB", holds = bytes, or a little more than that, but less than = and a file whose size is listed as "2.3 GB" may have a size closer to ≈ or to = , depending on the program or operating system providing that measurement. This kind of ambiguity is often confusing to computer system users and has resulted in lawsuits. The IEC 60027-2 binary prefixes have been incorporated in the standard and are supported by other standards bodies, including the BIPM, which defines the SI system, the US NIST, and the European Union.
Prior to the 1999 IEC standard, some industry organizations, such as the Joint Electron Device Engineering Council (JEDEC), noted the common use of the terms "kilobyte", "megabyte", and "gigabyte", and the corresponding symbols "KB", "MB", and "GB" in the binary sense, for use in storage capacity measurements. However, other computer industry sectors (such as magnetic storage) continued using those same terms and symbols with the decimal meaning. Since then, the major standards organizations have expressly disapproved the use of SI prefixes to denote binary multiples, and recommended or mandated the use of the IEC prefixes for that purpose, but the use of SI prefixes in this sense has persisted in some fields. Definitions. In 2022, the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) adopted the decimal prefixes "ronna" for 10009 and "quetta" for 100010. In 2025, the prefixes "robi" () and "quebi" () were adopted by the IEC. Comparison of binary and decimal prefixes. The relative difference between the values in the binary and decimal interpretations increases, when using the SI prefixes as the base, from 2.4% for kilo to nearly 27% for the quetta prefix.
History. Early prefixes. The original metric system adopted by France in 1795 included two binary prefixes named "double-" (2×) and "demi-" (×). However, these were not retained when the SI prefixes were internationally adopted by the 11th CGPM conference in 1960. Storage capacity. Main memory. Early computers used one of two addressing methods to access the system memory; binary (base 2) or decimal (base 10). For example, the IBM 701 (1952) used a binary methods and could address 2048 words of 36 bits each, while the IBM 702 (1953) used a decimal system, and could address ten thousand 7-bit words. By the mid-1960s, binary addressing had become the standard architecture in most computer designs, and main memory sizes were most commonly powers of two. This is the most natural configuration for memory, as all combinations of states of their address lines map to a valid address, allowing easy aggregation into a larger block of memory with contiguous addresses. While early documentation specified those memory sizes as exact numbers such as 4096, 8192, or units (usually words, bytes, or bits), computer professionals also started using the long-established metric system prefixes "kilo", "mega", "giga", etc., defined to be powers of 10, to mean instead the nearest powers of two; namely, 210 = 1024, 220 = 10242, 230 = 10243, etc. The corresponding metric prefix symbols ("k", "M", "G", etc.) were used with the same binary meanings. The symbol for 210 = 1024 could be written either in lower case ("k") or in uppercase ("K"). The latter was often used intentionally to indicate the binary rather than decimal meaning. This convention, which could not be extended to higher powers, was widely used in the documentation of the IBM 360 (1964) and of the IBM System/370 (1972), of the CDC 7600, of the DEC PDP-11/70 (1975) and of the DEC VAX-11/780 (1977).
In other documents, however, the metric prefixes and their symbols were used to denote powers of 10, but usually with the understanding that the values given were approximate, often truncated down. Thus, for example, a 1967 document by Control Data Corporation (CDC) abbreviated "216 = = words" as "65K words" (rather than "64K" or "66K"), while the documentation of the HP 21MX real-time computer (1974) denoted = = as "196K" and 220 = as "1M". These three possible meanings of "k" and "K" ("1024", "1000", or "approximately 1000") were used loosely around the same time, sometimes by the same company. The HP 3000 business computer (1973) could have "64K", "96K", or "128K" bytes of memory. The use of SI prefixes, and the use of "K" instead of "k" remained popular in computer-related publications well into the 21st century, although the ambiguity persisted. The correct meaning was often clear from the context; for instance, in a binary-addressed computer, the true memory size had to be either a power of 2, or a small integer multiple thereof. Thus a "512 megabyte" RAM module was generally understood to have = bytes, rather than .
Hard disks. In specifying disk drive capacities, manufacturers have always used conventional decimal SI prefixes representing powers of 10. Storage in a rotating disk drive is organized in platters and tracks whose sizes and counts are determined by mechanical engineering constraints so that the capacity of a disk drive has hardly ever been a simple multiple of a power of 2. For example, the first commercially sold disk drive, the IBM 350 (1956), had 50 physical disk platters containing a total of sectors of 100 characters each, for a total quoted capacity of 5 million characters. Moreover, since the 1960s, many disk drives used IBM's disk format, where each track was divided into blocks of user-specified size; and the block sizes were recorded on the disk, subtracting from the usable capacity. For example, the IBM 3336 disk pack was quoted to have a 200-megabyte capacity, achieved only with a single -byte block in each of its 808 × 19 tracks. Decimal megabytes were used for disk capacity by the CDC in 1974. The Seagate ST-412, one of several types installed in the IBM PC/XT, had a capacity of when formatted as 306 × 4 tracks and 32 256-byte sectors per track, which was quoted as "10 MB". Similarly, a "300 GB" hard drive can be expected to offer only slightly more than = , bytes, not (which would be about bytes or "322 GB"). The first terabyte (SI prefix, bytes) hard disk drive was introduced in 2007. Decimal prefixes were generally used by information processing publications when comparing hard disk capacities.
Some programs and operating systems, such as Microsoft Windows, still use "MB" and "GB" to denote binary prefixes even when displaying disk drive capacities and file sizes, as did Classic Mac OS. Thus, for example, the capacity of a "10 MB" (decimal "M") disk drive could be reported as "", and that of a "300 GB" drive as "279.4 GB". Some operating systems, such as Mac OS X, Ubuntu, and Debian, have been updated to use "MB" and "GB" to denote decimal prefixes when displaying disk drive capacities and file sizes. Some manufacturers, such as Seagate Technology, have released recommendations stating that properly-written software and documentation should specify clearly whether prefixes such as "K", "M", or "G" mean binary or decimal multipliers. Floppy disks. Floppy disks used a variety of formats, and their capacities was usually specified with SI-like prefixes "K" and "M" with either decimal or binary meaning. The capacity of the disks was often specified without accounting for the internal formatting overhead, leading to more irregularities.
The early 8-inch diskette formats could contain less than a megabyte with the capacities of those devices specified in kilobytes, kilobits or megabits. The 5.25-inch diskette sold with the IBM PC AT could hold = bytes, and thus was marketed as "1200 KB" with the binary sense of "KB". However, the capacity was also quoted "1.2 MB", which was a hybrid decimal and binary notation, since the "M" meant 1000 × 1024. The precise value was (decimal) or (binary). The 5.25-inch Apple Disk II had 256 bytes per sector, 13 sectors per track, 35 tracks per side, or a total capacity of bytes. It was later upgraded to 16 sectors per track, giving a total of = bytes, which was described as "140KB" using the binary sense of "K". The most recent version of the physical hardware, the "3.5-inch diskette" cartridge, had 720 512-byte blocks (single-sided). Since two blocks comprised 1024 bytes, the capacity was quoted "360 KB", with the binary sense of "K". On the other hand, the quoted capacity of "1.44 MB" of the High Density ("HD") version was again a hybrid decimal and binary notation, since it meant 1440 pairs of 512-byte sectors, or = . Some operating systems displayed the capacity of those disks using the binary sense of "MB", as "1.4 MB" (which would be ≈ ). User complaints forced both Apple and Microsoft to issue support bulletins explaining the discrepancy.
Optical disks. When specifying the capacities of optical compact discs, "megabyte" and "MB" usually meant 10242 bytes. Thus a "700-MB" (or "80-minute") CD has a nominal capacity of about , which is approximately (decimal). On the other hand, capacities of other optical disc storage media like DVD, Blu-ray Disc, HD DVD and magneto-optical (MO) have been generally specified in decimal gigabytes ("GB"), that is, 10003 bytes. In particular, a typical "" DVD has a nominal capacity of about , which is about . Tape drives and media. Tape drive and media manufacturers have generally used SI decimal prefixes to specify the maximum capacity, although the actual capacity would depend on the block size used when recording. Data and clock rates. Computer clock frequencies are always quoted using SI prefixes in their decimal sense. For example, the internal clock frequency of the original IBM PC was , that is . Similarly, digital information transfer rates are quoted using decimal prefixe. The Parallel ATA " disk interface can transfer bytes per second, and a " modem transmits bits per second. Seagate specified the sustained transfer rate of some hard disk drive models with both decimal and IEC binary prefixes.
The standard sampling rate of music compact disks, quoted as , is indeed samples per second. A "" Ethernet interface can receive or transmit up to 109 bits per second, or bytes per second within each packet. A "56k" modem can encode or decode up to bits per second. Decimal SI prefixes are also generally used for processor-memory data transfer speeds. A PCI-X bus with clock and 64 bits wide can transfer 64-bit words per second, or = , which is usually quoted as . A PC3200 memory on a double data rate bus, transferring 8 bytes per cycle with a clock speed of has a bandwidth of = , which would be quoted as . Ambiguous standards. The ambiguous usage of the prefixes "kilo ("K" or "k"), "mega" ("M"), and "giga" ("G"), as meaning both powers of 1000 or (in computer contexts) of 1024, has been recorded in popular dictionaries, and even in some obsolete standards, such as ANSI/IEEE 1084-1986 and ANSI/IEEE 1212-1991, IEEE 610.10-1994, and IEEE 100-2000. Some of these standards specifically limited the binary meaning to multiples of "byte" ("B") or "bit" ("b").
Early binary prefix proposals. Before the IEC standard, several alternative proposals existed for unique binary prefixes, starting in the late 1960s. In 1996, Markus Kuhn proposed the extra prefix "di" and the symbol suffix or subscript "2" to mean "binary"; so that, for example, "one dikilobyte" would mean "1024 bytes", denoted "K2B" or "K2B". In 1968, Donald Morrison proposed to use the Greek letter kappa (κ) to denote 1024, κ2 to denote 10242, and so on. (At the time, memory size was small, and only K was in widespread use.) In the same year, Wallace Givens responded with a suggestion to use bK as an abbreviation for 1024 and bK2 or bK2 for 10242, though he noted that neither the Greek letter nor lowercase letter b would be easy to reproduce on computer printers of the day. Bruce Alan Martin of Brookhaven National Laboratory proposed that, instead of prefixes, binary powers of two were indicated by the letter B followed by the exponent, similar to E in decimal scientific notation. Thus one would write 3B20 for . This convention is still used on some calculators to present binary floating point-numbers today.
In 1969, Donald Knuth, who uses decimal notation like 1 MB = 1000 kB, proposed that the powers of 1024 be designated as "large kilobytes" and "large megabytes", with abbreviations KKB and MMB. Consumer confusion. The ambiguous meanings of "kilo", "mega", "giga", etc., has caused significant consumer confusion, especially in the personal computer era. A common source of confusion was the discrepancy between the capacities of hard drives specified by manufacturers, using those prefixes in the decimal sense, and the numbers reported by operating systems and other software, that used them in the binary sense, such as the Apple Macintosh in 1984. For example, a hard drive marketed as "1 TB" could be reported as having only "931 GB". The confusion was compounded by fact that RAM manufacturers used the binary sense too. Legal disputes. The different interpretations of disk size prefixes led to class action lawsuits against digital storage manufacturers. These cases involved both flash memory and hard disk drives. Early cases.
Early cases (2004–2007) were settled prior to any court ruling with the manufacturers admitting no wrongdoing but agreeing to clarify the storage capacity of their products on the consumer packaging. Accordingly, many flash memory and hard disk manufacturers have disclosures on their packaging and web sites clarifying the formatted capacity of the devices or defining MB as 1 million bytes and 1 GB as 1 billion bytes. "Willem Vroegh v. Eastman Kodak Company". On 20 February 2004, Willem Vroegh filed a lawsuit against Lexar Media, Dane–Elec Memory, Fuji Photo Film USA, Eastman Kodak Company, Kingston Technology Company, Inc., Memorex Products, Inc.; PNY Technologies Inc., SanDisk Corporation, Verbatim Corporation, and Viking Interworks alleging that their descriptions of the capacity of their flash memory cards were false and misleading. Vroegh claimed that a 256 MB Flash Memory Device had only 244 MB of accessible memory. "Plaintiffs allege that Defendants marketed the memory capacity of their products by assuming that one megabyte equals one million bytes and one gigabyte equals one billion bytes." The plaintiffs wanted the defendants to use the customary values of 10242 for megabyte and 10243 for gigabyte. The plaintiffs acknowledged that the IEC and IEEE standards define a MB as one million bytes but stated that the industry has largely ignored the IEC standards.
The parties agreed that manufacturers could continue to use the decimal definition so long as the definition was added to the packaging and web sites. The consumers could apply for "a discount of ten percent off a future online purchase from Defendants' Online Stores Flash Memory Device". "Orin Safier v. Western Digital Corporation". On 7 July 2005, an action entitled "Orin Safier v. Western Digital Corporation, et al." was filed in the Superior Court for the City and County of San Francisco, Case No. CGC-05-442812. The case was subsequently moved to the Northern District of California, Case No. 05-03353 BZ. Although Western Digital maintained that their usage of units is consistent with "the indisputably correct industry standard for measuring and describing storage capacity", and that they "cannot be expected to reform the software industry", they agreed to settle in March 2006 with 14 June 2006 as the Final Approval hearing date. Western Digital offered to compensate customers with a gratis download of backup and recovery software that they valued at US$30. They also paid in fees and expenses to San Francisco lawyers Adam Gutride and Seth Safier, who filed the suit. The settlement called for Western Digital to add a disclaimer to their later packaging and advertising.
Western Digital had this footnote in their settlement. "Apparently, Plaintiff believes that he could sue an egg company for fraud for labeling a carton of 12 eggs a 'dozen', because some bakers would view a 'dozen' as including 13 items." "Cho v. Seagate Technology (US) Holdings, Inc.". A lawsuit ("Cho v. Seagate Technology (US) Holdings, Inc.", San Francisco Superior Court, Case No. CGC-06-453195) was filed against Seagate Technology, alleging that Seagate overrepresented the amount of usable storage by 7% on hard drives sold between 22 March 2001 and 26 September 2007. The case was settled without Seagate admitting wrongdoing, but agreeing to supply those purchasers with gratis backup software or a 5% refund on the cost of the drives. "Dinan et al. v. SanDisk LLC". On 22 January 2020, the district court of the Northern District of California ruled in favor of the defendant, SanDisk, upholding its use of "GB" to mean . IEC 1999 Standard. In 1995, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry's (IUPAC) Interdivisional Committee on Nomenclature and Symbols (IDCNS) proposed the prefixes "kibi" (short for "kilobinary"), "mebi" ("megabinary"), "gibi" ("gigabinary") and "tebi" ("terabinary"), with respective symbols "kb", "Mb", "Gb" and "Tb", for binary multipliers. The proposal suggested that the SI prefixes should be used only for powers of 10; so that a disk drive capacity of "500 gigabytes", "0.5 terabytes", "500 GB", or "0.5 TB" should all mean , exactly or approximately, rather than (= ) or (= ).
The proposal was not accepted by IUPAC at the time, but was taken up in 1996 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in collaboration with the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). The prefixes "kibi", "mebi", "gibi" and "tebi" were retained, but with the symbols "Ki" (with capital "K"), "Mi", "Gi" and "Ti" respectively. In January 1999, the IEC published this proposal, with additional prefixes "pebi" ("Pi") and "exbi" ("Ei"), as an international standard (IEC 60027-2 Amendment 2) The standard reaffirmed the BIPM's position that the SI prefixes should always denote powers of 10. The third edition of the standard, published in 2005, added prefixes "zebi" and "yobi", thus matching all then-defined SI prefixes with binary counterparts. The harmonized ISO/IEC IEC 80000-13:2025 standard cancels and replaces subclauses 3.8 and 3.9 of IEC 60027-2:2005 (those defining prefixes for binary multiples). The only significant change is the addition of explicit definitions for some quantities. In 2009, the prefixes kibi-, mebi-, etc. were defined by ISO 80000-1 in their own right, independently of the kibibyte, mebibyte, and so on.
The BIPM standard JCGM 200:2012 "International vocabulary of metrology – Basic and general concepts and associated terms (VIM), 3rd edition" lists the IEC binary prefixes and states "SI prefixes refer strictly to powers of 10, and should not be used for powers of 2. For example, 1 kilobit should not be used to represent bits (210 bits), which is 1 kibibit." The IEC 60027-2 standard recommended operating systems and other software were updated to use binary or decimal prefixes consistently, but incorrect usage of SI prefixes for binary multiples is still common. At the time, the IEEE decided that their standards would use the prefixes "kilo", etc. with their metric definitions, but allowed the binary definitions to be used in an interim period as long as such usage was explicitly pointed out on a case-by-case basis. Other standards bodies and organizations. The IEC standard binary prefixes are supported by other standardization bodies and technical organizations. The United States National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) supports the ISO/IEC standards for
"Prefixes for binary multiples" and has a web page documenting them, describing and justifying their use. NIST suggests that in English, the first syllable of the name of the binary-multiple prefix should be pronounced in the same way as the first syllable of the name of the corresponding SI prefix, and that the second syllable should be pronounced as "bee". NIST has stated the SI prefixes "refer strictly to powers of 10" and that the binary definitions "should not be used" for them. As of 2014, the microelectronics industry standards body JEDEC describes the IEC prefixes in its online dictionary, but acknowledges that the SI prefixes and the symbols "K", "M" and "G" are still commonly used with the binary sense for memory sizes. On 19 March 2005, the IEEE standard IEEE 1541-2002 ("Prefixes for Binary Multiples") was elevated to a full-use standard by the IEEE Standards Association after a two-year trial period. , the IEEE Publications division does not require the use of IEC prefixes in its major magazines such as "Spectrum" or "Computer".
The International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM), which maintains the International System of Units (SI), expressly prohibits the use of SI prefixes to denote binary multiples, and recommends the use of the IEC prefixes as an alternative since units of information are not included in the SI. The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) prohibits the use of SI prefixes with anything but a power-of-1000 meaning, but does not cite the IEC binary prefixes. The European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization (CENELEC) adopted the IEC-recommended binary prefixes via the harmonization document HD 60027-2:2003-03. The European Union (EU) has required the use of the IEC binary prefixes since 2007. Current practice. Some computer industry participants, such as Hewlett-Packard (HP), and IBM have adopted or recommended IEC binary prefixes as part of their general documentation policies. As of 2023, the use of SI prefixes with the binary meanings is still prevalent for specifying the capacity of the main memory of computers, of RAM, ROM, EPROM, and EEPROM chips and memory modules, and of the cache of computer processors. For example, a "512-megabyte" or "512 MB" memory module holds 512 MiB; that is, 512 × 220 bytes, not 512 × 106 bytes.
JEDEC continues to include the customary binary definitions of "kilo", "mega", and "giga" in the document "Terms, Definitions, and Letter Symbols", and, , still used those definitions in their memory standards. On the other hand, the SI prefixes with powers of ten meanings are generally used for the capacity of external storage units, such as disk drives, solid state drives, and USB flash drives, except for some flash memory chips intended to be used as EEPROMs. However, some disk manufacturers have used the IEC prefixes to avoid confusion. The decimal meaning of SI prefixes is usually also intended in measurements of data transfer rates, and clock speeds. Some operating systems and other software use either the IEC binary multiplier symbols ("Ki", "Mi", etc.) or the SI multiplier symbols ("k", "M", "G", etc.) with decimal meaning. Some programs, such as the GNU ls command, let the user choose between binary or decimal multipliers. However, some continue to use the SI symbols with the binary meanings, even when reporting disk or file sizes. Some programs may also use "K" instead of "k", with either meaning. Other uses. While the binary prefixes are predominantly used with units of data, bits and bytes, they may be used with other unit of measure. For example, in signal processing it may be convenient to use a binary prefix with the unit of frequency, hertz (Hz), to produce a unit such as the kibihertz (KiHz), which is equal to .
National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum is a history museum and hall of fame in Cooperstown, New York, operated by a private foundation. It serves as the central collection and gathering space for the history of baseball in the United States displaying baseball-related artifacts and exhibits, honoring those who have excelled in playing, managing, and serving the sport. The Hall's motto is "Preserving History, Honoring Excellence, Connecting Generations". Cooperstown is often used as shorthand (or a metonym) for the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. The museum also established and manages the process for honorees into the Hall of Fame. The Hall of Fame was established in 1939 by Stephen Carlton Clark, an heir to the Singer Sewing Machine fortune. Clark sought to bring tourists to the village hurt by the Great Depression, which reduced the local tourist trade, and Prohibition, which devastated the local hops industry. Clark constructed the Hall of Fame's building, which was dedicated on June 12, 1939. (His granddaughter, Jane Forbes Clark, is the current chairman of the board of directors.) The mythology that future Civil War hero Abner Doubleday invented baseball in Cooperstown in the 1830s was instrumental in the placement and early marketing of the Hall.
An expanded library and research facility opened in 1994. Dale Petroskey became the organization's president in 1999. In 2002, the Hall launched "Baseball as America", a traveling exhibit that toured ten American museums over six years. The Hall of Fame has since also sponsored educational programming on the Internet to bring the Hall of Fame to schoolchildren who might not visit. The Hall and Museum completed a series of renovations in spring 2005. The Hall of Fame also presents an annual exhibit at FanFest at the Major League Baseball All-Star Game. Inductees. Among baseball fans, "Hall of Fame" means not only the museum and facility in Cooperstown, New York, but the pantheon of players, managers, umpires, executives, and pioneers who have been inducted into the Hall. The first five men elected were Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner, Christy Mathewson and Walter Johnson, chosen in 1936; roughly 20 more were selected before the entire group was inducted at the Hall's 1939 opening. , 351 people had been elected to the Hall of Fame, including 278 former professional players, 23 managers, 10 umpires, and 40 pioneers, executives, and organizers. 119 members of the Hall of Fame have been inducted posthumously, including four who died after their selection was announced. Of the 39 members primarily recognized for their contributions to Negro league baseball, 31 were inducted posthumously, including all 26 selected since the 1990s. The Hall of Fame includes one woman, baseball executive Effa Manley.
The newest members of the Hall of Fame as of January 21, 2025, are Dick Allen, Dave Parker, CC Sabathia, Ichiro Suzuki, and Billy Wagner. In 2019, former Yankees closer Mariano Rivera became the first player to be elected unanimously on the writers' ballot. Derek Jeter, Marvin Miller, Ted Simmons, and Larry Walker were to be inducted in 2020, but their induction ceremony was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic until September 8, 2021. The ceremony was open to the public, as COVID restrictions had been lifted. Selection process. Players are currently inducted into the Hall of Fame through election by either the Baseball Writers' Association of America (or BBWAA), or the Veterans Committee, which now consists of four subcommittees, each of which considers and votes for candidates from a separate era of baseball.
Players are currently inducted into the Hall of Fame through election by either the Baseball Writers' Association of America (or BBWAA), or the Veterans Committee, which now consists of four subcommittees, each of which considers and votes for candidates from a separate era of baseball. Any player named on 75% or more of all ballots cast is elected. A player who is named on fewer than 5% of ballots is dropped from future elections. In some instances, the screening committee had restored their names to later ballots, but in the mid-1990s, dropped players were made permanently ineligible for Hall of Fame consideration, even by the Veterans Committee. A 2001 change in the election procedures restored the eligibility of these dropped players; while their names will not appear on future BBWAA ballots, they may be considered by the Veterans Committee. Players receiving 5% or more of the votes but fewer than 75% are reconsidered annually until a maximum of ten years of eligibility (lowered from fifteen years for the 2015 election).
Under special circumstances, certain players may be deemed eligible for induction even though they have not met all requirements. Addie Joss was elected in 1978, despite only playing nine seasons before he died of meningitis. Additionally, if an otherwise eligible player dies before his fifth year of retirement, then that player may be placed on the ballot at the first election at least six months after his death. Roberto Clemente set the precedent: the writers put him up for consideration after his death on New Year's Eve, 1972, and he was inducted in 1973. The five-year waiting period was established in 1954 after an evolutionary process. In 1936 all players were eligible, including active ones. From the 1937 election until the 1945 election, there was no waiting period, so any retired player was eligible, but writers were discouraged from voting for current major leaguers. Since there was no formal rule preventing a writer from casting a ballot for an active player, the scribes did not always comply with the informal guideline; Joe DiMaggio received a vote in 1945, for example. From the 1946 election until the 1954 election, an official one-year waiting period was in effect. (DiMaggio, for example, retired after the 1951 season and was first eligible in the 1953 election.) The modern rule establishing a wait of five years was passed in 1954, although those who had already been eligible under the old rule were grandfathered into the ballot, thus permitting Joe DiMaggio to be elected within four years of his retirement.
Contrary to popular belief, no formal exception was made for Lou Gehrig (other than to hold a special one-man election for him): there was no waiting period at that time, and Gehrig met all other qualifications, so he would have been eligible for the next regular election after he retired during the 1939 season. However, the BBWAA decided to hold a special election at the 1939 Winter Meetings in Cincinnati, specifically to elect Gehrig (most likely because it was known that he was terminally ill, making it uncertain that he would live long enough to see another election). Nobody else was on that ballot, and the numerical results have never been made public. Since no elections were held in 1940 or 1941, the special election permitted Gehrig to enter the Hall while still alive. If a player fails to be elected by the BBWAA within 10 years of his eligibility for election, he may be selected by the Veterans Committee. Following changes to the election process for that body made in 2010 and 2016, the Veterans Committee is now responsible for electing all otherwise eligible candidates who are not eligible for the BBWAA ballot — both long-retired players and non-playing personnel (managers, umpires, and executives). From 2011 to 2016, each candidate could be considered once every three years; now, the frequency depends on the era in which an individual made his greatest contributions. A more complete discussion of the new process is available below.
From 2008 to 2010, following changes made by the Hall in July 2007, the main Veterans Committee, then made up of living Hall of Famers, voted only on players whose careers began in 1943 or later. These changes also established three separate committees to select other figures: Players of the Negro leagues have also been considered at various times, beginning in 1971. In 2005, the Hall completed a study on African American players between the late 19th century and the integration of the major leagues in 1947, and conducted a special election for such players in February 2006; seventeen figures from the Negro leagues were chosen in that election, in addition to the eighteen previously selected. Following the 2010 changes, Negro leagues figures were primarily considered for induction alongside other figures from the 1871–1946 era, called the "Pre-Integration Era" by the Hall; since 2016, Negro leagues figures are primarily considered alongside other figures from what the Hall calls the "Early Baseball" era (1871–1949).
Predictably, the selection process catalyzes endless debate among baseball fans over the merits of various candidates. Even players elected years ago remain the subjects of discussions as to whether they deserved election. For example, Bill James' 1994 book "Whatever Happened to the Hall of Fame?" goes into detail about who he believes does and does not belong in the Hall of Fame. Non-induction of banned players. The selection rules for the Baseball Hall of Fame were modified to prevent the induction of anyone on Baseball's "permanently ineligible" list. The most prominent former players to be affected are Pete Rose and "Shoeless Joe" Jackson—many others have been barred from participation in MLB, but none have Hall of Fame qualifications on the level of Jackson or Rose. Jackson and Rose were both banned from MLB for life for actions related to gambling on games involving their own teams. Jackson was determined to have cooperated with those who conspired to intentionally lose the 1919 World Series, and for accepting payment for losing, although his actual level of culpability is fiercely debated. The ensuing Black Sox Scandal led directly to baseball's Rule 21, prominently posted in every clubhouse locker room, which mandates permanent banishment from MLB for having a gambling interest of any sort on a game in which a player, manager or umpire is directly involved.
Rose voluntarily accepted a permanent spot on the ineligible list in return for MLB's promise to make no official finding in relation to alleged betting on the Cincinnati Reds when he was their manager in the 1980s. No credible evidence has ever emerged to support allegations that Rose bet against his team and/or that his betting influenced his managerial decisions, nevertheless, the betting constituted a clear violation of the aforementioned Rule 21. After years of denial, Rose admitted that he bet on the Reds in his 2004 autobiography. Baseball fans are deeply split on the issue of whether Rose and/or Jackson (now both deceased) should remain banned or have their punishments posthumously revoked. Writer Bill James, though he advocates Rose eventually making it into the Hall of Fame, compared the people who want to put Jackson in the Hall of Fame to "those women who show up at murder trials wanting to marry the cute murderer". Changes to Veterans Committee process. The actions and composition of the Veterans Committee have been at times controversial, with occasional selections of contemporaries and teammates of the committee members over seemingly more worthy candidates.
In 2001, the Veterans Committee was reformed to comprise the living Hall of Fame members and other honorees. The revamped Committee held three elections, in 2003 and 2007, for both players and non-players, and in 2005 for players only. No individual was elected in that time, sparking criticism among some observers who expressed doubt whether the new Veterans Committee would ever elect a player. The Committee members, most of whom were Hall members, were accused of being reluctant to elect new candidates in the hope of heightening the value of their own selection. After no one was selected for the third consecutive election in 2007, Hall of Famer Mike Schmidt noted, "The same thing happens every year. The current members want to preserve the prestige as much as possible, and are unwilling to open the doors." In 2007, the committee and its selection processes were again reorganized; the main committee then included all living members of the Hall, and voted on a reduced number of candidates from among players whose careers began in 1943 or later. Separate committees, including sportswriters and broadcasters, would select umpires, managers and executives, as well as players from earlier eras.
In the first election to be held under the 2007 revisions, two managers and three executives were elected in December 2007 as part of the 2008 election process. The next Veterans Committee elections for players were held in December 2008 as part of the 2009 election process; the main committee did not select a player, while the panel for pre–World War II players elected Joe Gordon in its first and ultimately only vote. The main committee voted as part of the election process for inductions in odd-numbered years, while the pre-World War II panel would vote every five years, and the panel for umpires, managers, and executives voted as part of the election process for inductions in even-numbered years. Further changes to the Veterans Committee process were announced by the Hall in July 2010, July 2016, and April 2022. Current structure. Per the latest changes, announced on April 22, 2022, the multiple eras previously utilized were collapsed to three, to be voted on in an annual rotation (one per year): A one-year waiting period beyond potential BBWAA eligibility (which had been abolished in 2016) was reintroduced, thus restricting the committee to considering players retired for at least 16 seasons.
Eligibility. The eligibility criteria for Era Committee consideration differ between players, managers, and executives. Players and managers with multiple teams. While the text on a player's or manager's plaque lists all teams for which the inductee was a member in that specific role, inductees are usually depicted wearing the cap of a specific team, though in a few cases, like umpires, they wear caps without logos. (Executives are not depicted wearing caps.) Additionally, as of 2015, inductee biographies on the Hall's website for all players and managers, and executives who were associated with specific teams, list a "primary team", which does not necessarily match the cap logo. The Hall selects the logo "based on where that player makes his most indelible mark." Although the Hall always made the final decision on which logo was shown, until 2001 the Hall deferred to the wishes of players or managers whose careers were linked with multiple teams. Some examples of inductees associated with multiple teams are the following:
In all of the above cases, the "primary team" is the team for which the inductee spent the largest portion of his career except for Ryan, whose primary team is listed as the Angels despite playing one fewer season for that team than for the Astros. In 2001, the Hall of Fame decided to change the policy on cap logo selection, as a result of rumors that some teams were offering compensation, such as number retirement, money, or organizational jobs, in exchange for the cap designation. (For example, though Wade Boggs denied the claims, some media reports had said that his contract with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays required him to request depiction in the Hall of Fame as a Devil Ray.) The Hall decided that it would no longer defer to the inductee, though the player's wishes would be considered, when deciding on the logo to appear on the plaque. Newly elected members affected by the change include the following: The museum. Sam Crane (who had played a decade in 19th century baseball before becoming a manager and sportswriter) had first approached the idea of making a memorial to the great players of the past in what was believed to have been the birthplace of baseball: Cooperstown, New York, but the idea did not muster much momentum until after his death in 1925. In 1934, the idea for establishing a Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum was devised by several individuals, such as Ford C. Frick (president of the National League) and Alexander Cleland, a Scottish immigrant who decided to serve as the first executive secretary for the Museum for the next seven years that worked with the interests of the Village and Major League Baseball. Stephen Carlton Clark (a Cooperstown native) paid for the construction of the museum, which was planned to open in 1939 to mark the "Centennial of Baseball", which included renovations to Doubleday Field. William Beattie served as the first curator of the museum.
According to the Hall of Fame, approximately 260,000 visitors enter the museum each year, and the running total has surpassed 17 million. These visitors see only a fraction of its 40,000 artifacts, 3 million library items (such as newspaper clippings and photos) and 140,000 baseball cards. The Hall has seen a noticeable decrease in attendance since the mid-2010s. A 2013 story on ESPN.com about the village of Cooperstown and its relation to the game partially linked the reduced attendance with Cooperstown Dreams Park, a youth baseball complex about away in the town of Hartwick. The 22 fields at Dreams Park currently draw 17,000 players each summer for a week of intensive play; while the complex includes housing for the players, their parents and grandparents must stay elsewhere. According to the story, Prior to Dreams Park, a room might be filled for a week by several sets of tourists. Now, that room will be taken by just one family for the week, and that family may only go into Cooperstown and the Hall of Fame once. While there are other contributing factors (the recession and high gas prices among them), the Hall's attendance has tumbled since Dreams Park opened. The Hall drew 383,000 visitors in 1999. It drew 262,000 last year.
Notable events. 1982 unauthorized sales. A controversy erupted in 1982, when it emerged that some historic items given to the Hall had been sold on the collectibles market. The items had been lent to the Baseball Commissioner's office, gotten mixed up with other property owned by the Commissioner's office and employees of the office, and moved to the garage of Joe Reichler, an assistant to Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, who sold the items to resolve his personal financial difficulties. Under pressure from the New York Attorney General, the Commissioner's Office made reparations, but the negative publicity damaged the Hall of Fame's reputation, and made it more difficult for it to solicit donations. 2014 commemorative coins. In 2012, Congress passed and President Barack Obama signed a law ordering the United States Mint to produce and sell commemorative, non-circulating coins to benefit the private, non-profit Hall. The bill, , was introduced in the United States House of Representatives by Rep. Richard Hanna, a Republican from New York, and passed the House on October 26, 2011. The coins, which depict baseball gloves and balls, are the first concave designs produced by the Mint. The mintage included 50,000 gold coins, 400,000 silver coins, and 750,000 clad (nickel-copper) coins. The Mint released them on March 27, 2014, and the gold and silver editions quickly sold out. The Hall receives money from surcharges included in the sale price: a total of $9.5 million if all the coins are sold.
BPP (complexity) In computational complexity theory, a branch of computer science, bounded-error probabilistic polynomial time (BPP) is the class of decision problems solvable by a probabilistic Turing machine in polynomial time with an error probability bounded by 1/3 for all instances. BPP is one of the largest "practical" classes of problems, meaning most problems of interest in BPP have efficient probabilistic algorithms that can be run quickly on real modern machines. BPP also contains P, the class of problems solvable in polynomial time with a deterministic machine, since a deterministic machine is a special case of a probabilistic machine. Informally, a problem is in BPP if there is an algorithm for it that has the following properties: Definition. A language "L" is in BPP if and only if there exists a probabilistic Turing machine "M", such that Unlike the complexity class ZPP, the machine "M" is required to run for polynomial time on all inputs, regardless of the outcome of the random coin flips. Alternatively, BPP can be defined using only deterministic Turing machines. A language "L" is in BPP if and only if there exists a polynomial "p" and deterministic Turing machine "M", such that
In this definition, the string "y" corresponds to the output of the random coin flips that the probabilistic Turing machine would have made. For some applications this definition is preferable since it does not mention probabilistic Turing machines. In practice, an error probability of 1/3 might not be acceptable; however, the choice of 1/3 in the definition is arbitrary. Modifying the definition to use any constant between 0 and 1/2 (exclusive) in place of 1/3 would not change the resulting set BPP. For example, if one defined the class with the restriction that the algorithm can be wrong with probability at most 1/2100, this would result in the same class of problems. The error probability does not even have to be constant: the same class of problems is defined by allowing error as high as 1/2 − "n"−"c" on the one hand, or requiring error as small as 2−"nc" on the other hand, where "c" is any positive constant, and "n" is the length of input. This flexibility in the choice of error probability is based on the idea of running an error-prone algorithm many times, and using the majority result of the runs to obtain a more accurate algorithm. The chance that the majority of the runs are wrong drops off exponentially as a consequence of the Chernoff bound.
Problems. All problems in P are obviously also in BPP. However, many problems have been known to be in BPP but not known to be in P. The number of such problems is decreasing, and it is conjectured that P = BPP. For a long time, one of the most famous problems known to be in BPP but not known to be in P was the problem of determining whether a given number is prime. However, in the 2002 paper "PRIMES is in P", Manindra Agrawal and his students Neeraj Kayal and Nitin Saxena found a deterministic polynomial-time algorithm for this problem, thus showing that it is in P. An important example of a problem in BPP (in fact in co-RP) still not known to be in P is polynomial identity testing, the problem of determining whether a polynomial is identically equal to the zero polynomial, when you have access to the value of the polynomial for any given input, but not to the coefficients. In other words, is there an assignment of values to the variables such that when a nonzero polynomial is evaluated on these values, the result is nonzero? It suffices to choose each variable's value uniformly at random from a finite subset of at least "d" values to achieve bounded error probability, where "d" is the total degree of the polynomial.
Related classes. If the access to randomness is removed from the definition of BPP, we get the complexity class P. In the definition of the class, if we replace the ordinary Turing machine with a quantum computer, we get the class BQP. Adding postselection to BPP, or allowing computation paths to have different lengths, gives the class BPPpath. BPPpath is known to contain NP, and it is contained in its quantum counterpart PostBQP. A Monte Carlo algorithm is a randomized algorithm which is likely to be correct. Problems in the class BPP have Monte Carlo algorithms with polynomial bounded running time. This is compared to a Las Vegas algorithm which is a randomized algorithm which either outputs the correct answer, or outputs "fail" with low probability. Las Vegas algorithms with polynomial bound running times are used to define the class ZPP. Alternatively, ZPP contains probabilistic algorithms that are always correct and have expected polynomial running time. This is weaker than saying it is a polynomial time algorithm, since it may run for super-polynomial time, but with very low probability.
Complexity-theoretic properties. It is known that BPP is closed under complement; that is, BPP = co-BPP. BPP is low for itself, meaning that a BPP machine with the power to solve BPP problems instantly (a BPP oracle machine) is not any more powerful than the machine without this extra power. In symbols, BPPBPP = BPP. The relationship between BPP and NP is unknown: it is not known whether BPP is a subset of NP, NP is a subset of BPP or neither. If NP is contained in BPP, which is considered unlikely since it would imply practical solutions for NP-complete problems, then NP = RP and PH ⊆ BPP. It is known that RP is a subset of BPP, and BPP is a subset of PP. It is not known whether those two are strict subsets, since we don't even know if P is a strict subset of PSPACE. BPP is contained in the second level of the polynomial hierarchy and therefore it is contained in PH. More precisely, the Sipser–Lautemann theorem states that formula_1. As a result, P = NP leads to P = BPP since PH collapses to P in this case. Thus either P = BPP or P ≠ NP or both.
Adleman's theorem states that membership in any language in BPP can be determined by a family of polynomial-size Boolean circuits, which means BPP is contained in P/poly. Indeed, as a consequence of the proof of this fact, every BPP algorithm operating on inputs of bounded length can be derandomized into a deterministic algorithm using a fixed string of random bits. Finding this string may be expensive, however. Some weak separation results for Monte Carlo time classes were proven by , see also . Closure properties. The class BPP is closed under complementation, union and intersection. Relativization. Relative to oracles, we know that there exist oracles A and B, such that PA = BPPA and PB ≠ BPPB. Moreover, relative to a random oracle with probability 1, P = BPP and BPP is strictly contained in NP and co-NP. There is even an oracle in which (and hence ), which can be iteratively constructed as follows. For a fixed ENP (relativized) complete problem, the oracle will give correct answers with high probability if queried with the problem instance followed by a random string of length "kn" ("n" is instance length; "k" is an appropriate small constant). Start with "n"=1. For every instance of the problem of length "n" fix oracle answers (see lemma below) to fix the instance output. Next, provide the instance outputs for queries consisting of the instance followed by "kn"-length string, and then treat output for queries of length ≤("k"+1)"n" as fixed, and proceed with instances of length "n"+1.
The lemma ensures that (for a large enough "k"), it is possible to do the construction while leaving enough strings for the relativized answers. Also, we can ensure that for the relativized , linear time suffices, even for function problems (if given a function oracle and linear output size) and with exponentially small (with linear exponent) error probability. Also, this construction is effective in that given an arbitrary oracle A we can arrange the oracle B to have and . Also, for a oracle (and hence ), one would fix the answers in the relativized E computation to a special nonanswer, thus ensuring that no fake answers are given. Derandomization. The existence of certain strong pseudorandom number generators is conjectured by most experts of the field. Such generators could replace true random numbers in any polynomial-time randomized algorithm, producing indistinguishable results. The conjecture that these generators exist implies that randomness does not give additional computational power to polynomial time computation, that is, P = RP = BPP. More strongly, the assumption that P = BPP is in some sense equivalent to the existence of strong pseudorandom number generators.
László Babai, Lance Fortnow, Noam Nisan, and Avi Wigderson showed that unless EXPTIME collapses to MA, BPP is contained in The class i.o.-SUBEXP, which stands for infinitely often SUBEXP, contains problems which have sub-exponential time algorithms for infinitely many input sizes. They also showed that P = BPP if the exponential-time hierarchy, which is defined in terms of the polynomial hierarchy and E as EPH, collapses to E; however, note that the exponential-time hierarchy is usually conjectured "not" to collapse. Russell Impagliazzo and Avi Wigderson showed that if any problem in E, where has circuit complexity 2Ω("n") then P = BPP.
BQP In computational complexity theory, bounded-error quantum polynomial time (BQP) is the class of decision problems solvable by a quantum computer in polynomial time, with an error probability of at most 1/3 for all instances. It is the quantum analogue to the complexity class BPP. A decision problem is a member of BQP if there exists a quantum algorithm (an algorithm that runs on a quantum computer) that solves the decision problem with high probability and is guaranteed to run in polynomial time. A run of the algorithm will correctly solve the decision problem with a probability of at least 2/3. Definition. BQP can be viewed as the languages associated with certain bounded-error uniform families of quantum circuits. A language "L" is in BQP if and only if there exists a polynomial-time uniform family of quantum circuits formula_1, such that Alternatively, one can define BQP in terms of quantum Turing machines. A language "L" is in BQP if and only if there exists a polynomial quantum Turing machine that accepts "L" with an error probability of at most 1/3 for all instances.
Similarly to other "bounded error" probabilistic classes, the choice of 1/3 in the definition is arbitrary. We can run the algorithm a constant number of times and take a majority vote to achieve any desired probability of correctness less than 1, using the Chernoff bound. The complexity class is unchanged by allowing error as high as 1/2 − "n"−"c" on the one hand, or requiring error as small as 2−"nc" on the other hand, where "c" is any positive constant, and "n" is the length of input. Relationship to other complexity classes. BQP is defined for quantum computers; the corresponding complexity class for classical computers (or more formally for probabilistic Turing machines) is BPP. Just like P and BPP, BQP is low for itself, which means . Informally, this is true because polynomial time algorithms are closed under composition. If a polynomial time algorithm calls polynomial time algorithms as subroutines, the resulting algorithm is still polynomial time. BQP contains P and BPP and is contained in AWPP, PP and PSPACE.
In fact, BQP is low for PP, meaning that a PP machine achieves no benefit from being able to solve BQP problems instantly, an indication of the possible difference in power between these similar classes. The known relationships with classic complexity classes are: As the problem of has not yet been solved, the proof of inequality between BQP and classes mentioned above is supposed to be difficult. The relation between BQP and NP is not known. In May 2018, computer scientists Ran Raz of Princeton University and Avishay Tal of Stanford University published a paper which showed that, relative to an oracle, BQP was not contained in PH. It can be proven that there exists an oracle A such that formula_6. In an extremely informal sense, this can be thought of as giving PH and BQP an identical, but additional, capability and verifying that BQP with the oracle (BQPA) can do things PHA cannot. While an oracle separation has been proven, the fact that BQP is not contained in PH has not been proven. An oracle separation does not prove whether or not complexity classes are the same. The oracle separation gives intuition that BQP may not be contained in PH.
It has been suspected for many years that Fourier Sampling is a problem that exists within BQP, but not within the polynomial hierarchy. Recent conjectures have provided evidence that a similar problem, Fourier Checking, also exists in the class BQP without being contained in the polynomial hierarchy. This conjecture is especially notable because it suggests that problems existing in BQP could be classified as harder than NP-Complete problems. Paired with the fact that many practical BQP problems are suspected to exist outside of P (it is suspected and not verified because there is no proof that P ≠ NP), this illustrates the potential power of quantum computing in relation to classical computing. Adding postselection to BQP results in the complexity class PostBQP which is equal to PP. A complete problem for Promise-BQP. Promise-BQP is the class of promise problems that can be solved by a uniform family of quantum circuits (i.e., within BQP). Completeness proofs focus on this version of BQP. Similar to the notion of NP-completeness and other complete problems, we can define a complete problem as a problem that is in Promise-BQP and that every other problem in Promise-BQP reduces to it in polynomial time.
APPROX-QCIRCUIT-PROB. The APPROX-QCIRCUIT-PROB problem is complete for efficient quantum computation, and the version presented below is complete for the Promise-BQP complexity class (and not for the total BQP complexity class, for which no complete problems are known). APPROX-QCIRCUIT-PROB's completeness makes it useful for proofs showing the relationships between other complexity classes and BQP. Given a description of a quantum circuit acting on qubits with gates, where is a polynomial in and each gate acts on one or two qubits, and two numbers formula_7, distinguish between the following two cases: Here, there is a promise on the inputs as the problem does not specify the behavior if an instance is not covered by these two cases. Claim. Any BQP problem reduces to APPROX-QCIRCUIT-PROB. Proof. Suppose we have an algorithm that solves APPROX-QCIRCUIT-PROB, i.e., given a quantum circuit acting on qubits, and two numbers formula_7, distinguishes between the above two cases. We can solve any problem in BQP with this oracle, by setting formula_15.
For any formula_16, there exists family of quantum circuits formula_1 such that for all formula_2, a state formula_19 of formula_20 qubits, if formula_21; else if formula_22. Fix an input formula_19 of qubits, and the corresponding quantum circuit formula_24. We can first construct a circuit formula_25 such that formula_26. This can be done easily by hardwiring formula_19 and apply a sequence of CNOT gates to flip the qubits. Then we can combine two circuits to get formula_28, and now formula_29. And finally, necessarily the results of formula_24 is obtained by measuring several qubits and apply some (classical) logic gates to them. We can always defer the measurement and reroute the circuits so that by measuring the first qubit of formula_29, we get the output. This will be our circuit , and we decide the membership of formula_32 by running formula_33 with formula_15. By definition of BQP, we will either fall into the first case (acceptance), or the second case (rejection), so formula_16 reduces to APPROX-QCIRCUIT-PROB.
BQP and EXP. We begin with an easier containment. To show that formula_36, it suffices to show that APPROX-QCIRCUIT-PROB is in EXP since APPROX-QCIRCUIT-PROB is BQP-complete. Note that this algorithm also requires formula_37 space to store the vectors and the matrices. We will show in the following section that we can improve upon the space complexity. BQP and PSPACE. Sum of histories is a technique introduced by physicist Richard Feynman for path integral formulation. APPROX-QCIRCUIT-PROB can be formulated in the sum of histories technique to show that formula_38. Consider a quantum circuit , which consists of gates, formula_39, where each formula_40 comes from a universal gate set and acts on at most two qubits. To understand what the sum of histories is, we visualize the evolution of a quantum state given a quantum circuit as a tree. The root is the input formula_41, and each node in the tree has formula_42 children, each representing a state in formula_43. The weight on a tree edge from a node in -th level representing a state formula_44 to a node in formula_45-th level representing a state formula_46 is formula_47, the amplitude of formula_46 after applying formula_49 on formula_44. The transition amplitude of a root-to-leaf path is the product of all the weights on the edges along the path. To get the probability of the final state being formula_51, we sum up the amplitudes of all root-to-leave paths that ends at a node representing formula_51.
More formally, for the quantum circuit , its sum over histories tree is a tree of depth , with one level for each gate formula_53 in addition to the root, and with branching factor formula_42. Notice in the sum over histories algorithm to compute some amplitude formula_55, only one history is stored at any point in the computation. Hence, the sum over histories algorithm uses formula_56 space to compute formula_55 for any since formula_56 bits are needed to store the histories in addition to some workspace variables. Therefore, in polynomial space, we may compute formula_59 over all with the first qubit being , which is the probability that the first qubit is measured to be 1 by the end of the circuit. Notice that compared with the simulation given for the proof that formula_36, our algorithm here takes far less space but far more time instead. In fact it takes formula_61 time to calculate a single amplitude! BQP and PP. A similar sum-over-histories argument can be used to show that formula_62. P and BQP. We know formula_63, since every classical circuit can be simulated by a quantum circuit. It is conjectured that BQP solves hard problems outside of P, specifically, problems in NP. The claim is indefinite because we don't know if P=NP, so we don't know if those problems are actually in P. Below are some evidence of the conjecture:
Brainfuck Brainfuck is an esoteric programming language created in 1993 by Swiss student Urban Müller. Designed to be extremely minimalistic, the language consists of only eight simple commands, a data pointer, and an instruction pointer. Brainfuck is an example of a so-called Turing tarpit: it can be used to write any program, but it is not practical to do so because it provides so little abstraction that the programs get very long or complicated. While Brainfuck is fully Turing-complete, it is not intended for practical use but to challenge and amuse programmers. Brainfuck requires one to break down commands into small and simple instructions. The language takes its name from the slang term "brainfuck", which refers to things so complicated or unusual that they exceed the limits of one's understanding, as it was not meant or made for designing actual software but to challenge the boundaries of computer programming. Because the language's name contains profanity, many substitutes are used, such as brainfsck, branflakes, brainoof, brainfrick, BrainF, and BF.
History. Müller designed Brainfuck with the goal of implementing the smallest possible compiler, inspired by the 1024-byte compiler for the FALSE programming language. Müller's original compiler was implemented in Motorola 68000 assembly on the Amiga and compiled to a binary with a size of 296 bytes. He uploaded the first Brainfuck compiler to Aminet in 1993. The program came with a "Readme" file, which briefly described the language, and challenged the reader "Who can program anything useful with it? :)". Müller also included an interpreter and some examples. A second version of the compiler used only 240 bytes. Language design. The language consists of eight commands. A brainfuck program is a sequence of these commands, possibly interspersed with other characters (which are ignored). The commands are executed sequentially, with some exceptions: an instruction pointer begins at the first command, and each command it points to is executed, after which it normally moves forward to the next command. The program terminates when the instruction pointer moves past the last command.
The brainfuck language uses a simple machine model consisting of the program and instruction pointer, as well as a one-dimensional array of at least 30,000 byte cells initialized to zero; a movable data pointer (initialized to point to the leftmost byte of the array); and two streams of bytes for input and output (most often connected to a keyboard and a monitor respectively, and using the ASCII character encoding). The eight language commands each consist of a single character: codice_1 and codice_2 match as parentheses usually do: each codice_1 matches exactly one codice_2 and vice versa, the codice_1 comes first, and there can be no unmatched codice_1 or codice_2 between the two. Brainfuck programs are usually difficult to comprehend. This is partly because any mildly complex task requires a long sequence of commands and partly because the program's text gives no direct indications of the program's state. These, as well as Brainfuck's inefficiency and its limited input/output capabilities, are some of the reasons it is not used for serious programming. Nonetheless, like any Turing-complete language, Brainfuck is theoretically capable of computing any computable function or simulating any other computational model if given access to an unlimited amount of memory and time. A variety of Brainfuck programs have been written. Although Brainfuck programs, especially complicated ones, are difficult to write, it is quite trivial to write an interpreter for Brainfuck in a more typical language such as C due to its simplicity. Brainfuck interpreters written in the Brainfuck language itself also exist.
Examples. Adding two values. As a first, simple example, the following code snippet will add the current cell's value to the next cell: Each time the loop is executed, the current cell is decremented, the data pointer moves to the right, that next cell is incremented, and the data pointer moves left again. This sequence is repeated until the starting cell is 0. [->+<] This can be incorporated into a simple addition program as follows: Cell c0 =. > +++++ Cell c1 = 5 [ Start your loops with your cell pointer on the loop counter (c1 in our case) < + Add 1 to c0 > - Subtract 1 from c1 ] End your loops with the cell pointer on the loop counter At this point our program has added 5 to 2 leaving 7 in c0 and 0 in c1 but we cannot output this value to the terminal since it is not ASCII encoded To display the ASCII character "7" we must add 48 to the value 7 We use a loop to compute 48 = 6 * 8 ++ ++++ c1 = 8 and this will be our loop counter aga. < +++ +++ Add 6 to c0 > - Subtract 1 from c1 < . Print out c0 which has the value 55 which translates to "7"!
Hello World! The following program prints "Hello World!" and a newline to the screen: [ This program prints "Hello World!" and a newline to the screen; its length is 106 active command characters. [It is not the shortest.] This loop is an "initial comment loop", a simple way of adding a comment to a BF program such that you don't have to worry about any command characters. Any ".", ",", "+", "-", "<" and ">" characters are simply ignored, the "[" and "]" characters just have to be balanced. This loop and the commands it contains are ignored because the current cell defaults to a value of 0; the 0 value causes this loop to be skipped. ++++++ Set Cell #0 to. >++++ Add 4 to Cell #1; this will always set Cell #1 to 4 [ as the cell will be cleared by the loop >++ Add 2 to Cell #2 >+++ Add 3 to Cell #3 >+++ Add 3 to Cell #4 >+ Add 1 to Cell #5 ««- Decrement the loop counter in Cell #1 ] Loop until Cell #1 is zero; number of iterations is 4 >+ Add 1 to Cell #2 >+ Add 1 to Cell #3
>- Subtract 1 from Cell #4 »+ Add 1 to Cell #6 [<] Move back to the first zero cell you find; this will be Cell #1 which was cleared by the previous loop <- Decrement the loop Counter in Cell #0 ] Loop until Cell #0 is zero; number of iterations is 8 The result of this is: Cell no : 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 Contents: 0 0 72 104 88 32 8 Pointer : ^ ». Cell #2 has value 72 which is 'H' >---. Subtract 3 from Cell #3 to get 101 which is 'e' +++++..+++. Likewise for 'llo' from Cell . ». Cell #5 is 32 for the space <-. Subtract 1 from Cell #4 for 87 to give a 'W' <. Cell #3 was set to 'o' from the end of 'Hello' +.------.--------. Cell #3 for 'rl' and '. »+. Add 1 to Cell #5 gives us an exclamation point >++. And finally a newline from Cell #6 For readability, this code has been spread across many lines, and blanks and comments have been added. Brainfuck ignores all characters except the eight commands codice_8 so no special syntax for comments is needed (as long as the comments do not contain the command characters). The code could just as well have been written as:
ROT13. This program enciphers its input with the ROT13 cipher. To do this, it must map characters A-M (ASCII 65–77) to N-Z (78–90), and vice versa. Also it must map a-m (97–109) to n-z (110–122) and vice versa. It must map all other characters to themselves; it reads characters one at a time and outputs their enciphered equivalents until it reads an EOF (here assumed to be represented as either -1 or "no change"), at which point the program terminates. -,+[ Read first character and start outer character reading loop -[ Skip forward if character is 0 »++++[>++++++++<-] Set up divisor (32) for division loop (MEMORY LAYOUT: dividend copy remainder divisor quotient zero zero) <+<-[ Set up dividend (x minus 1) and enter division loop >+>+>-[»>] Increase copy and remainder / reduce divisor / Normal case: skip forward <]<[ Zero that flag unless quotient was 2 or 3; zero quotient; check flag ++++++++++++<[ If flag then set up divisor (13) for second division loop (MEMORY LAYOUT: zero copy dividend divisor remainder quotient zero zero)
>-[>+»] Reduce divisor; Normal case: increase remainder >[+[<+>-]>+»] Special case: increase remainder / move it back to divisor / increase quotient ««<- Decrease dividend ] End division loop »[<+>-] Add remainder back to divisor to get a useful 13 >[ Skip forward if quotient was 0 -[ Decrement quotient and skip forward if quotient was 1 -«[-]» Zero quotient and divisor if quotient was 2 ]«[«-»-]» Zero divisor and subtract 13 from copy if quotient was 1 ]«[«+»-] Zero divisor and add 13 to copy if quotient was 0 ] End outer skip loop (jump to here if ((character minus 1)/32) was not 2 or 3) <[-] Clear remainder from first division if second division was skipped <.[-] Output ROT13ed character from copy and clear it <-,+ Read next character ] End character reading loop Simulation of abiogenesis. In 2024, a Google research project used a slightly modified 10-command version of Brainfuck as the basis of an artificial digital environment. In this environment, they found that replicators arose naturally and competed with each other for domination of the environment.
Bartolomeo Ammannati Bartolomeo Ammannati (18 June 1511 – 13 April 1592) was an Italian architect and sculptor, born at Settignano, near Florence, Italy. He studied under Baccio Bandinelli and Jacopo Sansovino (assisting on the design of the Library of St. Mark's, the Biblioteca Marciana, Venice) and closely imitated the style of Michelangelo. He was more distinguished in architecture than in sculpture. He worked in Rome in collaboration with Vignola and Vasari), including designs for the Villa Giulia, but also for works at Lucca. He labored during 1558–1570, in the refurbishment and enlargement of Pitti Palace, creating the courtyard consisting of three wings with rusticated facades, and one lower portico leading to the amphitheatre in the Boboli Gardens. His design mirrored the appearance of the main external façade of Pitti. He was also named "Consul" of Accademia delle Arti del Disegno of Florence, which had been founded by the Duke Cosimo I in 1563. In 1569, Ammannati was commissioned to build the Ponte Santa Trinita, a bridge over the Arno River. The three arches are elliptic, and though very light and elegant, has survived, when floods had damaged other Arno bridges at different times. Santa Trinita was destroyed in 1944, during World War II, and rebuilt in 1957.
Ammannati designed what is considered a prototypic Mannerist sculptural ensemble in the Fountain of Neptune ("Fontana del Nettuno"), prominently located in the Piazza della Signoria in the center of Florence. The assignment was originally given to the aged Bartolommeo Bandinelli; however when Bandinelli died, Ammannati's design, bested the submissions of Benvenuto Cellini and Vincenzo Danti, to gain the commission. From 1563 and 1565, Ammannati and his assistants, among them Giambologna, sculpted the block of marble that had been chosen by Bandinelli. He took Grand Duke Cosimo I as model for Neptune's face. The statue was meant to highlight Cosimo's goal of establishing a Florentine Naval force. The ungainly sea god was placed at the corner of the Palazzo Vecchio within sight of Michelangelo's David statue, and the then 87-year-old sculptor is said to have scoffed at Ammannati— saying that he had ruined a beautiful piece of marble— with the ditty: "Ammannati, Ammanato, che bel marmo hai rovinato!" Ammannati continued work on this fountain for a decade, adding around the perimeter a cornucopia of demigod figures: bronze reclining river gods, laughing satyrs and marble sea horses emerging from the water. In 1550 Ammannati married Laura Battiferri, an elegant poet and an accomplished woman. Later in his life he had a religious crisis, influenced by Counter-Reformation piety, which resulted in condemning his own works depicting nudity, and he left all his possessions to the Jesuits. He died in Florence in 1592.
Bishop A bishop is an ordained member of the clergy who is entrusted with a position of authority and oversight in a religious institution. In Christianity, bishops are normally responsible for the governance and administration of dioceses. The role or office of the bishop is called episcopacy or the episcopate. Organizationally, several Christian denominations utilize ecclesiastical structures that call for the position of bishops, while other denominations have dispensed with this office, seeing it as a symbol of power. Bishops have also exercised political authority within their dioceses. Traditionally, bishops claim apostolic succession, a direct historical lineage dating back to the original Twelve Apostles or Saint Paul. The bishops are by doctrine understood as those who possess the full priesthood given by Jesus Christ, and therefore may ordain other clergy, including other bishops. A person ordained as a deacon, priest (i.e. presbyter), and then bishop is understood to hold the fullness of the ministerial priesthood, given responsibility by Christ to govern, teach and sanctify the Body of Christ (the Church). Priests, deacons and lay ministers co-operate and assist their bishops in pastoral ministry.
Some Pentecostal and other Protestant denominations have bishops who oversee congregations, though they do not necessarily claim apostolic succession. Etymology and terminology. The English word "bishop" derives, via Latin , Old English , and Middle English , from the Greek word , meaning "overseer" or "supervisor". Greek was the language of the early Christian church, but the term did not originate in Christianity: it had been used in Greek for several centuries before the advent of Christianity. The English words "priest" and "presbyter" both derive, via Latin, from the Greek word , meaning "elder" or "senior", and not originally referring to priesthood. In the early Christian era the two terms were not always clearly distinguished, but is used in the sense of the order or office of bishop, distinct from that of , in the writings attributed to Ignatius of Antioch in the second century. History in Christianity. The earliest organization of the Church in Jerusalem was, according to most scholars, similar to that of Jewish synagogues, but it had a council or college of ordained presbyters (). In Acts 11:30 and Acts 15:22, a collegiate system of government in Jerusalem is chaired by James the Just, according to tradition the first bishop of the city. In Acts 14:23, the Apostle Paul ordains presbyters in churches in Anatolia. The word "presbyter" was not yet distinguished from "overseer" (, later used exclusively to mean "bishop"), as in Acts 20:17, Titus 1:5–7 and 1 Peter 5:1. The earliest writings of the Apostolic Fathers, the Didache and the First Epistle of Clement, for example, show the church used two terms for local church offices—presbyters (seen by many as an interchangeable term with or overseer) and deacon.
In the First epistle to Timothy and Epistle to Titus in the New Testament a more clearly defined episcopate can be seen. Both letters state that Paul had left Timothy in Ephesus and Titus in Crete to oversee the local church. Paul commands Titus to ordain presbyters/bishops and to exercise general oversight. Early sources are unclear but various groups of Christian communities may have had the bishop surrounded by a group or college functioning as leaders of the local churches. Eventually the head or "monarchic" bishop came to rule more clearly, and all local churches would eventually follow the example of the other churches and structure themselves after the model of the others with the one bishop in clearer charge, though the role of the body of presbyters remained important. Apostolic Fathers. Around the end of the 1st century, the church's organization became clearer in historical documents. In the works of the Apostolic Fathers, and Ignatius of Antioch in particular, the role of the episkopos, or bishop, became more important or, rather, already was very important and being clearly defined. While Ignatius of Antioch offers the earliest clear description of monarchial bishops (a single bishop over all house churches in a city) he is an advocate of monepiscopal structure rather than describing an accepted reality. To the bishops and house churches to which he writes, he offers strategies on how to pressure house churches who do not recognize the bishop into compliance. Other contemporary Christian writers do not describe monarchial bishops, either continuing to equate them with the presbyters or speaking of (bishops, plural) in a city.
Clement of Alexandria (end of the 2nd century) writes about the ordination of a certain Zachæus as bishop by the imposition of Simon Peter Bar-Jonah's hands. The words bishop and ordination are used in their technical meaning by the same Clement of Alexandria. The bishops in the 2nd century are defined also as the only clergy to whom the ordination to priesthood (presbyterate) and diaconate is entrusted: "a priest (presbyter) lays on hands, but does not ordain." (). At the beginning of the 3rd century, Hippolytus of Rome describes another feature of the ministry of a bishop, which is that of the : the primate of sacrificial priesthood and the power to forgive sins. Christian bishops and civil government. The efficient organization of the Roman Empire became the template for the organisation of the church in the 4th century, particularly after Constantine's Edict of Milan. As the church moved from the shadows of privacy into the public forum it acquired land for churches, burials and clergy. In 391, Theodosius I decreed that any land that had been confiscated from the church by Roman authorities be returned.
The most usual term for the geographic area of a bishop's authority and ministry, the diocese, began as part of the structure of the Roman Empire under Diocletian. As Roman authority began to fail in the western portion of the empire, the church took over much of the civil administration. This can be clearly seen in the ministry of two popes: Pope Leo I in the 5th century, and Pope Gregory I in the 6th century. Both of these men were statesmen and public administrators in addition to their role as Christian pastors, teachers and leaders. In the Eastern churches, latifundia entailed to a bishop's see were much less common, the state power did not collapse the way it did in the West, and thus the tendency of bishops acquiring civil power was much weaker than in the West. However, the role of Western bishops as civil authorities, often called prince bishops, continued throughout much of the Middle Ages. Bishops holding political office. As well as being Archchancellors of the Holy Roman Empire after the 9th century, bishops generally served as chancellors to medieval monarchs, acting as head of the "justiciary" and chief chaplain. The Lord Chancellor of England was almost always a bishop up until the dismissal of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey by Henry VIII. Similarly, the position of Kanclerz in the Polish kingdom was always held by a bishop until the 16th century.
In modern times, the principality of Andorra is headed by Co-Princes of Andorra, one of whom is the Bishop of Urgell and the other, the sitting President of France, an arrangement that began with the Paréage of Andorra (1278), and was ratified in the 1993 constitution of Andorra. The office of the Papacy is inherently held by the sitting Roman Catholic Bishop of Rome. Though not originally intended to hold temporal authority, since the Middle Ages the power of the Papacy gradually expanded deep into the secular realm and for centuries the sitting Bishop of Rome was the most powerful governmental office in Central Italy. In modern times, the Pope is also the sovereign Prince of Vatican City, an internationally recognized micro-state located entirely within the city of Rome. In France, prior to the Revolution, representatives of the clergy — in practice, bishops and abbots of the largest monasteries — comprised the First Estate of the Estates-General. This role was abolished after separation of Church and State was implemented during the French Revolution.
In the 21st century, the more senior bishops of the Church of England continue to sit in the House of Lords of the Parliament of the United Kingdom, as representatives of the established church, and are known as Lords Spiritual. The Bishop of Sodor and Man, whose diocese lies outside the United Kingdom, is an "ex officio" member of the Legislative Council of the Isle of Man. In the past, the Bishop of Durham had extensive vice-regal powers within his northern diocese, which was a county palatine, the County Palatine of Durham, (previously, Liberty of Durham) of which he was "ex officio" the earl. In the 19th century, a gradual process of reform was enacted, with the majority of the bishop's historic powers vested in The Crown by 1858. Eastern Orthodox bishops, along with all other members of the clergy, are canonically forbidden to hold political office. Occasional exceptions to this rule are tolerated when the alternative is political chaos. In the Ottoman Empire, the Patriarch of Constantinople, for example, had de facto administrative, cultural and legal jurisdiction, as well as spiritual authority, over all Eastern Orthodox Christians of the empire, as part of the Ottoman millet system. An Orthodox bishop headed the Prince-Bishopric of Montenegro from 1516 to 1852, assisted by a secular "guvernadur". More recently, Archbishop Makarios III of Cyprus, served as President of the Cyprus from 1960 to 1977, an extremely turbulent time period on the island.
In 2001, Peter Hollingworth, AC, OBE – then the Anglican Archbishop of Brisbane – was controversially appointed Governor-General of Australia. Although Hollingworth gave up his episcopal position to accept the appointment, it still attracted considerable opposition in a country which maintains a formal separation between Church and State. Episcopacy during the English Civil War. During the period of the English Civil War, the role of bishops as wielders of political power and as upholders of the established church became a matter of heated political controversy. Presbyterianism was the polity of most Reformed Christianity in Europe, and had been favored by many in England since the English Reformation. Since in the primitive church the offices of "presbyter" and were not clearly distinguished, many Puritans held that this was the only form of government the church should have. The Anglican divine, Richard Hooker, objected to this claim in his famous work "Of the Laws of Ecclesiastic Polity" while, at the same time, defending Presbyterian ordination as valid (in particular Calvin's ordination of Beza). This was the official stance of the English Church until the Commonwealth, during which time, the views of Presbyterians and Independents (Congregationalists) were more freely expressed and practiced.
Christian churches. Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Lutheran and Anglican churches. Bishops form the leadership in the Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Oriental Orthodox Churches, certain Lutheran churches, the Anglican Communion, the Independent Catholic churches, the Independent Anglican churches, and certain other, smaller, denominations. The traditional role of a bishop is as pastor of a diocese (also called a bishopric, synod, eparchy or see), and so to serve as a "diocesan bishop", or "eparch" as it is called in many Eastern Christian churches. Dioceses vary considerably in size, geographically and population-wise. Some dioceses around the Mediterranean Sea which were Christianised early are rather compact, whereas dioceses in areas of rapid modern growth in Christian commitment—as in some parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, South America and the Far East—are much larger and more populous. As well as traditional diocesan bishops, many churches have a well-developed structure of church leadership that involves a number of layers of authority and responsibility.
Duties. In Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Oriental Orthodoxy, High Church Lutheranism, and Anglicanism, only a bishop can ordain other bishops, priests, and deacons. In the Eastern liturgical tradition, a priest can celebrate the Divine Liturgy only with the blessing of a bishop. In Byzantine usage, an antimension signed by the bishop is kept on the altar partly as a reminder of whose altar it is and under whose omophorion the priest at a local parish is serving. In Syriac Church usage, a consecrated wooden block called a thabilitho is kept for the same reasons. The bishop is the ordinary minister of the sacrament of confirmation in the Latin Church, and in the Old Catholic communion only a bishop may administer this sacrament. In the Lutheran and Anglican churches, the bishop normatively administers the rite of confirmation, although in those denominations that do not have an episcopal polity, confirmation is administered by the priest. However, in the Byzantine and other Eastern rites, whether Eastern or Oriental Orthodox or Eastern Catholic, chrismation is done immediately after baptism, and thus the priest is the one who confirms, using chrism blessed by a bishop.
Ordination of Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Lutheran and Anglican bishops. Bishops in all of these communions are ordained by other bishops through the laying on of hands. Ordination of a bishop, and thus continuation of apostolic succession, takes place through a ritual centred on the imposition of hands and prayer. Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Anglican, Old Catholic and some Lutheran bishops claim to be part of the continuous sequence of ordained bishops since the days of the apostles referred to as apostolic succession. In Scandinavia and the Baltic region, Lutheran churches participating in the Porvoo Communion (those of Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, and Lithuania), as well as many non-Porvoo membership Lutheran churches (including those of Kenya, Latvia, and Russia), as well as the confessional Communion of Nordic Lutheran Dioceses, believe that they ordain their bishops in the apostolic succession in lines stemming from the original apostles. "The New Westminster Dictionary of Church History" states that "In Sweden the apostolic succession was preserved because the Catholic bishops were allowed to stay in office, but they had to approve changes in the ceremonies."
Peculiar to the Catholic Church. While traditional teaching maintains that any bishop with apostolic succession can validly perform the ordination of another bishop, some churches require two or three bishops participate, either to ensure sacramental validity or to conform with church law. Catholic doctrine holds that one bishop can validly ordain another (priest) as a bishop. Though a minimum of three bishops participating is desirable (there are usually several more) in order to demonstrate collegiality, canonically only one bishop is necessary. The practice of only one bishop ordaining was normal in countries where the church was persecuted under Communist rule. The title of archbishop or metropolitan may be granted to a senior bishop, usually one who is in charge of a large ecclesiastical jurisdiction. He may, or may not, have provincial oversight of suffragan bishops and may possibly have auxiliary bishops assisting him. Apart from the ordination, which is always done by other bishops, there are different methods as to the actual selection of a candidate for ordination as bishop. In the Catholic Church the Congregation for Bishops generally oversees the selection of new bishops with the approval of the pope. The papal nuncio usually solicits names from the bishops of a country, consults with priests and leading members of a laity, and then selects three to be forwarded to the Holy See. In Europe, some cathedral chapters have duties to elect bishops. The Eastern Catholic churches generally elect their own bishops. Most Eastern Orthodox churches allow varying amounts of formalised laity or lower clergy influence on the choice of bishops. This also applies in those Eastern churches which are in union with the pope, though it is required that he give assent.
The pope, in addition to being the Bishop of Rome and spiritual head of the Catholic Church, is also the Patriarch of the Latin Church. Each bishop within the Latin Church is answerable directly to the Pope and not any other bishop except to metropolitans in certain oversight instances. The pope previously used the title "Patriarch of the West", but this title was dropped from use in 2006, a move which caused some concern within the Eastern Orthodox Communion as, to them, it implied wider papal jurisdiction. Recognition of other churches' ordinations. The Catholic Church does recognise as valid (though illicit) ordinations done by breakaway Catholic, Old Catholic or Oriental bishops, and groups descended from them; it also regards as both valid and licit those ordinations done by bishops of the Eastern churches, so long as those receiving the ordination conform to other canonical requirements (for example, is an adult male) and an eastern orthodox rite of episcopal ordination, expressing the proper functions and sacramental status of a bishop, is used; this has given rise to the phenomenon of (for example, clergy of the Independent Catholic groups which claim apostolic succession, though this claim is rejected by both Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy). With respect to Lutheranism, "the Catholic Church has never officially expressed its judgement on the validity of orders as they have been handed down by episcopal succession in these two national Lutheran churches" (the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Sweden and the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland) though it does "question how the ecclesiastical break in the 16th century has affected the apostolicity of the churches of the Reformation and thus the apostolicity of their ministry".
Since Pope Leo XIII issued the bull in 1896, the Catholic Church has insisted that Anglican orders are invalid because of the Reformed changes in the Anglican ordination rites of the 16th century and divergence in understanding of the theology of priesthood, episcopacy and Eucharist. However, since the 1930s, Utrecht Old Catholic bishops (recognised by the Holy See as validly ordained) have sometimes taken part in the ordination of Anglican bishops. According to the writer Timothy Dufort, by 1969, all Church of England bishops had acquired Old Catholic lines of apostolic succession recognised by the Holy See. This development has been used to argue that the strain of apostolic succession has been re-introduced into Anglicanism, at least within the Church of England. However, other issues, such as the Anglican ordination of women, is at variance with Catholic understanding of Christian teaching, and have contributed to the reaffirmation of Catholic rejection of Anglican ordinations. The Eastern Orthodox Churches do not accept the validity of any ordinations performed by the Independent Catholic groups, as Eastern Orthodoxy considers to be spurious any consecration outside the church as a whole. Eastern Orthodoxy considers apostolic succession to exist only within the Universal Church, and not through any authority held by individual bishops; thus, if a bishop ordains someone to serve outside the (Eastern Orthodox) Church, the ceremony is ineffectual, and no ordination has taken place regardless of the ritual used or the ordaining prelate's position within the Eastern Orthodox Churches.
The position of the Catholic Church is slightly different. Whilst it does recognise the validity of the orders of certain groups which separated from communion with Holy See (for instance, the ordinations of the Old Catholics in communion with Utrecht, as well as the Polish National Catholic Church - which received its orders directly from Utrecht, and was until recently part of that communion), Catholicism does not recognise the orders of any group whose teaching is at variance with what they consider the core tenets of Christianity; this is the case even though the clergy of the Independent Catholic groups may use the proper ordination ritual. There are also other reasons why the Holy See does not recognise the validity of the orders of the Independent clergy: Whilst members of the Independent Catholic movement take seriously the issue of valid orders, it is highly significant that the relevant Vatican Congregations tend not to respond to petitions from Independent Catholic bishops and clergy who seek to be received into communion with the Holy See, hoping to continue in some sacramental role. In those instances where the pope does grant reconciliation, those deemed to be clerics within the Independent Old Catholic movement are invariably admitted as laity and not priests or bishops.
There is a mutual recognition of the validity of orders amongst Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Old Catholic, Oriental Orthodox and Assyrian Church of the East churches. Some provinces of the Anglican Communion have begun ordaining women as bishops in recent decades – for example, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Cuba. The first woman to be consecrated a bishop within Anglicanism was Barbara Harris, who was ordained in the United States in 1989. In 2006, Katharine Jefferts Schori, the Episcopal Bishop of Nevada, became the first woman to become the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church. In the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada (ELCIC), the largest Lutheran Church bodies in the United States and Canada, respectively, and roughly based on the Nordic Lutheran national churches (similar to that of the Church of England), bishops are elected by Synod Assemblies, consisting of both lay members and clergy, for a term of six years, which can be renewed, depending upon the local synod's "constitution" (which is mirrored on either the ELCA or ELCIC's national constitution). Since the implementation of concordats between the ELCA and the Episcopal Church of the United States and the ELCIC and the Anglican Church of Canada, all bishops, including the presiding bishop (ELCA) or the national bishop (ELCIC), have been consecrated using the historic succession in line with bishops from the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Sweden, with at least one Anglican bishop serving as co-consecrator.
Since going into ecumenical communion with their respective Anglican body, bishops in the ELCA or the ELCIC not only approve the "rostering" of all ordained pastors, diaconal ministers, and associates in ministry, but they serve as the principal celebrant of all pastoral ordination and installation ceremonies, diaconal consecration ceremonies, as well as serving as the "chief pastor" of the local synod, upholding the teachings of Martin Luther as well as the documentations of the Ninety-Five Theses and the Augsburg Confession. Unlike their counterparts in the United Methodist Church, ELCA and ELCIC synod bishops do not appoint pastors to local congregations (pastors, like their counterparts in the Episcopal Church, are called by local congregations). The presiding bishop of the ELCA and the national bishop of the ELCIC, the national bishops of their respective bodies, are elected for a single 6-year term and may be elected to an additional term.
Methodism. African Methodist Episcopal Church. In the African Methodist Episcopal Church, "Bishops are the Chief Officers of the Connectional Organization. They are elected for life by a majority vote of the General Conference which meets every four years." Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. In the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States, bishops are administrative superintendents of the church; they are elected by "delegate" votes for as many years deemed until the age of 74, then the bishop must retire. Among their duties, are responsibility for appointing clergy to serve local churches as pastor, for performing ordinations, and for safeguarding the doctrine and discipline of the church. The General Conference, a meeting every four years, has an equal number of clergy and lay delegates. In each Annual Conference, CME bishops serve for four-year terms. In 2010, Teresa E. Jefferson-Snorton was elected as a bishop, becoming the first woman to hold that position. As of 2024, she remains the only female bishop in CME.
United Methodist Church. In the United Methodist Church (the largest branch of Methodism in the world) bishops serve as administrative and pastoral superintendents of the church. They are elected for life from among the ordained elders (presbyters) by vote of the delegates in regional (called jurisdictional) conferences, and are consecrated by the other bishops present at the conference through the laying on of hands. In the United Methodist Church bishops remain members of the "Order of Elders" while being consecrated to the "Office of the Episcopacy". Within the United Methodist Church only bishops are empowered to consecrate bishops and ordain clergy. Among their most critical duties is the ordination and appointment of clergy to serve local churches as pastor, presiding at sessions of the Annual, Jurisdictional, and General Conferences, providing pastoral ministry for the clergy under their charge, and safeguarding the doctrine and discipline of the church. Furthermore, individual bishops, or the Council of Bishops as a whole, often serve a prophetic role, making statements on important social issues and setting forth a vision for the denomination, though they have no legislative authority of their own. In all of these areas, bishops of the United Methodist Church function very much in the historic meaning of the term. According to the "Book of Discipline of the United Methodist Church", a bishop's responsibilities are:
In each Annual Conference, United Methodist bishops serve for four-year terms, and may serve up to three terms before either retirement or appointment to a new Conference. United Methodist bishops may be male or female, with Marjorie Matthews being the first woman to be consecrated a bishop in 1980. The collegial expression of episcopal leadership in the United Methodist Church is known as the Council of Bishops. The Council of Bishops speaks to the church and through the church into the world and gives leadership in the quest for Christian unity and interreligious relationships. The Conference of Methodist Bishops includes the United Methodist "Council of Bishops" plus bishops from affiliated autonomous Methodist or United Churches. John Wesley consecrated Thomas Coke a "General Superintendent", and directed that Francis Asbury also be consecrated for the United States of America in 1784, where the Methodist Episcopal Church first became a separate denomination apart from the Church of England. Coke soon returned to England, but Asbury was the primary builder of the new church. At first he did not call himself bishop, but eventually submitted to the usage by the denomination.
Notable bishops in United Methodist history include Coke, Asbury, Richard Whatcoat, Philip William Otterbein, Martin Boehm, Jacob Albright, John Seybert, Matthew Simpson, John S. Stamm, William Ragsdale Cannon, Marjorie Matthews, Leontine T. Kelly, William B. Oden, Ntambo Nkulu Ntanda, Joseph Sprague, William Henry Willimon, and Thomas Bickerton. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Bishop is the leader of a local congregation, called a ward. As with most LDS priesthood holders, the bishop is a part-time lay minister and earns a living through other employment. As such, it is his duty to preside, call local leaders, and judge the worthiness of members for certain activities. The bishop does not deliver sermons at every service (generally asking members to do so), but is expected to be a spiritual guide for his congregation. It is therefore believed that he has both the right and ability to receive divine inspiration (through the Holy Spirit) for the ward under his direction. Because it is a part-time position, all able members are expected to assist in the management of the ward by holding delegated lay positions (for example, women's and youth leaders, teachers) referred to as callings. The bishop is especially responsible for leading the youth, in connection with the fact that a bishop is the president of the Aaronic priesthood in his ward (and is thus a form of Mormon Kohen). Although members are asked to confess serious sins to him, unlike the Catholic Church, he is not the instrument of divine forgiveness, but merely a guide through the repentance process (and a judge in case transgressions warrant excommunication or other official discipline). The bishop is also responsible for the physical welfare of the ward, and thus collects tithing and fast offerings and distributes financial assistance where needed.
A literal descendant of Aaron has "legal right" to act as a bishop after being found worthy and ordained by the First Presidency. In the absence of a literal descendant of Aaron, a high priest in the Melchizedek priesthood is called to be a bishop. Each bishop is selected from resident members of the ward by the stake presidency with approval of the First Presidency, and chooses two "counselors" to form a "bishopric". An priesthood holder called as bishop must be ordained a high priest if he is not already one, unlike the similar function of branch president. In special circumstances (such as a ward consisting entirely of young university students), a bishop may be chosen from outside the ward. Traditionally, bishops are married, though this is not always the case. A bishop is typically released after about five years and a new bishop is called to the position. Although the former bishop is released from his duties, he continues to hold the Aaronic priesthood office of bishop. Church members frequently refer to a former bishop as "Bishop" as a sign of respect and affection.
Latter-day Saint bishops do not wear any special clothing or insignia the way clergy in many other churches do, but are expected to dress and groom themselves neatly and conservatively per their local culture, especially when performing official duties. Bishops (as well as other members of the priesthood) can trace their line of authority back to Joseph Smith, who, according to church doctrine, was ordained to lead the church in modern times by the ancient apostles Peter, James, and John, who were ordained to lead the Church by Jesus Christ. At the global level, the presiding bishop oversees the temporal affairs (buildings, properties, commercial corporations, and so on) of the worldwide church, including the church's massive global humanitarian aid and social welfare programs. The presiding bishop has two counselors; the three together form the presiding bishopric. As opposed to ward bishoprics, where the counselors do not hold the office of bishop, all three men in the presiding bishopric hold the office of bishop, and thus the counselors, as with the presiding bishop, are formally referred to as "Bishop".
Irvingism. New Apostolic Church. The New Apostolic Church (NAC) knows three classes of ministries: Deacons, Priests and Apostles. The Apostles, who are all included in the apostolate with the Chief Apostle as head, are the highest ministries. Of the several kinds of priest...ministries, the bishop is the highest. Nearly all bishops are set in line directly from the chief apostle. They support and help their superior apostle. Pentecostalism. Church of God in Christ. In the Church of God in Christ (COGIC), the ecclesiastical structure is composed of large dioceses that are called "jurisdictions" within COGIC, each under the authority of a bishop, sometimes called "state bishops". They can either be made up of large geographical regions of churches or churches that are grouped and organized together as their own separate jurisdictions because of similar affiliations, regardless of geographical location or dispersion. Each state in the U.S. has at least one jurisdiction while others may have several more, and each jurisdiction is usually composed of between 30 and 100 churches.