Karen Dawn is an American animal rights and welfare advocate and writer.

Biography and work
Karen Dawn was born in the United States and grew up and was schooled in Australia. She studied at the University of NSW — a science degree with a major in psychology. Dawn got her first experience working with the media as a news researcher and writer for Australia's national nightly news magazine show "The 7:30 Report," on ABC. Dawn moved to New York City and pursued her interest in music throughout the early 1990s as a singer/songwriter.

Animal rights spokesperson
Dawn is an animal rights spokesperson who speaks at the national animal rights conferences and the annual "Taking Action for Animals" conference in Washington DC. She has appeared on major TV networks discussing animal issues and she is a popular speaker at colleges.

Dawn's career in animal rights began in 1999 when she started the DawnWatch.com list serve, which she created to encourage activists to stay in contact with the media.

Dawn was invited to serve on the voting committee for the Genesis Awards a position which she held from 2001 to 2004. In 2006 she returned to the Genesis Awards voting committee as the print consultant.

Her piece "Best Friends Need Shelter, Too" was published in The Washington Post and she was subsequently interviewed for a New York Times article about the media coverage of displaced pets during the Katrina aftermath. A year later she participated in an on-air follow-up — a one-hour program on Washington Post Radio devoted to the Katrina Animal Disaster and what we learned from it with regard to the need for disaster preparedness and policy changes.

Dawn was an official spokesperson for California's Proposition 2, a 2008 election ballot initiative that changed the standards for confining farm animals.

On May 17, 2008, Dawn was presented with the Outstanding Activist for Farm Animals Award. The award was presented at the Farm Sanctuary 2008 Gala by Karen Dawn's friends actress Emily Deschanel and Skinny Bitch author Rory Freedman.

Pit bull advocate
Dawn is outspoken in her advocacy for pit bulls and was featured in a Los Angeles Times front-page story as a “passionate defender” of the breed.  But she also fully supports the need for pit bull spay-neuter legislation, even testifying in favor of such legislation in a California Senate committee hearing in Sacramento.  The bill, SB861, was signed into law in 2006. It allows for breed specific spay-neuter local ordinances but “prohibits cities and counties from banning any specific breed of dog.”

Turkey rescue
Karen Dawn may be most widely known for her annual Thanksgiving turkey rescue. It garners much media attention and was picked up by the Associated Press for Thanksgiving 2012.

In a radio blog that aired on Washington Post Radio on Thanksgiving Day 2006, Dawn explains that she met a turkey for the first time in 2000 at the Poplar Spring Animal Sanctuary in Washington DC. She says that she was surprised that the turkey, Olivia, was so friendly and gentle and that when she crawled into Dawn's lap and fell asleep, Dawn "fell in love."

She first brought two live turkeys, who had been destined for slaughter, into her own home for Thanksgiving 2009. They were later retired to the Animal Acres sanctuary in Acton California. The Los Angeles Times did a spread on that effort, printed on the front page of the California Section under the heading "Hold the turkey, please: A vegan Thanksgiving – where the birds are friends, not feast." Dawn told ABC World News Now, during an interview (at the time of her third annual turkey rescue) that she had done the original rescue largely as a publicity stunt in order to garner that Los Angeles Times story. But the next year she missed having live turkeys, and she now does her rescue every year because, as she told CNN's Headline News anchor Jane Velez Mitchell, she realized that having the turkeys in her home over Thanksgiving is "A fun way to present a serious message about health, about animal welfare, and about the environment.”

The media coverage includes serious messages: The ABC World News Now story from 2010 shows slaughterhouse video of turkeys hanging upside down on a conveyor belt while Dawn comments, "Something I think very few people would be aware of is that turkeys are not covered under the Federal humane slaughter laws. The ironic thing about the slaughter laws in this country is that they actually exempt 95% of the animals who are slaughtered." (She is referring to all poultry, plus rabbits.)  The Thanksgiving 2012 coverage from Dawn's local ABC station showed the reporter, Elex Michaelson, petting a turkey and talking about how much they enjoy the human touch. Dawn tells viewers that "Turkeys are a lot more adorable than they are delicious" and that "turkey day is a lot more fun when the turkeys are alive and well."

Almost all of the media coverage includes video and photos of the turkeys getting a welcome bath and blowdry. Dawn posts an annual turkey rescue video on her YouTube channel (youtube.com/thankingthemonkey) where you can watch the bath and blow-dry scenes.

Los Angeles ABC-7 has covered Dawn's turkey rescue every year from 2008 through 2018. Below are examples of that coverage as well as Fox Business News and KTLA.

 Los Angeles ABC-7 coverage
 Fox Business News coverage
 KTLA coverage

Radio hosting
Dawn has hosted animal issues talk shows on Houston's Pacifica station, KPFT and on the Los Angeles Pacifica station, KPFK.

Writing
Dawn has written opinion pieces published in The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, New York's Newsday and the UK Guardian. She contributed to "Terrorists or Freedom Fighters: Reflections on the Liberation of Animals" a 2004 anthology edited by Steve Best and Anthony Nocella, and to "In Defense of Animals: The Second Wave," edited by Peter Singer.

Dawn's first book, Thanking the Monkey: Rethinking the Way We Treat Animals, was published in May 2008.  She promotes animal rights with a fun and friendly image, stating, "There's no reason that animal rights can't be fun and inviting. For heaven's sake—gin's vegan!"

Thanking the Monkey was chosen by the Washington Post as one of the "Best Books of 2008."

Works
Thanking the Monkey: Rethinking the Way We Treat Animals. Harper Paperbacks, 2008.
Revised and Updated e-edition. May 2014.

Op-Eds
Dogs Can Get by Just Fine on a Vegetarian Diet. Los Angeles Times. December 27, 2017.
No Good Options for P-45. Los Angeles Times. December 6, 2016.
Suffering by the numbers: If you give up red meat but continue eating fish and chicken you may end up increasing animal cruelty. With Peter Singer. Los Angeles Times. October 16, 2016.
Why Do We Keep Gorillas Behind Bars? With Peter Singer. Los Angeles Times. June 5, 2016.
Turkeys have a Seat at the Table. Santa Monica Daily Press. November 23, 2011.
The choice isn't seals or people. Los Angeles Times. December 4, 2007.
Tale of a Turkey who Changed Thanksgiving. Washington Post Radio. Aired November 23, 2006.
Shameful policy caused many pets' deaths. New York Newsday. September 15, 2005.
Best Friends Need Shelter, Too. Washington Post. September 10, 2005.
Got milk? You've got problems. Los Angeles Times. August 13, 2005.
Gandhi's way won't do: Animal rights activists do not want to resort to violence but many see it as the only option. The Guardian. September 5, 2004.
Commentary; Echoes of Abu Ghraib in Chicken Slaughterhouse. With Peter Singer. Los Angeles Times. July 25, 2004.
When Slaughter Makes Sense. With Peter Singer. New York Newsday. February 8, 2004.
Back at the Ranch, a Horror Story. With Peter Singer. Los Angeles Times. December 1, 2003.
There Should Be No Room for Cruelty to Livestock. With Peter Singer. Los Angeles Times. June 8, 2003.

Blogs
Prince and His Animal Rights Legacy. The Huffington Post. April 25, 2016.
McConaughey Missteps: Is Celebrity Shaming Good Animal Rights Activism? The Huffington Post. February 9, 2015.
Why I Love the Go Daddy Puppy Commercial. The Huffington Post. January 29, 2015.
Thanksgiving Turkey Rescue: Spa Day and Vegan Feast for Beautiful Birds (with video). The Huffington Post. November 21, 2014.
Baby-Monkey Abuse Funded by Your Tax Dollars. The Huffington Post. August 7, 2014.
Seventeen Years of Love with my Pit Bull, Paula. The Dodo. June 4, 2014.
How Animal Welfare Advances Veganism and Animal Rights. The Huffington Post. March 17, 2014.
Is Japan’s Dolphin Slaughter Really for Food? The Huffington Post. January 24, 2014.
They Shoot Giraffes Don’t They? Why Marius’s Death Is No Surprise. The Huffington Post. January 11, 2014.
Turkeys Get Spa Treatment and Love on Thanksgiving (with VIDEO). The Huffington Post. November 27, 2013.

Magazine Pieces
Beyond the Slaughterhouse: A look at a new industry working to produce real meat without killing animals. The Progressive Magazine. Pages 47–50. October/November, 2019.
The End of Animal Farming Is Not An Impossible Dream. The Progressive Magazine. September 13, 2018.
Making Progress Against Animal Cruelty: An interview with Wayne Pacelle. The Progressive Magazine. July 2016.
Making Animal Protection a Political Issue. The Progressive Magazine. December 2015.

Book Chapter Contributions
Converging Convictions: Coetzee and His Characters on Animals. June 2010.
From the Front Lines to the Front Page: An Analysis of ALF Media Coverage. June 2004.
Moving the Media. August 2003.

References

American non-fiction writers
American animal rights activists
American animal welfare workers
American veganism activists
Living people
University of New South Wales alumni
Year of birth missing (living people)


The sixth series of the BBC family sitcom My Family originally aired between 10 March 2006 and 25 December 2006. The series was commissioned following consistently high ratings from the previous series. The opening episode, "Bliss For Idiots", re-introduces the six main characters, with the addition of Alfie Butts, played by Rhodri Meilir. All episodes from the sixth series are thirty minutes long, excluding The series was once again produced by Rude Boy Productions, a company that produces comedies created by Fred Barron. The series was filmed at Pinewood Studios in London, in front of a live audience.

Episode Information

Reception

Viewers
The series was once again given a Friday evening prime-time slot, with most episodes being aired at 8:30pm. The opening episode of the series gained 7.17 million viewers, becoming the second most watched programme of the week. The sixth series averaged 6.35 million viewers for each episode.

References

External links
My Family: Series Six at the British Comedy Guide
My Family: Series Six at My Family Online
BBC Comedy- My Family Series 6

2006 British television seasons


Dynamic game difficulty balancing (DGDB), also known as dynamic difficulty adjustment (DDA) or dynamic game balancing (DGB), is the process of automatically changing parameters, scenarios, and behaviors in a video game in real-time, based on the player's ability, in order to avoid making the player bored (if the game is too easy) or frustrated (if it is too hard). The goal of dynamic difficulty balancing is to keep the user interested from the beginning to the end, providing a good level of challenge.

Traditionally, game difficulty increases steadily along the course of the game (either in a smooth linear fashion, or through steps represented by levels). The parameters of this increase (rate, frequency, starting levels) can only be modulated at the beginning of the experience by selecting a difficulty level. This often leads to frustrating experiences for players as they attempt to follow premade learning or difficulty curves, which poses many challenges for game developers; as a result, this method of difficulty scaling is not ubiquitous.

Dynamic game elements
Some elements of a game that might be changed via dynamic difficulty balancing include:
 Speed of enemies
 Health of enemies
 Frequency of enemies
 Frequency of powerups
 Power of player
 Power of enemies
 Duration of gameplay experience

Approaches

Different approaches are found in the literature to address dynamic game difficulty balancing. In all cases, it is necessary to measure, implicitly or explicitly, the difficulty the user is facing at a given moment. This measure can be performed by a heuristic function, which some authors call "challenge function". This function maps a given game state into a value that specifies how easy or difficult the game feels to the user at a specific moment. Examples of heuristics used are:

 The rate of successful shots or hits
 The numbers of won and lost pieces
 Life points
 Evolution
 Time to complete some task

... or any metric used to calculate a game score. Chris Crawford said "If I were to make a graph of a typical player's score as a function of time spent within the game, that graph should show a curve sloping smoothly and steadily upward. I describe such a game as having a positive monotonic curve". Games without such a curve seem "either too hard or too easy", he said.

Hunicke and Chapman's approach controls the game environment settings in order to make challenges easier or harder. For example, if the game is too hard, the player gets more weapons, recovers life points faster, or faces fewer opponents. Although this approach may be effective, its application can result in implausible situations. A straightforward approach is to combine such "parameters manipulation" to some mechanisms to modify the behavior of the non-player characters (characters controlled by the computer and usually modeled as intelligent agents). This adjustment, however, should be made with moderation, to avoid the 'rubber band' effect. One example of this effect in a racing game would involve the AI driver's vehicles becoming significantly faster when behind the player's vehicle, and significantly slower while in front, as if the two vehicles were connected by a large rubber band.

A traditional implementation of such an agent's intelligence is to use behavior rules, defined during game development. A typical rule in a fighting game would state "punch opponent if he is reachable, chase him otherwise". Extending such an approach to include opponent modeling can be made through Spronck et al.′s dynamic scripting, which assigns to each rule a probability of being picked. Rule weights can be dynamically updated throughout the game, accordingly to the opponent skills, leading to adaptation to the specific user. With a simple mechanism, rules can be picked that generate tactics that are neither too strong nor too weak for the current player.

Andrade et al. divide the DGB problem into two dimensions: competence (learn as well as possible) and performance (act just as well as necessary). This dichotomy between competence and performance is well known and studied in linguistics, as proposed by Noam Chomsky. Their approach faces both dimensions with reinforcement learning (RL). Offline training is used to bootstrap the learning process. This can be done by letting the agent play against itself (selflearning), other pre-programmed agents, or human players. Then, online learning is used to continually adapt this initially built-in intelligence to each specific human opponent, in order to discover the most suitable strategy to play against him or her. Concerning performance, their idea is to find an adequate policy for choosing actions that provide a good game balance, i.e., actions that keep both agent and human player at approximately the same performance level. According to the difficulty the player is facing, the agent chooses actions with high or low expected performance. For a given situation, if the game level is too hard, the agent does not choose the optimal action (provided by the RL framework), but chooses progressively less and less suboptimal actions until its performance is as good as the player's. Similarly, if the game level becomes too easy, it will choose actions whose values are higher, possibly until it reaches the optimal performance.

Demasi and Cruz built intelligent agents employing genetic algorithms techniques to keep alive agents that best fit the user level. Online coevolution is used in order to speed up the learning process. Online coevolution uses pre-defined models (agents with good genetic features) as parents in the genetic operations, so that the evolution is biased by them. These models are constructed by offline training or by hand, when the agent genetic encoding is simple enough.

Other work in the field of DGB is based on the hypothesis that the player-opponent interaction—rather than the audiovisual features, the context or the genre of the game—is the property that contributes the majority of the quality features of entertainment in a computer game. Based on this fundamental assumption, a metric for measuring the real time entertainment value of predator/prey games was introduced, and established as efficient and reliable by validation against human judgment.

Further studies by Yannakakis and Hallam have shown that artificial neural networks (ANN) and fuzzy neural networks can extract a better estimator of player satisfaction than a human-designed one, given appropriate estimators of the challenge and curiosity (intrinsic qualitative factors for engaging gameplay according to Malone) of the game and data on human players' preferences. The approach of constructing user models of the player of a game that can predict the answers to which variants of the game are more or less fun is defined as Entertainment Modeling. The model is usually constructed using machine learning techniques applied to game parameters derived from player-game interaction and/or statistical features of player's physiological signals recorded during play. This basic approach is applicable to a variety of games, both computer and physical.

Caveats
Designing a game that is fair without being predictable is difficult. Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams cite an example of a game that changed the difficulty of each level based on how the player performed in several preceding levels. Players noticed this and developed a strategy to overcome challenging levels by deliberately playing badly in the levels before the difficult one. The authors stress the importance of covering up the existence of difficulty adaptation so that players are not aware of it.

Uses in video games

An early example of difficulty balancing can be found in Zanac, developed in 1986 by Compile. The game featured a unique adaptive artificial intelligence, in which the game automatically adjusted the difficulty level according to the player's skill level, rate of fire, and the ship's current defensive status/capability. Earlier than this can be found in Midway's 1975 Gun Fight coin-op game. This head to head shoot-em-up would aid whichever player had just been shot, by placing a fresh additional object, such as a Cactus plant, on their half of the play-field making it easier for them to hide.

Archons computer opponent slowly adapts over time to help players defeat it. Danielle Bunten designed both M.U.L.E. and Global Conquest to dynamically balance gameplay between players. Random events are adjusted so that the player in first place is never lucky and the last-place player is never unlucky.

The first Crash Bandicoot game and its sequels make use of a "Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment" system, slowing down obstacles, giving extra hit points and adding continue points according to the player's number of deaths. According to the game's lead designer Jason Rubin, the goal was to "help weaker players without changing the game for the better players".

The video game Flow was notable for popularizing the application of mental immersion (also called flow) to video games with its 2006 Flash version. The video game design was based on the master's thesis of one of its authors, and was later adapted to PlayStation 3.

SiN Episodes released in 2006 featured a "Personal Challenge System" where the numbers and toughness of enemies faced would vary based on the performance of the player to ensure the level of challenge and pace of progression through the game.  The developer, Ritual Entertainment, claimed that players with widely different levels of ability could finish the game within a small range of time of each other.

In 2005, Resident Evil 4 employed a system called the "Difficulty Scale", unknown to most players, as the only mention of it was in the Official Strategy Guide. This system grades the player's performance on a number scale from 1 to 10, and adjusts both enemy behavior/attacks used and enemy damage/resistance based on the player's performance (such as deaths, critical attacks, etc.). The selected difficulty levels lock players at a certain number; for example, on Normal difficulty, one starts at Grade 4, can move down to Grade 2 if doing poorly, or up to Grade 7 if doing well. The grades between difficulties can overlap.

God Hand, a 2006 video game developed by Clover Studio, directed by Resident Evil 4 director Shinji Mikami, and published by Capcom for the PlayStation 2, features a meter during gameplay that regulates enemy intelligence and strength. This meter increases when the player successfully dodges and attacks opponents, and decreases when the player is hit. The meter is divided into four levels, with the hardest level called "Level DIE." The game also has three difficulties, with the easy difficulty only allowing the meter to ascend to level 2, while the hardest difficulty locks the meter to level DIE. This system also offers greater rewards when defeating enemies at higher levels.

The 2008 video game Left 4 Dead uses an artificial intelligence technology dubbed "The AI Director". The AI Director is used to procedurally generate a different experience for the players each time the game is played. It monitors individual players' performance and how well they work together as a group to pace the game, determining the number of zombies that attack the player and the location of boss infected encounters based on information gathered. The Director also determines how quickly players are moving through the level towards each objective; if it detects that players have remained in one place for too long or are not making enough progress, it will summon a horde of common infected to force any players and AI Characters present to move from their current location and combat the new threat. Besides pacing, the Director also controls some video and audio elements of the game to set a mood for a boss encounter or to draw the players' attention to a certain area. Valve calls the way the Director is working "procedural narrative" because instead of having a difficulty level which just ramps up to a constant level, the A.I. analyzes how the players fared in the game so far, and try to add subsequent events that would give them a sense of narrative.

Madden NFL 09 introduces "Madden IQ", which begins with an optional test of the players knowledge of the sport, and abilities in various situations. The score is then used to control the game's difficulty.

In the match-3 game Fishdom, the time limit is adjusted based on how well the player performs. The time limit is increased should the player fail a level, making it possible for any player to beat a level after a few tries.

In the 1999 video game Homeworld, the number of ships that the AI begins with in each mission will be set depending on how powerful the game deems the player's fleet to be.  Successful players have larger fleets because they take fewer losses.  In this way, a player who is successful over a number of missions will begin to be challenged more and more as the game progresses.

In Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout 3, as the player increases in level, tougher variants of enemies, enemies with higher statistics and better weapons, or new enemies will replace older ones to retain a constant difficulty, which can be raised, using a slider, with experience bonuses and vice versa in Fallout 3. This can also be done in New Vegas, but there is no bonus to increasing or decreasing the difficulty.

The Mario Kart series features items during races that help an individual driver get ahead of their opponents. These items are distributed based on a driver's position in a way that is an example of dynamic game difficulty balancing. For example, a driver near the bottom of the field is likely to get an item that will drastically increase their speed or sharply decrease the speed of their opponents, whereas a driver in first or second place can expect to get these kinds of items rarely (and will probably receive the game's weaker items). The game's computer racers also adapt to the player's speed - slowing down when the leading player racer is too far behind the best computer racer, and vice versa - as the rival computer racers catch up to the player in first.

Alleged use to shape player buying behaviour

In 2020, a class-action lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California accused game developer Electronic Arts of using its patented Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment technology in three of its EA Sports franchises — Madden NFL, FIFA, and NHL — across all games ranging back to the 2017 versions. The plaintiffs say that EA uses this technology to push players into purchasing more loot boxes in the form of Player Packs, saying that it effectively makes even high-stat players not play as well as they should.

The suit also notes that EA uses this technology without disclosing it to players, noting that EA has denied its use in the past in multiple games mentioned in the suit. When asked for comment on the allegations, EA called the claims "baseless" and that they "misrepresent our games."

See also
 Difficulty level
 Nonlinear gameplay
 Game balance
 Game artificial intelligence
 Flow (psychology)
 Nintendo Hard
 FIFA (video game series)

References

Further reading

External links

Video game gameplay
Game design
Video game terminology


The seventh series of the BBC family sitcom My Family was originally broadcast between 6 April 2007 and 26 December 2007. It was commissioned following consistently high ratings from the sixth series. The opening episode, "The Ego Has Landed", re-introduces the seven main characters. All episodes from the seventh series are thirty minutes in length, with the exception of the Christmas special. The series was once again produced by Rude Boy Productions, a company that produces comedies created by Fred Barron. The series was filmed at Pinewood Studios near London, in front of a live audience.

Episode information

Reception

Viewers
The series was once again given a prime-time Friday evening slot, with most episodes broadcast at 8:30pm. No episodes in the series managed to attract over 6.8 million viewers, a considerable loss compared to previous series.

The final episode of the series, "Life Begins at Fifty", was moved back a week due to international football, losing around 1.5 million viewers.

The seventh series averaged 5.92 million viewers for each episode.

Critics
Tom Simpson, of My Family Online, thought that one particular episode from the series sood out. He wrote that "One of the Boys", written by the friend of Jason, David Cantor, is a "brilliant, lively, funny episode that also contains a rare moment of emotion", and that the episode brought a tear to his eye.

References

External links
My Family: Series Seven at the British Comedy Guide
My Family: Series Seven at My Family Online
BBC Comedy- My Family Series 7

2007 British television seasons


Edgewood School District was a public school district serving the families of Edgewood, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania and surrounding communities by providing K-12 public education.  The school opened October 6, 1892 in the town of Edgewood and operated for 90 years before closing.
The Edgewood School District was eliminated by court order in July 1981 when the students of Edgewood were included in the newly formed, larger, Woodland Hills School District.

References

School districts in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania
School districts established in 1892
1892 establishments in Pennsylvania
1982 disestablishments in Pennsylvania
School districts disestablished in 1982


The eighth series of the BBC family sitcom My Family originally aired between 11 April 2008 and 24 December 2008. The series was commissioned following consistent ratings from the seventh series. The opening episode, "The Parent Trap", re-introduces the seven main characters. All episodes from the eighth series are thirty minutes long, excluding the Christmas special. The series was once again produced by Rude Boy Productions, a company that produces comedies created by Fred Barron. The series was filmed at Pinewood Studios in London, in front of a live audience.

Episode Information

Reception

Viewers
Beginning with Series 8, My Family was given a much later slot, with most episodes airing at 9:30pm. The opening episode of the series gained only 5.56 million viewers, the poorest figure for an episode of the series yet. The eighth series averaged 5.39 million viewers for each episode.

References

External links
My Family: Series Eight at the British Comedy Guide
My Family: Series Eight at My Family Online
BBC Comedy- My Family Series 8

2008 British television seasons


The ninth series of the BBC family sitcom My Family originally aired between 2 April 2009 and 24 December 2009. The series was commissioned following successful ratings from the previous series. The opening episode, "Bully For Ben", re-introduces the six main characters, with the exception of Abi. Kris Marshall (Nick) and Siobhan Hayes (Abi) make a guest appearance in the last episode of the series, "Kenzo's Project". All episodes from the ninth series are thirty minutes long, excluding the Christmas special. The eighth episode of the series, "The Guru", was announced as the 100th episode of the series, and included guest appearances from John Barrowman and David Haig. The series was once again produced by Rude Boy Productions, a company that produces comedies created by Fred Barron. The series was filmed at Pinewood Studios in London, in front of a live audience.

Episode Information

Reception

Viewers
The series was given a new, Thursday evening prime-time slot, with the opening episode airing at 8:30pm, with all the following episodes airing at 8:30. To celebrate the 100th episode of My Family, the fourth and fifth episodes were aired as a double-bill in a Sunday evening prime-time slot. The opening episode of the series gained 6.83 million viewers, a consistent improvement on series eight. The ninth series averaged 5.13 million viewers for each episode.

References

External links
My Family: Series Nine

2009 British television seasons


Woodruff Harlan “Doc” Bruder (February 5, 1901 – November 13, 1952) was a professional football player for the Buffalo Bisons in 1925 and the Frankford Yellow Jackets in 1926. He played college football at Pitt and West Virginia. Bruder won the 1926 NFL championship with the Yellow Jackets.

External links

1901 births
1952 deaths
Players of American football from Houston
Frankford Yellow Jackets players
Buffalo Bisons (NFL) players
Pittsburgh Panthers football players
West Virginia Mountaineers football players
Burials in Texas
American football halfbacks


The Dodd Center for Human Rights (formerly the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center) is a University of Connecticut center which supports programming, educational initiatives, and events dedicated to the theme of human rights. The Dodd Center also houses several University of Connecticut departments and centers, including Archives & Special Collections, a unit of the University of Connecticut Library, the Human Rights Institute, and the Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life. The John P. McDonald Reading Room is the public access point for the university archives and special collections.

History

Ground was broken for the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center on October 10, 1993, and the finished building was dedicated by President Bill Clinton on October 15, 1995. It is named for the late Senator Thomas Joseph Dodd whose son, Senator Christopher J. Dodd, played a crucial role in the center's development. The dedication ceremony inaugurated "The Dodd Year", a year-long series of special events, speakers, exhibits, and colloquia. Devoted to the theme of human rights, The Dodd Year recalled Thomas Dodd's participation as a senior prosecutor in the International Military Tribunal, the first of the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials.

The Dodd Year program brought an array of world figures to campus including Madeleine Albright, Elie Wiesel, and Oscar Arias and concluded in the fall of 1996 with an address by Mikhail Gorbachev.
In August 2021, the University of Connecticut Board of Trustees voted to rededicate the center as the Dodd Center for Human Rights. President Joe Biden, accompanied by Connecticut governor Ned Lamont, former senator Christopher Dodd, and other political dignitaries rededicated the center in a ceremony on October 15, 2021, exactly 26 years after its original iteration's dedication.

Programs

The Dodd Center for Human Rights hosts a number of ongoing programs and events.

The Raymond and Beverly Distinguished Sackler Lecture in Human Rights is held twice a year. Past speakers include Dorothy Q. Thomas, Adam Fairclough, Charlotte Bunch, Harold Koh, Patricia Wald, Samantha Power, Michael Ignatieff, George Mitchell, and James Crawford.
The Thomas J. Dodd Prize in International Justice and Human Rights, first awarded in 2003, is given biennially to an individual or organization which has made a significant contribution towards international justice and human rights. The 2009 Dodd Prize was awarded to the Committee to Protect Journalists on October 5, 2009.

The Edwin Way Teale Lecture Series brings a variety of distinguished speakers to the University of Connecticut to speak on various aspects of nature and the environment.

References

External links
 Official site

Library buildings completed in 1995
University and college academic libraries in the United States
University of Connecticut
Dodd family
Libraries in Tolland County, Connecticut


The 2nd Army Brigade () is a mixed (mechanized infantry and armoured) brigade of the Serbian Army.

History
The brigade was formed on March 28, 2007, from the former Army units located in western Serbia: 252nd Armoured Brigade, 37th Motorized Brigade, 20th Motorized Brigade, 401st Air Defence Artillery Brigade as well as parts of 228th Signal Battalion, 524th Logistics Base and 24th Special Purpose Battalion.

Structure
Brigade's units are spread out throughout western and central Serbia, from the border with Montenegro on south to Drina and Velika Morava rivers on west and east, to area around city of Valjevo on north. It consists of mechanized infantry, armoured, artillery, air defence artillery, engineer, signal and logistics units.
 20th Command Battalion - Kraljevo
 21st Infantry Battalion - Raška
 22nd Infantry Battalion - Požega
 23rd Self-propelled Artillery Battalion - Kraljevo
 24th Self-propelled Missile Launcher Artillery Battalion - Valjevo
 25th Air-defence Artillery Battalion - Kraljevo
 26th Tank Battalion - Kraljevo
 27th Mechanized Battalion - Kraljevo
 28th Mechanized Battalion - Novi Pazar
 29th Logistics Battalion - Kraljevo
 210th Engineer Battalion - Kraljevo

Equipment
M-84 main battle tank
BVP M-80 infantry fighting vehicle
BRDM-2 armoured reconnaissance vehicle
2S1 Gvozdika 122mm self-propelled howitzer
M-94 Plamen-S 128mm self-propelled multiple rocket launcher
Strela 1 short-range surface-to-air missile system
Bofors L/70 anti-aircraft gun
engineer and logistic vehicles and equipment

Traditions

Anniversary
The anniversary of the brigade is celebrated on July 12. On that day in 1805, during the First Serbian Uprising, in the Battle of Karanovac, town of
Kraljevo and its surroundings was liberated from Ottoman Empire.

Patron saint
The unit's slava or its patron saint is Feast of Saints Peter and Paul known as Petrovdan.

References

External links
2nd Army Brigade Web Page

Brigades of Serbia
Military units and formations established in 2007


A gingival disease is the term given to any disorder primarily affecting the gingiva. An example is gingivitis.

Causes
Dental plaque accumulates at the surfaces when proper cleaning and maintaining is not done. There is inflammation due to the bacteria released from the toxins. calculus forms and if not removed, causes this disease.

References

External links

Periodontal disorders


Suvi Do (Serbian Cyrillic: Cуви Дo) is a neighborhood of the city of Niš, Serbia. It is located in Niš municipality of Palilula.

Location
Suvi Do is located in the south-east part of Niš. It is bordered on the north by the Car Konstadin Boulevard, and on the west by neighborhood of Trosarina.

History
Suvi Do used to be a village but now it grow to a suburb. It was founded by a settler named Koca, in the 17th century.

Characteristics
The neighborhood is residential.

Neighborhoods of Niš


Varsity Cup is the collective name for four South African rugby union competitions involving the top rugby playing universities in the country. It was launched in 2008, with eight teams participating in the Varsity Cup competition and each university's internal champions competing in the Koshuis Rugby Championships (now known as Res Rugby). In 2011, a second tier competition called the Varsity Shield was added, increasing the number of participating universities to thirteen. A Young Guns tournament for the Under-20 side of the Varsity Cup teams was launched in 2012. A further expansion for the 2017 season saw three additional universities added to the Varsity Shield, totaling sixteen teams.

The Varsity Cup was dominated by  during the competition's formative years, with the team winning the first three tournaments in a row. Four other sides –  (NWU Pukke), ,  and  – have also won the tournament subsequently. Those five sides, along with , participated in the Varsity Cup in each season since its conception, while , , ,  and  participated in the Varsity Cup on occasion, but also played in the second-tier Varsity Shield competition in certain seasons. , , ,  and  have never been able to win promotion to the Varsity Cup, spending all their time in the Varsity Shield tournament.

History

The Varsity Cup tournament was founded in 2008, with former Springbok World Cup winning captain, Francois Piennaar playing a key role in the establishment. It featured the rugby teams of eight universities, with , , , , , ,  and  being the founding members of the competition. At the same time, the Koshuis Rugby Championships (now known as Res Rugby) was also launched; this competition featured the university residence (koshuis) teams that won the internal league for each of the Varsity Cup universities.

In 2011, a second tier was added below the Varsity Cup tournament, called the Varsity Shield, which featured the rugby teams of a further five universities. , , ,  and  were the expansion teams that were added to the Varsity Shield for its first season.

In 2012, an Under-20 competition was also added, called the Young Guns. Each season, the same eight teams that took part in the Varsity Cup could enter their youth teams in this Young Guns competition. The name "Varsity Rugby" was also coined in 2012 to describe the four competitions collectively.

From the inception of the tournament in 2008 until 2017, the title sponsors of the tournaments were First National Bank and Steinhoff International. For this reason, the competitions were officially known as the "FNB Varsity Cup presented by Steinhoff International", "FNB Varsity Shield presented by Steinhoff International", "FNB Young Guns presented by Steinhoff International" and the "Steinhoff Koshuis Rugby Championships". In 2018, Steinhoff withdrew as a sponsor, with FNB retaining the sponsorship rights.

Player eligibility

The Varsity Rugby competitions implemented rules to help ensure that the majority of the players are bona fide students of the relevant universities. In the 2012 season, Varsity Cup and Varsity Shield sides were required to have 16 full-time students in their 23-man squads. The Young Guns and Res Rugby competitions were restricted to full-time students only. In the 2013 season, Varsity Cup teams were required to have 18 full-time students in their 23-man squads. In addition, students needed to have passed at least 30% of their previous year's courses, and all players, even non-students, must have finished high school. From the 2014 season, Varsity Cup teams were required to have 20 full-time students in their 23-man squads and an entire squad consisting of full-time students were to be fielded from 2015 onwards.

A quota system was also introduced to aid transformation in rugby. Each team had to include a certain number of players of colour in both their matchday squads and starting line-ups (for 2018, eight players of colour had to be included in the matchday squad, with five of those in the starting line-up).

Competition rules

Throughout its history, Varsity Rugby adopted experimental rules during the competitions. Since 2012, a points scoring system was adopted whereby conversions would count three points instead of the traditional two, while penalties and drop goals would count two points instead of the usual three. In 2016, a bonus points system was introduced whereby teams could get two of four bonus points for tries, based on where the try-scoring move originated on the field of play. 2017 saw this rule simplified: if a try is originated from the scoring team's own half, it receives two extra points.

The competition was one of the first to adopt 23-man squads to include two props, which reduced the number of uncontested scrums in matches. They also experimented with having two referees officiating in matches and a white card review system, whereby team captains can refer certain incidents to the television match official.

In addition, each school nominates a "Player That Rocks" each week, who wears pink shorts in his next game. Proceeds from the "Player That Rocks" initiative, along with other fund-raisers, go to a charity nominated by each university that fights domestic violence in their local area.

Teams

The following sides have participated in Varsity Rugby since the competition's inception in 2008:

Varsity Cup

The Varsity Cup is the premier Varsity Rugby competition and is contested on an annual basis between the nine foremost university rugby union teams in South Africa. The competition – known as the "FNB Varsity Cup presented by Steinhoff International" for sponsorship reasons – was first held in 2008. It was won by  in the first three seasons. Between 2011 and 2014,  and  both won the competition on two occasions, while the only other winner was , who won it in 2015.

Those four teams, along with , ,  and , were the founding members of the competition in 2015. All eight those teams took part in every season of the competition, with the exception of the TUT Vikings who were relegated to the Varsity Shield competition at the end of the 2012 competition. Their place was taken by , who took part in 2013 and 2014 before they too were relegated, and , who took part since 2015.

Between 2008 and 2016, there were eight teams taking part in the competition; this was expanded to nine teams from 2017 onwards.  returned to the Varsity Cup for 2017, winning promotion from the 2016 Varsity Shield.

Format

The tournament starts with a round robin stage, during which all teams play each other once, either home or away. Teams are awarded four points for a win and two points for a draw. Teams may also be awarded bonus points for either scoring four tries in a game, or for losing a margin by a margin of seven points or less.

At the end of the round robin stage, the top four teams progress to the semi-finals of the play-off stage. In the semi-finals, the team that finishes first has home advantage against the team that finishes fourth, while the team that finishes second has home advantage against the team that finishes third. The semi-final winners progress to the final, played at the venue of the higher-placed team.

Since the introduction of the Varsity Shield tournament in 2011, a promotion/relegation system between the Varsity Cup and Varsity Shield competitions was also introduced. In 2011, the bottom Varsity Cup side played in a play-off match against the Varsity Shield champions. In 2012, promotion/relegation was changed to a bi-annual process occurring in even-numbered years. The bottom team is automatically relegated to the Varsity Shield and replaced by the champions of the Varsity Shield. In addition, the seventh-placed team will take part in a promotion/relegation play-off against the Varsity Shield runner-up. At the end of the 2016 competition, following a decision to expand the competition to nine teams, the bottom team played in the relegation play-off instead.

Teams

The following teams have participated in the Varsity Cup:

Seasons

Varsity Cup Women
The Varsity Cup tournament was  inaugural competition in 2023,
Maties crowned first-ever Varsity Cup Women’s champions.

Teams

The following teams have participated in the Varsity Shield:

Seasons

Varsity Shield

The Varsity Shield is the second-tier Varsity Rugby competition and is contested on an annual basis between the five next-best university rugby union teams in South Africa after the eight Varsity Cup teams. The competition – known as the "FNB Varsity Shield presented by Steinhoff International" for sponsorship reasons – was first held in 2011. The most successful team in the competition to date is , who won the inaugural competition, and also in 2013 and 2014.  won the competition in 2012 before becoming the first team to earn promotion to the Varsity Cup competition for 2013. CUT Ixias also won promotion in 2014, while the 2015 Varsity Shield was won by  for the first time.

Those three teams, along with  and  were the founding members of the competition in 2011. UFH Blues, UKZN Impi and UWC took part in every season of the competition to date, while  played in the Varsity Shield competition since their relegation from the Varsity Cup in 2012.

Format

The tournament starts with a round robin stage, during which all teams play each other twice, once at home and once away. Teams are awarded four points for a win and two points for a draw. Teams may also be awarded bonus points for either scoring four tries in a game, or for losing a margin by a margin of seven points or less.

At the end of the round robin stage, the top two teams progress to the Varsity Shield final, played at the venue of the higher-placed team.

A promotion/relegation system between the Varsity Shield and Varsity Cup competitions was also introduced since the second tier was added to the competition. In 2011, the Varsity Shield champions played in a play-off match against the bottom Varsity Cup side. In 2012, promotion/relegation was changed to a bi-annual process occurring in even-numbered years. The champions of the Varsity Shield is automatically promoted to the Varsity Cup and replaced by the bottom team from the Varsity Cup. In addition, the Varsity Shield runner-up will take part in a promotion/relegation play-off against the seventh-placed team in the Varsity Cup.

Due to an expansion of Varsity Rugby for 2017, the winner of the 2016 Varsity Shield was automatically promoted, while the runner-up played in a promotion play-off against the bottom team in the Varsity Cup. Three additional universities – CPUT, Rhodes University and WSU All Blacks – joined the Varsity Shield for the first time in 2017.

Teams

The following teams have participated in the Varsity Shield:

Seasons

Young Guns

The Varsity Rugby Young Guns competition is a youth competition that forms part of Varsity Rugby and is contested on an annual basis between the Under-20 teams of the eight foremost university rugby union teams in South Africa. The competition – known as the "FNB Young Guns presented by Steinhoff International" for sponsorship reasons – was first held in 2012. The most successful team in the competition to date is ; they won four of the first five competitions and played in the final in 2014, where they only lost to  on a kick-off after the matched finished in a 17–all draw.

Teams are included or excluded from the competition based on the university's first team's performance in the Varsity Cup competition.

Format

The eight teams are divided into two pools during the group stage. In the first three editions of the competition, teams played the other teams in their pool once, either at home or away, with the top two teams in each pool progressing to the semi-final. In 2015, this was slightly modified so that teams played the teams in the other pool once, either at home or away. This meant each team played in one more match during the pool stage, but led to the semi-finals being scrapped and the top two teams advancing directly to the final.

Teams are awarded four points for a win and two points for a draw. Teams may also be awarded bonus points for either scoring four tries in a game, or for losing a margin by a margin of seven points or less.

Teams

The following teams have participated in the Young Guns competition:

Seasons

Res Rugby

The Res Rugby competition — known as the Koshuis Rugby Championship from 2008 to 2017 — is a competition that forms part of Varsity Rugby and is contested on an annual basis between the winning university residence (koshuis) teams of the nine foremost university rugby union teams in South Africa. The competition was first held in 2008, the same year the first Varsity Cup was also held. The most successful team in the competition to date is University of the Free State koshuis Vishuis, who won the competition on four occasions. The University of the Free State produced the winning koshuis for six competitions, with Huis Armentum, Dagbreek (SU), Heimat also winning the competition.

Teams are included or excluded from the competition based on the university's first team's performance in the Varsity Cup competition.

Format

The eight teams are divided into two pools during the group stage. In the first seven editions of the competition, teams played the other teams in their pool once, either at home or away, with the top two teams in each pool progressing to the semi-final. In 2015, this was slightly modified so that teams played the teams in the other pool once, either at home or away. This meant each team played in one more match during the pool stage, but led to the semi-finals being scrapped and the top two teams advancing directly to the final.

Teams are awarded four points for a win and two points for a draw. Teams may also be awarded bonus points for either scoring four tries in a game, or for losing a margin by a margin of seven points or less.

Teams

The following teams have participated in the play-off stages of the Res Rugby competition:

Seasons

Controversies

The Rugby Transformation Coalition has called for a boycott of the Varsity Cup. This is due to the exclusion of formerly black universities, and the low representation of black players.

Varsity Cup universities has faced accusations of professionalism, and breaking eligibility rules. The punishments handed to guilty teams have also been seen as lenient.

The practice of charging students for tickets, as well as the prices set, have been a point of contention. This led to an SMS campaign against the University of Pretoria.

No private universities have been allowed to compete in the tournament, leading to complaints from Varsity College.

Sponsors

The tournament's current primary sponsors are:
 First National Bank
 Steers

See also

 Varsity Sports
BUCS Super Rugby

References

External links

University and college rugby union competitions
2008 establishments in South Africa
Student sport in South Africa


The Ashby technique is a method for determining the volume and life span of red blood cells in humans, first published by Dr. Winifred Ashby in 1919. The technique involves injection of compatible donor red blood cells of a different blood group into a recipient, followed by blood testing periodically afterwards. Differential agglutination of the red cells is then used to determine the number of remaining donor cells, allowing the survival rate to be determined. It does not involve radioisotope technology, and was the first technique to successfully establish the correct red blood cell life span. In particular, Type O blood is first transfused into Type A or B subjects. In subsequent blood samples, the patient's own A and B blood cells are removed by agglutination with either anti-A or anti-B serum. The number of remaining nonagglutinated Type O cells as a function of time defines the survival rate of blood cells. This technique was used extensively during World War II and shortly after but has more recently been replaced by techniques that label one's own blood, due of the dangers of using donor blood.

References

Further reading

Hematology
Blood tests


John Binder (August 11, 1902 – March 6, 1986) was a Golden Age comics creator and art packager. A fine artist by education, Binder had a prolific comics career that lasted primarily from 1937 to 1953, through his most concentrated work was through 1946. He was the creator of the original comic book Daredevil, for Lev Gleason Publications. Binder is credited with coining the term zero gravity as part of a 1938 article in Thrilling Wonder Stories. Binder's younger brothers were Earl and Otto Binder, collectively known as Eando Binder when writing science fiction.

Biography
Born into a German-Lutheran family in Austria-Hungary, Binder emigrated to America in 1910, where he settled with his parents and five siblings in Chicago.

Six months after the debut of Thrilling Wonder Stories, its June 1937 issue contained a picture feature by Jack Binder entitled If---!. Binder's earlier training as a fine artist helped him create detailed renderings of space ships, lost cities, future cities, landscapes, indigenous peoples, and even ancient Atlantis. If---!'''s pen and ink drawings are hand-lettered and rendered in black and white. These one-to-two page studies presented readers with possible outcomes to early 20th-century scientific quandaries.
In the October 1938 issue of the pulp magazine, Binder's article "If Science Reached the Earth's Core" is the first attested use of the phrase "zero gravity".

Moving to New York City, Binder worked for three years for the Harry "A" Chesler studio, one of the early comic-book "packagers" that supplied complete comics on demand for publishers entering the new medium. Binder left the Chesler studio in 1940 as the firm's art director.

In the early 1940s Binder drew for Fawcett Comics, Lev Gleason Publications, and Timely Comics; during this period he created the Golden Age character Daredevil (not to be confused with the Marvel character of the same name) for an eight-page backup feature in Lev Gleason Publications' Silver Streak #6 (September 1940), and along with Stan Lee, co-created the Destroyer in Timely's Mystic Comics #6 (October 1941).

Jack Binder Studio
By 1942 Binder had formed his own studio, with over 50 artists, in a Fifth Avenue loft in Manhattan. Later, Binder moved his studio to Englewood, New Jersey, to the upstairs loft of a barn, where it produced material for publishers like Fawcett, Nedor Comics, and Lev Gleason Publications. Features the studio worked on included the Fighting Yank, Mister Scarlet and Pinky, Bulletman, Ibis the Invincible, Captain Battle, the Black Owl, and the adapted pulp magazine features Doc Savage and The Shadow. In addition to running the studio, Binder drew layouts for Fawcett Comics stories which other artists finished for him.

Artists employed by Jack Binder Studios included Ken Bald, Carmine Infantino, Gil Kane, Pete Riss, Kurt Schaffenberger, and Bill Ward. Bald eventually became the studio art director. As Kane recalled, "Binder had a loft on Fifth Avenue and it just looked like an internment camp. There must have been 50 or 60 guys up there, all at drawing tables. You had to account for the paper that you took."

After closing his studio in 1946, Binder continued to work casually in the industry until he fully retired in 1953 and returned to fine and commercial art. He lived in Chestertown, New York, at the time of his death.

Erroneous Pseudonym
Some reference works erroneously state Charles Maxwell Plaisted was a pseudonym for Binder when in fact Plaisted was a real person.

References

External links

 Kyle, Richard. "A Real-Life 'Marvel Family': A 1973 Talk with Golden Age Artisans Jack & Otto Binder," Alter Ego'' #55 (Dec. 2005) pp. 58–67.

1902 births
1986 deaths
American comics artists
American people of German descent
Emigrants from Austria-Hungary to the United States
Golden Age comics creators
Pulp fiction artists


Herbert Arnold "Herb" Deutsch (February 9, 1932 – December 9, 2022) was an American composer, inventor, and educator.  Until his death in 2022, he was professor emeritus of electronic music and composition at Hofstra University. He was best known for co-inventing the Moog synthesizer with Bob Moog in 1964.

Early life and education
Deutsch was born in 1932 in Hempstead, New York.  At the age of four, he first realized he had a musical gift. Throughout his childhood, he studied music and began composing at a young age. Deutsch attended the Manhattan School of Music, earning his B.A. and M.A. there.

Work with Moog

Deutsch had assembled a theremin based on Moog's design in 1962 and in November 1963 he introduced himself to Moog at a music-education conference in Rochester, New York. In 1964 Moog and Deutsch started investigating the possibilities of a new instrument to aid composers. Deutsch has been credited with the keyboard interface of the Moog. He composed the first piece ever for the Moog ("Jazz Images – A Worksong and Blues") and performed early Moog concerts at The Town Hall and The Museum of Modern Art in New York (1969's 'Jazz in the Garden'). The prototype Moog synthesizer, developed by Bob Moog and Herbert Deutsch in 1964, is part of the collections of The Henry Ford museum.

Career
Deutsch was a dedicated educator. In the early 1970s he taught at St. Agnes High School in Rockville Centre, New York. He taught at Hofstra University for over 50 years and was twice the chair of the music department. Deutsch co-founded the Long Island Composers Alliance in 1972, and worked with music foundation NYSSMA. In 1994 he proposed its Electronic Music Composition Showcase.

Death
Deutsch died on December 9, 2022, at the age of 90 at his home in Massapequa Park, New York.

References

External links
 Long Island Composer's Alliance
 Herb Deutsch - Hofstra Faculty Professor Emeritus
 New York State School Music Association Website
 NYSSMA Electronic Music Composition Showcase Website

Herbert Deutsch Interview - NAMM Oral History Library (2005)

1932 births
2022 deaths
American male composers
21st-century American composers
Manhattan School of Music alumni
21st-century American male musicians
People from Baldwin, Nassau County, New York


"All Night Long" is a song by a four-piece version of hip-hop group Blazin' Squad, released as a single on June 10, 2006.

Background
In May 2006, it was announced that Rocky-B, Reepa, Spike-E and Melo-D were going to reform, and perform as a four-piece version of Blazin' Squad. They also announced they were to release a new album under new record label, Peach Records. Under Peach Records, they released their first single since reforming, "All Night Long", in June 2006. The single was very popular on underground music channels, but did not receive a lot of mainstream airplay. As such, the single peaked at #54 on the UK Singles Chart, which resulted in their record deal being scrapped and a further disbandment. The track was not included on any of the group's albums until the release of their Greatest Hits compilation in June 2009.

Music video
The music video for "All Night Long" did not premiere until August 2006, two months after the release of the single, at a total length of two-minutes and fifty-seconds. The video is very similar to the video for the group's previous single "We Just Be Dreamin'". It features the four band members performing the song around a swimming pool, surrounded by a gaggle of girls dressed in bikinis and other sexy outfits. The music video received airplay on Starz and Channel AKA, but was never placed on rotation by MTV.

Track listing
 Digital EP
 "All Night Long" (Radio Edit) - 3:02
 "Whoa!" - 2:56
 "All Night Long" (Si Hulbert's Funkin' Great Mix) - 3:15
 "All Night Long" (Platinum Hit The Floor Remix) - 3:40

 UK CD #1
 "All Night Long" (Radio Edit) - 3:02
 "Whoa!" - 2:56

 UK CD #2
 "All Night Long" (Radio Edit) - 3:02
 "All Night Long" (Si Hulbert's Funkin' Great Mix) - 3:15
 "All Night Long" (Platinum Hit The Floor Remix) - 3:40
 "All Night Long" (Video) - 3:02

Charts

References

Blazin' Squad songs
2006 singles
2006 songs
Songs written by Christian Ballard (songwriter)


Hassam may refer to:

 Childe Hassam (1859–1935), an American impressionist painter
 Hassam Al Doubaykhi, a Saudi prisoner at the United States Guantanamo Bay Naval Base
 Hassam-ud-Din Rashidi, (1911–1982), a Pakistani journalist
 Umm Al Hassam, a neighborhood in Bahrain
 Hassam, Rasulpur, a village in Pakistan
 Hassam v Jacobs, a South African legal precedent


Master Tracks is a Canadian television series where an emerging band is given one day to record a song with acclaimed producers Moe Berg and Laurence Currie.  It was launched on aux.tv, a Canadian music website, and BiteTV, a digital cable channel, in March 2009 and currently airs on both.  The show aims to provide viewers with a behind-the-scenes look at how records are produced while profiling new and emerging artists.

Originally airing a preview of its first five episode on Bite TV, it now airs on Aux TV.  The channel was launched on October 1, 2009 exclusively on Rogers Cable, with plans to launch on other providers in the future.

Location
The show is filmed entirely in one of North America's premier studios, Metalworks Studios in Mississauga, Ontario Canada.  The studio that is used to record the songs on the show is studio 6, and is the studio that is primarily shown.  The show has also shot interview segments in other studios throughout Metal Works.

Episodes

References

 Master Tracks
 Master Tracks

2009 Canadian television series debuts
2000s Canadian music television series
2010s Canadian music television series


Winifred Mayer Ashby (October 13, 1879 – July 19, 1975)  was a British-born American pathologist known for developing the Ashby technique for determining red blood cell survival.

Biography
Ashby was born to George Mayer Ashby and Mary-Ann Brock in London, UK, in 1879, and emigrated with her family to the United States at the age of 14. She attended several universities, including Northwestern University and University of Chicago receiving a B.S degree from the latter in 1903 and she received a M.S. degree from Washington University in St. Louis in 1905. She studied malnutrition among children in the Philippines. Upon returning to the United States, she taught physics and chemistry in the high schools of Berwyn, Ill. and Maryville, Mo. From 1914 to 1916 she worked in laboratories at Rush Medical College and Illinois Central Hospital in Chicago. She then took up a Fellowship at the Mayo Clinic in Immunology and pathology in February 1917, where she stayed a staff member until 1924. Her fellowship extended the length of seven years, during which she made historic contributions to hematology. In 1921, Ashby also received her PhD from the University of Minnesota, and affiliate of the Mayo Clinic, and one of the first women to receive a PhD diploma. She later became a staff member of St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, DC where she did work in bacteriology. Her final study was a hypothesis on sudden infant death syndrome, which was cut short by her death in 1975.

During her life, it was widely believed that the life span of the erythrocyte (red blood cell) was no more than two to three weeks. She undertook a study of erythrocyte survival and devised a serologic technique for accurately measuring erythrocyte survival. She concluded that human red cells may remain in the circulation for as long as 110 days. Results of erythrocyte survival studies with the “Ashby method” remain a milestone in the development of the knowledge of erythrocyte physiology.

Her work on red blood cell survival rates was first published in 1919, which included the theories of the Ashby Technique. She never returned to Rochester, and for 47 years there was almost no communication. At St. Elizabeth's Hospital, she supervised serology and bacteriology laboratories until her retirement in 1949. During those 28 years, she published several studies concerning the standardization and relative sensitivity of serologic tests for syphilis. She also contributed many studies of the carbonic anhydrase activity of the central nervous system.

See also
Women of Mayo Clinic

References

External links

1975 deaths
American pathologists
1879 births
20th-century American women scientists
20th-century American scientists
English women scientists
Women pathologists
20th-century English women
20th-century English medical doctors
Mayo Clinic people
Northwestern University alumni
University of Chicago alumni
Washington University in St. Louis alumni
Rush Medical College faculty
University of Minnesota alumni
British emigrants to the United States


Breviata anathema is a single-celled flagellate amoeboid eukaryote, previously studied under the name Mastigamoeba invertens. The cell lacks mitochondria, but has remnant mitochondrial genes, and possesses an organelle believed to be a modified anaerobic mitochondrion, similar to the mitosomes and hydrogenosomes found in other eukaryotes that live in low-oxygen environments.

Early molecular data placed Breviata in the Amoebozoa, but without obvious affinity to known amoebozoan groups. More recently, phylogenomic analysis has shown that the class Breviatea is a sister group to the Opisthokonta and Apusomonadida. Together, these three groups form the clade Obazoa (the term Obazoa is based on an acronym of Opisthokonta, Breviatea, and Apusomonadida, plus ‘zóa’ (pertaining to ‘life’ in Greek)).

References

Obazoa
Eukaryote genera


Harry L. Norris was an American pioneer in dairy distribution.  He was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1885, and began work with the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad at age 11. He began as a messenger boy for the telegraph department. His hard work led to several promotions, and in 1912 he became the traveling baggage agent for the railroad. In 1916, Norris's responsibilities were expanded to include the milk business, a labor-intensive and vital part of train service to dairy farmers and consumers. He developed depots along train routes were farmers could gather their milk cans for transportation to the city, using freight trains that allowed for packing milk cans in ice. Due to his experience with the problems inherent in this system, he was asked to assist in the development of a milk tank car by rail car manufacturers. The results were a 6,000 gallon insulated tanker that greatly simplified transportation of milk, and reduced costs.

Norris resigned his position with the B & O in 1926 and began a new phase of his career. He was president of the Flavorite Ice Cream Co. in Washington, D.C., and began his own company with his sons, the Norris Milk Products Company.  He was a co-founder and treasurer of the National Association of Independent Ice Cream Manufacturers.

Norris lived with his wife and 3 children for many years on Leeds Avenue in Arbutus, Maryland, a short walk from the railroad tracks. He organized the Arbutus Community Association and the Arbutus Educational and Social Association, which eventually built the Arbutus Community Hall.

References
Obituary of Harry L. Norris. Baltimore and Ohio Magazine, March 1948
Obituary of Harry L. Norris, Baltimore Sun, January 15, 1948
U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930

1885 births
Year of death missing
Businesspeople from Baltimore
People from Arbutus, Maryland


Events in the year 1898 in Norway.

Incumbents
 Monarch – Oscar II
Prime Minister: Francis Hagerup (until 17 February), then Johannes Steen

Events
12 January – The National Association for Women's Suffrage is founded by Gina Krog and Hagbard Emanuel Berner
28 February – Melhus IL sports club is founded in Melhus
31 May – A/S Holmenkolbanen open the Holmenkollen Line to Besserud
1 June – HNoMS Storm is launched, one of the oldest ships still in front line service in the Second World War
14 September – Nordal Church in Norddalsfjord is consecrated
27 September – Snillfjord Church is consecrated by Johannes Skaar
30 December – Stryn TIL sports club is founded in Stryn

Popular culture

Sports

Music

26 June – Edvard Grieg holds Norway's first music festival in Bergen
Olaus Alvestad publishes the songbook Norsk Songbok for Ungdomsskular og Ungdomslag

Theathre

Literature
24 January – Daily newspaper Bladet Tromsø is first printed in Tromsø
August The longest running Northern Sami newspaper, Nuorttanaste, is first printed in Bodø
The political newspapers Budstikka and Søndfjords Avis are founded

Notable births

12 January – Jacob Erstad, gymnast (died 1963)
19 January – Harald Økern, Nordic combined skier (died 1977)
25 January – Sveinung O. Flaaten, politician (died 1962)
1 February – Roald Larsen, speed skater and Olympic silver medallist (died 1959)
13 February – Albert Andreas Mørkved, politician (died 1990)
19 February – Arnold Carl Johansen, politician (died 1957)
2 March – Erling Aastad, long jumper and sprinter (died 1963)
2 March – Nils Thune, politician (died 1988)
8 March – Per Almaas, politician (died 1991)
8 March – Per Næsset, politician (died 1970)
25 March – Einar Landvik, Nordic skier (died 1993)
31 March – Tora Øyna, politician (died 1991)
7 April – Jacob Tullin Thams, skier (died 1954)
17 April – Birger Grønn, engineer and resistance member (died 1988).
20 April – Johan Johannesen, track and field athlete (died 1979)
8 May – Erling Gjone, architect (died 1990).
18 May – Einar Stang, painter and illustrator (died 1984).
19 May – Bjart Ording, horse rider and Olympic silver medallist (died 1975)
14 June – Kristian Alfred Hammer, politician (died 1965)
19 June – Olav Dalgard, filmmaker and literature and art historian (died 1980)
24 June – Bjarne Støtvig, politician (died 1982)
25 June – Anders Lundgren, sailor and Olympic gold medallist (died 1964)
26 June – Ole Reistad, military officer and pentathlete (died 1949)
3 July – Kristian Rønneberg, politician (died 1982)
9 July – Johannes S. Andersen, resistance fighter (died 1968)
1 August – Sverre Steen, historian (died 1983).
5 August – Reidar Magnus Aamo, politician (died 1972)
10 August – Ivar Kornelius Eikrem, politician (died 1994)
10 August – Rolf Hofmo, politician and sports official (died 1966)
23 August – Sigrid Boo, novelist (died 1953)
27 August – Carl Otto Løvenskiold, businessperson (died 1969)
15 September – Bjørn Hougen, archaeologist (died 1976)
19 September – Erik Rotheim, chemical engineer and inventor of the aerosol spray can (died 1938)
2 October – Trond Hegna, journalist and politician (died 1992)
18 October – John Ditlev-Simonsen, sailor and Olympic silver medallist (died 1967)
22 October – Inge Lyse, engineer and resistance member (died 1990)
22 October – Bjørn Skjærpe, gymnast and Olympic silver medallist
20 November – Einar Stavang, politician (died 1992)
29 November – Aagot Børseth, actor (died 1993)
2 December – Henry Jacobsen, politician (died 1964)
3 December – Asbjørn Halvorsen, international soccer player and general secretary of the Norwegian Football Association (died 1955)
4 December – Reimar Riefling, classical pianist, music teacher, and music critic (died 1981)
8 December –
Christopher Dahl, sailor and Olympic gold medallist (died 1966)
Aslak Nilsen, politician (died 1952).
29 December – Randi Anda, politician (died 1999)

Full date unknown
Conrad Bonnevie-Svendsen, priest and politician (died 1983)
Rolf Gammleng, violinist and organizational leader (died 1984).
Sonja Hagemann, literary historian and literary critic (died 1983)
Odd Hølaas, journalist and writer (died 1968)
Sverre Munck, businessperson (died 1970)
Rolf Østbye, businessperson (died 1979)
Sverre Petterssen, meteorologist (died 1974)
Leif J. Sverdrup, civil engineer and military officer in America (died 1976)

Notable deaths

5 January – Valdemar Knudsen, sugar cane plantation pioneer in Hawaii (born 1819)
2 February – Johan Christian Johnsen, politician (born 1815)
7 September – Karl Hals, businessperson and politician (born 1822)

Full date unknown
Hans Rasmus Astrup, politician (born 1831)
Axel Gudbrand Blytt, botanist (born 1843)
Laura Gundersen, actor (born 1832)
Nils Pedersen Igland, farmer and politician (born 1833)
Holm Hansen Munthe, architect (born 1848)
Johan Jørgen Schwartz, politician and businessperson (born 1824)

See also

References


Prevotella intermedia (formerly Bacteroides intermedius) is a gram-negative, obligate anaerobic pathogenic bacterium involved in periodontal infections, including gingivitis and periodontitis, and often found in acute necrotizing ulcerative gingivitis. It is commonly isolated from dental abscesses, where obligate anaerobes predominate.
P. intermedia is thought to be more prevalent in patients with noma.

P. intermedia use steroid hormones as growth factors, so their numbers are higher in pregnant women. It has also been isolated from women with bacterial vaginosis.

See also
 Oral microbiology
 List of bacterial vaginosis microbiota

References

External links
 Type strain of Prevotella intermedia at BacDive -  the Bacterial Diversity Metadatabase

Bacteroidia
Inflammatory diseases of female pelvic organs
Vagina
Reproductive system
Gynaecology
Sexual health
Bacterial vaginosis


The MidAmerica Industrial Park Airport  is located in the MidAmerica Industrial Park, four nautical miles (7.4 km) south of Pryor, Oklahoma, United States. The public-use airport has a  runway capable of handling most business jets, a PAPI system and 24-hour credit fueling system with both jet fuel and avgas. The airport is classified as a regional business airport (RBA).

Services
The airport has 14 enclosed hangars, 12 open T hangars and tie downs available. Tulsa Life Flight, a helicopter ambulance service formerly based solely at Saint Francis Hospital in Tulsa, opened a second base of operations at MidAmerica Industrial Park's airport.

Founded in 1960, MidAmerica Industrial Park has evolved into one of the leading centers for manufacturing, processing, and distribution in the United States. Often described as the nation's largest rural industrial park, MidAmerica is located between Pryor Creek and Chouteau in northeast Oklahoma just about  east of Tulsa. The development has been recognized by leading economic development publications as a top-ranked expansion or relocation site for growing companies and has been named as a "Certified Industrial Park" by the Oklahoma Department of Commerce.

The  park is owned and operated by a public trust with the sole mission of increasing area employment by bringing new businesses to the region and assisting existing businesses.

News
Tulsa Life Flight, a helicopter ambulance service formerly based solely at Saint Francis Hospital in Tulsa, will open a second base of operations at MidAmerica Industrial Park’s airport. Tulsa Life Flight was established in 1979. It was the thirteenth helicopter air ambulance to be established in the US and the first in Oklahoma. To date, Tulsa Life Flight has completed more than 42,200 accident free flights, which is a record held only by a few programs in the world. The aircraft are owned and operated by Air Methods Corporation, the largest air ambulance corporation in the world. The firm contracts with Saint Francis Hospital to provide aircraft, pilots and mechanics.

The airport received a multi-million dollar upgrade in 2016, funded by the Federal Aviation Agency, the Oklahoma Aeronautics Commission, and the Oklahoma Ordnance Works Authority.

See also
 List of airports in Oklahoma

References

External links

Airports in Oklahoma
Buildings and structures in Mayes County, Oklahoma


KUBS (91.5 FM) is a high school radio station broadcasting a country music format. Licensed to Newport, Washington, United States, the station is currently owned by Newport Consolidated School District #56415.

References

External links

UBS
High school radio stations in the United States
Country radio stations in the United States
Pend Oreille County, Washington


Love Marriage may refer to:
Love marriage, a marital union based on love, affection and attraction
Love Marriage (1959 film)
Love Marriage (1975 film), an Indian Malayalam film
Love Marriage (1984 film)
Love Marriage (2001 film)
Love Marriage (2015 film)
Love Marriage (TV series)
Love Marriage (novel), a novel by V. V. Ganeshananthan

See also
 Love and Marriage (disambiguation)


Akraberg is the southern tip of Suðuroy, 5 km (3 miles) south from the village of Sumba, in the Faroe Islands. The name Akraberg derives from akur (cereal field). Five kilometres (3 miles) south of Akraberg is the southernmost point of The Faroe Islands, a rock called the Munkurin (The Monk), also called Sumbiarsteinur, which is one of a group of six rocks. This group of rocks are called Flesjarnar. The sound between Suðuroy and Munkurin is notorious for its strong current, it is called Røstin; the poet Poul F. Joensen (born 1898, died 1970) mentioned it in one of his poems "...Røstin rísin rann...".

The waters south of Sumba are notorious for their unpredictability. Here lies a series of rocky skerries below and above sea level, and the meeting of currents, together with wind and weather, create dangerous conditions for boats and ships. The situation became more hazardous in 1884 when much of the high rock Munkurin on the southernmost rock, Sumbiarsteinur, crashed into the sea, and the seafarers lost the best fixed landmark of the rocks.

The lighthouse
In 1909, a lighthouse and some family houses were built in Akraberg. The lighthouse itself is 14 metres (45') tall, it consists of a white cylindrical tower with red lantern roof. It was fitted with guy wires to withstand the wind drag on this southern headland. The focal plane is located at 94 metres (310') above sea level, a flash signal is given every 20 seconds with red, green and white sectors. If needed, a fog horn may be sounded every 60 seconds.
Today, there are only two houses and a lighthouse, but there are no inhabitants. The last family who lived there was the lighthouse keeper Hans Petur Kjærbo and his family. They lived there during a terrible hurricane in December 1988, which was later called the Christmas Hurricane. Luckily the house was very strongly built and didn't get blasted away by the strong wind. But much damage had been done to their car, the soil and parts of the house; a window was blown out. Much damage happened in the Faroe Islands that night, many houses were blasted away by the hurricane. After that the lighthouse keeper and his family moved away from Akraberg, and nobody has lived there since then, except for tourists who rent one of the two houses there. The lighthouse is now automatic, but it needs attention regularly. Hans Petur Kjærbo is still a lighthouse keeper, but now he works not only in Akraberg but also attends most of the other lighthouses in the Faroe Islands.

Medium wave station
Near Akraberg stands the medium wave station of Kringvarp Føroya, the Faroese broadcasting network. This transmits on 531 kHz.
The antenna consists of a 141 metres (463') tall guyed mast and can be received also in parts of Northern and Western Europe.

A peatland landscape
The peatland landscape above the headland of Akraberg at the southern tip of Suðuroy features relict peat cuttings of various age – from the 1950s and perhaps centuries before – as well as mounds of peat. The removal of dried peat from the torvløð and the continued use of the platforms led to a gradual increase in torvlað height. General comparisons are made with peat mounds from the British Isles.
These features are of unknown antiquity, but they have been associated with the possible pre-Viking presence of Irish monks or priests (papar).

Blæing
The Blæing area north of Akraberg is unique with a tremendous amount of big and small rocks and stones, which have come down into the valley during the Ice Age. One characteristic of the stones is the bright colour. You go down in Blæingsskarð, which is a passage down from the ridge. There is a story about two brothers, Kaspar and Sjúrður, who hid here in the stony landscape. They had leased land from the priest in Vágur, but because the price was high, they would often starve and had to steal sheep to survive. In the old days, stealing sheep was a very serious crime in the Faroe Islands. The brothers fled from the authorities and hid in a cave in Blæing, which is called Cave Kaspar today.
Among other things, there is a long stone wall, called Eiriksgarður, and a sheep fold, which is probably built centuries ago. No one knows exactly when or who built them.

History

The Frisian people
According to Faroese legends and folk songs a Frisian colony was in Akraberg from the year 1040 until The Black Death killed most of them around 1350. A few of them, a man called Bóndin í Akrabergi (The Farmer of Akraberg) was said to have survived the Black Death and after that he and his house hold moved to Sumba. The Frisians remained heathen a long time after the rest of the Faroe Islands were Christianized. It is said that they partly lived by piracy and they are mentioned in several Faeroese legends.

World War II in Akraberg
During World War II, Akraberg lighthouse and radio were serviced by technical Royal Air Force soldiers, working on one of the first radar stations, which scanned the water and air south of the Faroe Islands. There are still some buildings in Akraberg from the World War II period, which were built by the British soldiers using reinforced concrete.

Climate

Akraberg has a very mild winter version of a tundra climate which borders very closely on a subpolar oceanic climate.

See also

 List of lighthouses in the Faroe Islands

Gallery

External links

Flickr photo set of Akraberg
Visitsuduroy.fo
Amateur Radio Lighthouse Society
SkyscraperPage Forum
BBC – WW2 people's War. Akraberg and the lighthouse are mentioned in the article.
Kringvarp Føroya (Faroes Broadcasting)

References

Geography of the Faroe Islands
Suðuroy
Headlands of the Faroe Islands
Important Bird Areas of the Faroe Islands


John McBride (born 1967) is an American photographer probably best known for his photographs taken in New York City of the riots surrounding Tompkins Square Park in 1988  and the eviction of Lower East Side squatters in 1989, although much of his work is not in the style of photojournalism.

John McBride attended Houston's High School for the Performing and Visual Arts (HSPVA), after which he studied under the direction of photographer George Krause at the University of Houston. McBride moved to the East Village neighborhood of New York City in 1986 at the age of nineteen and began his photographic career by assisting numerous commercial photographers on shoots in the United States and Europe.  He also took courses at the School of Visual Arts and, later, attended Hunter College where he majored in Geography and Energy and Environmental Policy Studies.

John McBride's work includes fine art photography, fashion, portraits and photojournalism.  The subjects of McBride's photographs include friends and lovers, the famous and the unknown, protesters, passersby as well as landscapes, cemeteries and religious and secular iconography.  In 1985 McBride took many photographs of the people who frequented the clubs and street scene along Westheimer Road in Houston's Neartown area.  Some of McBride's better-known work includes photographs of the 1988 riots surrounding New York City's Tompkins Square Park that were published in The Village Voice and the 1989 arrests of Lower East Side squatters and the demolition of their homes, many of which were published in the East Villager, as were photos of civil rights attorney William Kunstler and artist Keith Haring.  Other work includes photographs taken in 1989 in Tututepec and Puerto Escondido, Mexico.  More recent work includes pictures taken in Texas, Europe and in Tokyo, Japan (2008).

In 2007 a selection of McBride's photographs were chosen for inclusion in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

John McBride currently lives and works in New York City.

Publication Credits
Publication credits include The New York Times, The Village Voice, The New York Daily News, The East Villager, The Houston Chronicle, The Houston Post, Public News and Entrepreneur Japan.  His portrait of the band Masters of Reality, signed by producer Rick Rubin, was used inside their self-titled album released by Def American Recordings in 1988.  In 1989 McBride's photograph of an angel statue in a Mexican graveyard was chosen by Profile Records for the cover of the 12-inch single "Hee-Haw" by the Sicilian Vespers.

Popular culture
McBride was injured in the 1988 Tompkins Square Park riots when he was struck by a nightstick swung by a New York City police officer  as he was taking still photographs atop a parked van on Avenue A alongside video artist Paul Garrin, who was also assaulted by the police.  Garrin's videotaping of the police assault on them both and the subsequent worldwide broadcast of the footage is said to have been the possible inspiration behind the decision to make the character of Mark a documentary filmmaker  in the Broadway musical Rent by the late Jonathon Larson, and the riots as a whole inspired the scenes of protest and violent conflict in the first act of the musical.

References

External links
John McBride's website

Living people
Commercial photographers
Artists from Texas
University of Houston alumni
Hunter College alumni
American portrait photographers
Photographers from New York (state)
1967 births
People from the East Village, Manhattan


Thomas R. "Tom" Savage is an American insurance executive who was chief executive officer of American International Group Financial Products (AIGFP) from 1994 until his retirement in 2001. AIGFP is considered a key company in the financial crisis of 2007–2008.

Life and career

Savage earned his undergraduate degree from Trinity College in 1972. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Claremont Graduate University in 1977. Prior to AIGFP, Savage was vice president of Drexel Burnham Lambert, an investment bank, and an executive at First Boston Corporation.

Savage was succeeded by Joseph Cassano. He serves on the Board of Trustees for Trinity College.

References

Living people
American businesspeople in insurance
American International Group
Claremont Graduate University alumni
Drexel Burnham Lambert
Trinity College (Connecticut) alumni
Year of birth missing (living people)


Ernest Pointer (1872 – after 1900) was an English professional footballer who made 28 appearances in the Football League playing for Small Heath. He played as a goalkeeper.

Pointer was born in the Sparkbrook district of Birmingham. He began his football career with Redditch Town of the Birmingham & District League before joining Small Heath of the Football League Second Division in 1896. He made his debut on 12 September 1896 in a 4–3 defeat at Newcastle United, and kept his place throughout the 1896–97 season, at the end of which the club finished in fourth position. His erratic goalkeeping meant that was the only season he spent in the league team, and in 1898 he moved back to the Birmingham & District League with Worcester club Berwick Rangers. Returning to Small Heath two years later, he was unable to establish himself in the reserve team, let alone the first team, and soon dropped back to the Birmingham League again, this time with Kidderminster Harriers.

References

1872 births
Year of death missing
Footballers from Birmingham, West Midlands
English men's footballers
Men's association football goalkeepers
Redditch United F.C. players
Birmingham City F.C. players
Worcester City F.C. players
Kidderminster Harriers F.C. players
English Football League players
Date of birth missing
Place of death missing


Leon Major (born 1933, Toronto) is a Canadian opera and theatre director. He is the Artistic Director of The Maryland Opera Studio for the University of Maryland, College Park. From 1998-2003 he was Artistic Director of Boston Lyric Opera and from 2003–2007 he was artistic consultant for Opera Cleveland.

He has directed opera and theatre throughout the Americas and Europe for companies that include: New York City Opera, Washington Opera, Glimmerglass Opera, San Diego Opera, Vancouver Opera, Teatro Municipale (Rio de Janeiro), The Opera Company of Philadelphia, Florentine Opera, Austin Lyric Opera, Wolf Trap Opera Company, the Canadian Opera Company and The Opera Festival of New Jersey.

Among the productions he has directed are: Macbeth, Falstaff, Intermezzo, Volpone, Don Pasquale, Don Carlos, Resurrection, Aida, Don Giovanni, Roméo et Juliette, La traviata, L'elisir d'amore, Carmen (on Boston Common) Eugene Onegin, The Aspern Papers, Cosi fan tutte, Il barbiere di Siviglia, and Peter Grimes. Of his New York City Opera production, the New York Times said: "Falstaff [was] directed with vitality and imagination by Leon Major." His 1981 Stratford Shakespeare Festival production of H.M.S. Pinafore was later presented for broadcast on television.

Aside from his work as an independent director, Major has given master classes in Mexico City, The Shanghai Conservatory, Tel Aviv (Israeli Vocal Arts Institute) and Toronto's Royal Conservatory of Music. He was the Founding and first Artistic Director of the Neptune Theatre in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and served for ten years as Artistic and General Director of Toronto Arts Productions which was the founding company at the St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts in Toronto. Major is a graduate of the University of Toronto, has an honorary doctorate from Dalhousie University and is a Member of the Order of Canada.

A new opera, Shadowboxer, based on the life of Joe Louis and conceived and directed by Major, premiered on 17 April 2010 at the University of Maryland's Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center.

References

Schabas, Ezra, There's Music in These Walls: A History of the Royal Conservatory of Music, Dundurn Press Ltd., 2005 pp. 176–177.

External links
 official website: www.leonmajor.com
Leon Major, faculty page, University of Maryland School of Music
Leon Major Interview, Legend Library, TheatreMuseumCanada

1933 births
Canadian opera directors
Living people
Members of the Order of Canada
People from Toronto
University of Toronto alumni
University of Maryland, College Park faculty
Canadian artistic directors


Bloodshot, also released as Battle Frenzy in Germany, is a video game developed by Jim Blackler for Domark in 1994 for the Mega Drive and the Mega-CD in Europe. A North American release was planned, and reviewed in gaming magazines, but was only released through the Sega Channel service.

Gameplay

Bloodshot is a first-person maze game which can be played by either one or two players. The game consists of twelve levels. Players must fight their way from the starting point to the end of each level, where the plasma node is located. Once the node is destroyed, players must return to where they started the level before the time runs out. If players fail to escape, they will lose a life; if they have any lives left, they must destroy the node again before being given another attempt to escape.

The player's default weapon is a simple pulse reserve gun. Players can find one of ten special weapons scattered around the level. Each special weapon has a limited amount of ammo, and the player must obtain a new weapon to refresh the ammo; however, collecting a special ammo pickup will replenish the ammo for all of the weapons. The player cannot use the reserve gun if they have any special weapons. Areas in each level are separated by sliding doors, in which players can open unconditionally; some of the doors are locked, and players must find and use the passkeys to unlock them. The game features the on-screen map to help players navigate the level. The health is represented by an oxygen supply, which depletes whenever a hit from enemy fire or a mine is taken. A life is lost when the player's oxygen is emptied. Players start the game with three lives; the game is over when all the lives are exhausted. Extra oxygen and lives can be found throughout the maze.

The game features the bonus light system. When an enemy is killed, the light is lit on the bonus panel; when the player is taking a hit, the light is lost. When the three lights are lit, the player is awarded with bonuses, such as a complete oxygen bonus, extra weapons and an extra life. The levels include secret areas that are hidden behind sliding camouflaged wall panels and not shown on the on-screen map. Secret areas contain special weapons and other bonuses, as well as extra enemies. They can also act as a shortcut between parts of the level. Players can obtain special white passkeys either via the bonus light system or in concealed areas of the level. White passkeys can unlock white doors to rooms which contain weapons and other bonuses. Bloodshot also features a special head-to-head mode, in which two players face off against each other in one of three specially designed arenas.

Synopsis
In the year 2049, the Earth moon base Yaz 67 is destroyed by an alien battlecruiser. The Earth Federation Starfleet Command retaliates by sending two of its own space battlecruisers against the alien ship with the goal of damaging the ship's defenses and taking as many prisoners as possible. When soldiers enter the battered alien ship, they find it completely controlled by robotic soldiers who outgun and outclass the boarding humans. The ship is eventually taken to Earth's orbit and human scientists successfully shut-off the alien robot crew using electromagnetic fields. However, when the scientists reactivate the cruiser's computers, they find an invincible space carrier containing even more robot soldiers and armed with extremely destructive Nova bombs is on its way to Earth. If the ship is disabled before it reaches Earth, then it is programmed to crash onto Earth's surface and detonate the bombs. The only way to completely destroy the carrier is to destroy its twelve plasma nodes. Once the plasma node is destroyed however, the entire deck the node is located on will explode.

A year later, the Earth Federation makes it their mission to board the carrier once it has entered the Solar System and destroy the ship from the inside. Players assume the role of the cybernetically enhanced trooper (starfleet elite marines) assigned to the mission, who has the special combat Battle Frenzy Chip implanted into them which gives the soldier an unstoppable desire to kill, a condition known as "Bloodshot".

Reception
GamePro gave the Mega Drive version a mixed review. They praised the high tension level and the pressure of having to beat the clock, but cited a number of control problems, such as the imprecise aiming and the "sticky" walls which can easily cause the player to lose lives during the timed destruction sequences. Electronic Gaming Monthly scored the Sega CD version a 6.4 out of 10 but remarked that while it was a major improvement over the Mega Drive version, "as a derivative of the Doom theme, Battle Frenzy holds its own, but it just isn't anything special."

Next Generation reviewed the Genesis version of the game, rating it two stars out of five, and stated that "Battle Frenzy is a tough game, though the challenge doesn't come from nasty enemies, it comes from fuzzy graphics instead, no gunsight, and jerky control."

References

External links

 Battle Frenzy at GameFAQs

1994 video games
Domark games
First-person shooters
Science fiction video games
Sega Genesis games
Sega CD games
Multiplayer and single-player video games
Video games set in the 2050s
Sprite-based first-person shooters
Video games developed in the United Kingdom


Chợ Mới is a township and capital of Chợ Mới District, An Giang Province, Vietnam.

It is known as "the Mecca" of the Hòa Hảo sect.

References

Communes of An Giang province
Populated places in An Giang province
District capitals in Vietnam
Townships in Vietnam