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Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence 592

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Baby Naming Issue: Place Names Traci writes:You helped me out less than a year ago when we were expecting our first. Now we're expecting AGAIN.Besides the craziness that is having two babies less than a year apart, we have a new naming issue.We don't know the gender of this baby, but if it is a girl, we would like to name her Marina Lynn, after both our mothers. (His mother = Marina, Mine = Lynn). I love most everything about the name Marina. I love that my husband loves it, I love the way it sounds, I love that it is a precious namesake like our first child. The ONLY THING I don't like about it is that Marina is a thing in English. (A place, actually. "Let's have lunch at the marina.") To me, a name that is a thing/place like Marina is different than a name that is a thing like Rose. I can't explain why, exactly, but it just bothers me. As an avid reader of your site (and because you steered us so right the first time and we took your advice and couldn't be happier!) I thought that I'd get your take on it. Should I get over it? Is there a way to frame it that might help me get over it? I also thought of spelling it Marinah. Does that seem like a viable solution? Is there another solution I haven't thought of? I thought you might take the opportunity to talk about names that are things (or places) in general, to help more readers than just me.Thank you!This is the kind of question where I have to rein in my urge to PUSH you to use the name. You love it! It's a family name! Place names are a totally valid category of names! I want to FORCE the place issue not to bother you! But if something bothers, it bothers, and there's no "just don't let it" about it. So let's work on the reframing idea.In this particular case, it would influence me whether you live near a marina or not. DO you ever suggest having lunch at the marina, or is there no marina? Proximity/confusion issues matter to me, which is why I also wouldn't suggest using Madison in or near Madison, Wisconsin, or Brooklyn in or near Brooklyn, New York---but wouldn't blink at either one of them used in Michigan. But of course people can move later on, so it still doesn't dismiss the point.It also matters to me how tied the name is to the place. I don't immediately think of Madison and Savannah and Florence as place names even though I know they are; Georgia is definitely a place name but also strongly a name-name; and India and Ireland are places until I shake off the confusion and realize that in this case it's someone's name. For me, Marina is somewhere between Savannah and Georgia: I'd know it was a place, and I'd know to take that into account---but it wouldn't bother me to use it, even knowing that the child might later move to Georgia or near a marina/savannah.In fact, maybe it would help to think how quickly a place association can vanish. Brittany! Austin! Jordan! Devon! Cody! Chelsea!Or, this one may backfire, but: do you think of a marina whenever your mother-in-law's name comes up? (If so, never mind and forget I said anything.) Has anyone you know ever commented on the connection? ("Marina? Oh, like the place we have lunch!")Or it helps me to think about how serious a situation it would be if the connection WERE made, or if the child DID move later on. How much of a problem/issue would it be for a girl named Madison to live in Wisconsin? There were 152 more of them born there last year, so my guess is it's not too bad. And Brooklyn is #15 in New York even though it's only #34 nationally. Place names are common honor names, so the connection can be a positive one.Do you LIKE marinas? If someone hates roses, Rose is probably a non-starter of a baby name for them; but if they love roses, it adds to the appeal and makes the name an even more personal choice. The appeal of a forest or a haven or a savannah or a sky can be the very thing that makes someone CHOOSE a name like Forrest or Haven or Savannah or Skye.Marinas are pretty(screenshot from Google images search result)It's too bad about Mirena, or I'd recommend that spelling. Marinah looks like mah-RY-nah to me, probably because of Mariah. I suppose you could use Marena (though I might say that one mare-ree-na or mah-RAY-nah instead of mah-REE-nah), but I think it's probably best to stick with the standard spelling. There was a Princess Marina in England in the 50s. She was considered a great beauty. I love the name Marina and to me it's much more name-y than place-y. (Probably because I live in landlocked Utah.) I used to work with a Marina who went almost exclusively by Marnie. I find that to be a cute nickname/alternative if the place association bothers you too much, and even if it doesn't :) My husband's boss, originally from Russia, is named Marina but she spells it Maryna.I've always thought the name Marina is lovely and graceful and elegant but without being formal or snobby.I vote Yes for the name Marina! I really like Marina. Marinah looks wrong and would be too confusing. It would be better to go with a completely different name than to change the spelling of a perfectly good name like that. Go with Marina. I love the name Marina. I think that Marina Lynn is a beautiful name, and you should go for it! I LOVE the name Marina and agree that even as a place marinas are nice (It's where we keep the boat! Boats are fun!) and it's not a bad association.BUT Marina is off our own list permanently because of The Fresh Beat Band. Which is too bad really, I tend to have red headed children. Although it might work in your favor, because I head Marina used as a name EVERY DAY and only used as a place a few months in the summer.If you're looking for a less-place-name alternative, Marin or Merin are both very similar. But I still say go with Marina. My husband has an aunt named Merina, so I guess that's a spelling option, too. I think that Marina is fine on its own, though. changelivlife When reading the OP, I didn't even make the connection until she explained it. I live near marinas, but I think it is more audial than visual. So, I wouldn't change the spelling, because it doesn't seem to matter. When I say it out loud, I do think of marinas, but it isn't negative. Also, I don't know how much I would have connected it if it weren't pointed out. I agree with Swistle, it's bordering on "name in its own right" territory, I'd definitely use it. Congratulations to you. When I see the word "Marina" I immediately think of Princess Marina of Greece, wife to Prince George of the UK, Duke of Kent. In fact, I had forgotten it's a thing as well as a name until your letter reminded me. I am with Swistle in having to fight the urge to push you to use the name. It really is lovely! While reading your letter I kept waiting to get to the part about a place name you wanted to use INSTEAD of the family name. I guess I don't really associate Marina the name with the place (even though I grew up in a lake-heavy area with LOTS of Marinas). Marina just sounds very name-y to me, as opposed to, say, Seattle. Ditto to Laura's comments. I too associate the name Marina very positively with Princess Marina, wife of Prince George, Duke of Kent. And having just googled her name, I discovered there were at least two other Princesses named Marina:Princess Marina may refer to: * Princess Marina Petrovna of Russia (1892–1981), daughter of Grand Duke Peter Nikolaevich of Russia and Grand Duchess Militza * Princess Marina of Greece and Denmark (1906–1968), wife of Prince George, Duke of Kent, the fourth son of King George V and Queen Mary * Marina, Princess of Naples (born 1935), wife of Vittorio Emanuele, Prince of NaplesAcccording to a UK baby name book: "Marina - Italian, Spanish, German and English name representing a feminine equivalent of the Latin family name Marinus, itself derived from Marius. Because of its similarity to the Latin marinus ('of the sea') it has always had maritime associations... The earliest records of the name among English speakers date from the 14th century, when its introduction was perhaps inspired by the Greek martyr St Marina of Alexandria. Notable bearers of the name in more recent times have included Princess Marina of Greece...I would definitely use the name: Marina is lovely, it has a strong family connection for you, it's a royal name. Meg C. @ mrcandme.blog.com Marina is a fabulous name and is perfect considering the family connections you have with it. I think of it as more of a name than a place - plus, as other comments have mentioned, it has some great history. I'd keep the spelling Marina instead of Marinah. Although if you are dead set on changing the spellings here are some possibilities: MarrinaMareenaMarinna Maerina ...but it might change the look too much and even the pronunciation possibly. P.S. I love Marina Lynn and even Marinalyn! But I'd go with your gut, the original name - Marina Lynn. I've always been landlocked but marina doesn't make me think of a marina... but i knew a gal named marina and really looked up to her :) I think you should go with Marina Lynn! I thought of Marina Sirtis from Star Trek, the Next Generation. No boats, just the Enterprise. I think Marina is much more of a name than a place. Of course, there is no marina near where I live, so that might influence my opinion, but I think the name is strong enough in it's own right that it doesn't even need to be considered a place name as well. It's lovely. I live right next to a marina and my family had a boat at a marina growing up, yet when I hear Marina, I only think about the name! Many parents of toddlers will also be familiar with it as a name because of the show "Fresh Beat Band," which many children watch INCESSANTLY! You may, though, get the question, "like the old Marina, or the new Marina?" (the show introduced a new, less red-headed Marina this season). I'd leave Marina as is (or use Marin or Maris or Mariah), but I think Marina Lynn is the best option for you because those are the grandmothers' actual names. It sounds nice with Clayton, too. Marina is a lovely name and sounds like the right choice for you. I know a Marina, and just realized that I have never though of it as a place. I think of it as... our friend's name. I would leave the spelling as is, too.Good luck! Some friends of the family were set on using the name Marina for their unborn baby if it were a girl. Then they found out they were having TWIN girls and couldn't think of a name as wonderful as Marina to pair with it. So they chose two different names altogether.That name is fabulous! The spelling, the family connection, the royal pedigree. Please, oh, PLEASE use this name!Best wishes to you and your growing family! (Oh, and great job with your son's name!) We are boating people and have been my whole life. So I am thoroughly familiar with marinas. And yet? Marina totally works as a name and I would say even more so since it is an honor name and if you are not boating people. Marina is a beautiful name! You should totally use it (and not misspell it). I love the family connection and the way it sounds, and unless you spend a lot of your time in a marina and it might be dorky, go for it. I also can imagine her affectionately being called Rina or Mar someday by her friends. I do like thing/place names, but this is one where it would take me a few beats to make the marina-noun association, and I lived right by Marina del Rey for several years. This is the first comment I've ever made on any blog - but! - my daughter, a sophomore in high school, has had a friend named Marina since they met in preschool at age three. Still one of her closest friends. In all these years I have never, not a single time, made the association between Marina's name and a boat marina. I have seriously NEVER thought of it as a "place" name. That almost seems odd now that I've read this post! I totally think if you love it you should use it, PARTICULARLY since it's a true namesake name! What a nice honor for both your mothers. I really like the name. Because I heard it for the first time on an actual child--before I was really old enoigh to understand what a marina is--it seems veyr name-y to me.Would definitely NOT add the H, but then I don't even like Lilah/Norah (although I DO like Sarah). You could also use Marin, but that's a place name and not one associated with yourfamily.Marina Lynn is great. Use it! Just another echo that although I grew up around water and live near it currently, when I read the name Marina, I thought, "I've never heard that name before. It's pretty - link of like Marie, but sounds more feminine" and then was surprised to realize when you pointed it out that a marina is also, of course, a place. I love the name, especially when you add in your strong family connection and that you and your husband also like the name. I hope that the "lunch at the marina" association you have stops bothering you, because if so, you have a fantastic name for your daughter! British American Marina makes me think of a random old song: http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=21100 I guess it's the name of a mermaid in a song. It makes me think "name" and then "water" - not even specifically of a marina, just water. I think it's a great choice for you, especially in honor of your MIL. I don't necessarily think of Marina as any different from other "place" names. I would stick with the spelling you've chosen to avoid confusion and because it's an honor name. There are going to be "associations" with every name. We named our daughter Evangeline and a lot of people ask if we named her after the actress (we didn't), but them asking doesn't bother me because I have a positive association with the actress. I guess that's what it comes down to, do marinas have a positive association for you? Also what about boy names? ;) I grew up near a huge marina, one which many people worked at/for, so it was pretty central in all our lives. I am now friends with a woman named Marina, and it took me WEEKS to realize her name was a place/thing (and when I did realize it, I said, "huh, how funny!" and moved on). To me, she is just Marina-- totally separate from a marina.I say go for it!! Clayton and Marina are just divine together!! KWILY Agree with everyone. Marina is fabulous. Don't change the spelling! I have been saying "Marina" over and over in my head as I read the post and comments and the more I say it, the more I fall firmly into the "more of a name than a place" camp. It just sounds so nice! It's European sounding without being pretencious or contrived and while it doesn't make me think of a place where you dock a boat, it is very evocotive of water for me, which is lovely. I say go for it! I always think of Marina as a name first, then a place. I will say though that a college friend, who eventually went on to marry one of my best friends dated a girl named Marina. He now refers to his ex not so affectionately, as "boat yard." BUT this particular friend also used to hop on campus buses while wearing a sombrero and playing a guitar and then ride it for the whole damned day. Although I guess "boat yard" is still better than some of the descriptions I've given my exes.My vote is still to use it. I know two other Marinas and no one has run into a problem with their names. Nicole Trager I agree with most everyone here.. I think it is a lovely name and didnt think of it as a place to park boats until you mentioned it. I would also go with the traditional spelling. If you are still unconvinced by the overwhelming response here on swistle, would you consider naming her Marina but calling her by a nickname like Mina, Mia or Myra? Good luck! I used to babysit for a woman names Marina, so it's definitely a name for me.I think this "name or thing?" issue is complicated by the fact that lots of places (Madison, Georgia) were named for people, and some names (Rose, Lily, Patience) were chosen particularly because of the thing they mean. And then there's Marina, which in both cases is derived from the adjective "marine." I think a name associated with the ocean is lovely. I think of it as a Greek name BEFORE I think of it as a place to park a boat, and I grew up near several marinas. I say use it. It's a beautiful name that I sadly couldn't convince my husband to use (he wanted Santina and I just didn't like it as much). USE IT! :) I didn't even think of a marina when I first read the world. I don't think I've ever actually said the word marina in my life...Maybe it's just my hormones talking (I'm due in ten days!) but a lot of "naming issues" that I've seen on here lately just seem totally silly to me. The fact that a marina is a thing should make no difference to you. It's a great name! Get over it and use it! It's funny what Swistle said about place names in that place. I grew up in Austin, Texas and went to school with at least ten boys named Austin/Austen over the years. It helps too that the city is named after a person--Stephen F. Austin, and so Austin is also a surname! The first and only time I've met somebody named Marina I immediately thought of the place. I found it really interesting and assumed it was a choice by the parents and not a "namey name." But it didn't stop me from loving it! Traci, the question asker Hi Everyone! Yay! I'm officially convinced. Not only was Swistle's answer super helpful, but the comments were too. I think the thing I thought aboutwas how I might respond to my little girl saying "mom, my name is a place where we eat lunch!" (We do live by several marinas by the way.) Whereas before I sent in this question, I might have imagined myself apologetically saying "Yes, it's unfortunate, but there are other wonderful things about your name." I have now shifted my thinking just enough to be able to imagine myself saying "Yes! Aren't you lucky? It's so pretty there! You are also named after your grandmas and there are two princesses with your name too!" So, thank you for all of the comments. If the baby is a girl she will definitely be Marina Lynn. I'll report back in 20 weeks or so :) Thanks again.- Yay, Traci!Do you listen to the Writer's Almanac on NPR? There was a poem about your daughter this morning:Let's take a walkInto the worldWhere if our shoes get whiteWith snow, is it snow, Marina,Is it snow or light?Let's take a walk I'm glad you're going to use the name! I see I'm very late commenting here, but I didn't get the association either. I'd be tempted to call her Marilyn -- a combination of both names! -- sometimes as a nickname. It's beautiful, I'm so happy to hear you're going to use it if you have a girl! Baby Boy Doorahzio: Italian Names Baby Boy Smith, Brother to Carson Michael Baby Boy Detwiler: Issues of Twilight and Beer Baby Name to Consider: Maxon Harris or Harrison Hamilton? Baby Girl or Boy Spam, Sibling to Bianca Baby Boy Purant-with-a-D Baby Boy or Girl Fitzpatrick, Sibling to Hugh and ... Baby Boy Thompson, Brother to Charlotte Grace Middle Name Challenge: Rhys ______ Kelly or Olive ... Baby Boy Like-Miller-with-a-B, Brother to Callum D... Baby Girl K., Sister to Emma Mae Baby Name to Consider: Bretcher Baby Naming Issue: Preferences vs. Requirements

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2014-15/0484/en_head.json.gz/18782

Horloge parlante horologe [klok] Show IPA/klɒk/ Show Spelled A clock is an instrument used for indicating and maintaining the time and passage thereof. The word clock is derived ultimately (via Dutch, Northern French, and Medieval Latin) from the Celtic words clagan and clocca meaning "bell". For horologists and other specialists the term clock continues to mean exclusively a device with a striking mechanism for announcing intervals of time acoustically, by ringing a bell, a set of chimes, or a gong. A silent instrument lacking such a mechanism has traditionally been known as a timepiece. In general usage today, however, a "clock" refers to any device for measuring and displaying the time which, unlike a watch, is not worn on the person. The clock is one of the oldest human inventions, meeting the need to consistently measure intervals of time shorter than the natural units, the day, the lunar month, and the year. Such measurement requires devices. Devices operating on several different physical processes have been used over the millennia, culminating in the clocks of today. Sundials and other devices The sundial, which measures the time of day by the direction of shadows cast by the sun, was widely used in ancient times. A well-designed sundial can measure local solar time with reasonable accuracy, and sundials continued to be used to monitor the performance of clocks until the modern era. However, its practical limitations - it requires the sun to shine and does not work at all during the night - encouraged the use of other techniques for measuring time.Candle clocks and sticks of incense that burn down at approximately predictable speeds have also been used to estimate the passing of time. In an hourglass, fine sand pours through a tiny hole at a constant rate and indicates a predetermined passage of an arbitrary period of time. Water clocksWater clocks, also known as clepsydrae (sg: clepsydra), along with the sundials, are possibly the oldest time-measuring instruments, with the only exceptions being the vertical gnomon and the day-counting tally stick. Given their great antiquity, where and when they first existed are not known and perhaps unknowable. The bowl-shaped outflow is the simplest form of a water clock and is known to have existed in Babylon and in Egypt around the 16th century BC. Other regions of the world, including India and China, also have early evidence of water clocks, but the earliest dates are less certain. Some authors, however, write about water clocks appearing as early as 4000 BC in these regions of the world.The Greek and Roman civilizations are credited for initially advancing water clock design to include complex gearing, which was connected to fanciful automata and also resulted in improved accuracy. These advances were passed on through Byzantium and Islamic times, eventually making their way to Europe. Independently, the Chinese developed their own advanced water clocks, passing their ideas on to Korea and Japan.Some water clock designs were developed independently and some knowledge was transferred through the spread of trade. It is important to point out that the need for the common person to 'know what time it is' largely did not exist until the Industrial Revolution, when it became important to keep track of hours worked. In the earliest of times, however, the purpose for using a water clock was for astronomical and astrological reasons. These early water clocks were calibrated with a sundial. While never reaching the level of accuracy based on today's standards of timekeeping, the water clock was the most accurate and commonly used timekeeping device for millennia, until it was replaced by the more accurate pendulum clock in 17th century Europe. Early clocks In 797 (or possibly 801), the Abbasid caliph of Baghdad, Harun al-Rashid, presented Charlemagne with an Asian Elephant named Abul-Abbas together with a "particularly elaborate example" of a water clock.None of the first clocks survived from 13th century Europe, but various mentions in church records reveal some of the early history of the clock.Medieval religious institutions required clocks to measure and indicate the passing of time because, for many centuries, daily prayer and work schedules had to be strictly regulated. This was done by various types of time-telling and recording devices, such as water clocks, sundials and marked candles, probably used in combination. Important times and durations were broadcast by bells, rung either by hand or by some mechanical device such as a falling weight or rotating beater.The word horologia (from the Greek ὡρα, hour, and λεγειν, to tell) was used to describe all these devices, but the use of this word (still used in several romance languages) for all timekeepers conceals from us the true nature of the mechanisms. For example, there is a record that in 1176 Sens Cathedral installed a ‘horologe’ but the mechanism used is unknown. According to Jocelin of Brakelond, in 1198 during a fire at the abbey of St Edmundsbury (now Bury St Edmunds), the monks 'ran to the clock' to fetch water, indicating that their water clock had a reservoir large enough to help extinguish the occasional fire .These early clocks may not have used hands or dials, but “told” the time with audible signals. A new mechanism The word clock (from the Latin word clocca, "bell"), which gradually supersedes "horologe", suggests that it was the sound of bells which also characterized the prototype mechanical clocks that appeared during the 13th century in Europe.Between 1280 and 1320, there is an increase in the number of references to clocks and horologes in church records, and this probably indicates that a new type of clock mechanism had been devised. Existing clock mechanisms that used water power were being adapted to take their driving power from falling weights. This power was controlled by some form of oscillating mechanism, probably derived from existing bell-ringing or alarm devices. This controlled release of power - the escapement - marks the beginning of the true mechanical clock. Outside of Europe, the escapement mechanism had been known and used in medieval China, as the Song Dynasty horologist and engineer Su Song (1020 - 1101) incorporated it into his astronomical clock-tower of Kaifeng in 1088. However, his astronomical clock and rotating armillary sphere still relied on the use of flowing water (ie. hydraulics), while European clockworks of the following centuries shed this old habit for a more efficient driving power of weights, in addition to the escapement mechanism.The first mechanical clocks to be driven by weights and gears were invented by medieval Muslim engineers. The first geared mechanical clock was invented by the 11th-century Arab engineer Ibn Khalaf al-Muradi in Islamic Spain; the first weight-driven mechanical clocks, employing a mercury escapement mechanism and a clock face similar to an astrolabe dial, were also invented by Muslim engineers in the 11th century. A similar weight-driven mechanical clock later appeared in a Spanish language work compiled from earlier Arabic sources for Alfonso X in 1277. The knowledge of weight-driven mechanical clocks produced by Muslim engineers in Spain was transmitted to other parts of Europe through Latin translations of Arabic and Spanish texts on Muslim mechanical technology.In the 13th century, clock construction and engineering entered a new phase with the advancements made by Al-Jazari, a Muslim engineer from Diyar-Bakr in South East Turkey, who is thought to be behind the birth to the concept of automatic machines. While working for Artuqid king of Diyar-Bakr, Nasir al-Din, al-Jazari made numerous clocks of all shapes and sizes. In 1206 he was ordered by the king to document his inventions leading to the publication of an outstanding book on engineering called "The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices” . This book became an invaluable resource for people of different engineering backgrounds as it described 50 mechanical devices in 6 categories, including water clocks. The most reputed clocks included the Elephant, the Castle and Scribe clocks, all of which were reconstructed by Muslim Heritage Consulting for Ibn Battuta Shopping Mall in Dubai (UAE), where they are fully functional. As well as telling the time, these grand clocks were symbols of status, grandeur and wealth of the Urtuq State.These mechanical clocks were intended for two main purposes: for signalling and notification (e.g. the timing of services and public events), and for modeling the solar system. The former purpose is administrative, the latter arises naturally given the scholarly interest in astronomy, science, astrology, and how these subjects integrated with the religious philosophy of the time. The astrolabe was used both by astronomers and astrologers, and it was natural to apply a clockwork drive to the rotating plate to produce a working model of the solar system.Simple clocks intended mainly for notification were installed in towers, and did not always require dials or hands. They would have announced the canonical hours or intervals between set times of prayer. Canonical hours varied in length as the times of sunrise and sunset shifted. The more sophisticated astronomical clocks would have had moving dials or hands, and would have shown the time in various time systems, including Italian hours, canonical hours, and time as measured by astronomers at the time. Both styles of clock started acquiring extravagant features such as automata.In 1283, a large clock was installed at Dunstable Priory; its location above the rood screen suggests that it was not a water clock . In 1292, Canterbury Cathedral installed a 'great horloge'. Over the next 30 years there are brief mentions of clocks at a number of ecclesiastical institutions in England, Italy, and France. In 1322, a new clock was installed in Norwich, an expensive replacement for an earlier clock installed in 1273. This had a large (2 metre) astronomical dial with automata and bells. The costs of the installation included the full-time employment of two clockkeepers for two years . Early astronomical clocksBesides the Chinese astronomical clock of Su Song in 1088 mentioned above, in Europe there were the clocks constructed by Richard of Wallingford in St Albans by 1336, and by Giovanni de Dondi in Padua from 1348 to 1364. They no longer exist, but detailed descriptions of their design and construction survive, and modern reproductions have been made. They illustrate how quickly the theory of the mechanical clock had been translated into practical constructions, and also that one of the many impulses to their development had been the desire of astronomers to investigate celestial phenomena.Wallingford's clock had a large astrolabe-type dial, showing the sun, the moon's age, phase, and node, a star map, and possibly the planets. In addition, it had a wheel of fortune and an indicator of the state of the tide at London Bridge. Bells rang every hour, the number of strokes indicating the time.Dondi's clock was a seven-sided construction, 1 metre high, with dials showing the time of day, including minutes, the motions of all the known planets, an automatic calendar of fixed and movable feasts, and an eclipse prediction hand rotating once every 18 years.It is not known how accurate or reliable these clocks would have been. They were probably adjusted manually every day to compensate for errors caused by wear and imprecise manufacture.The Salisbury Cathedral clock, built in 1386, is considered to be the world's oldest surviving mechanical clock that strikes the hours. Later developments Clockmakers developed their art in various ways. Building smaller clocks was a technical challenge, as was improving accuracy and reliability. Clocks could be impressive showpieces to demonstrate skilled craftsmanship, or less expensive, mass-produced items for domestic use. The escapement in particular was an important factor affecting the clock's accuracy, so many different mechanisms were tried. Spring-driven clocks appeared during the 1400s, although they are often erroneously credited to Nürnberg watchmaker Peter Henlein (or Henle, or Hele) around 1511. The earliest existing spring driven clock is the chamber clock given to Peter the Good, Duke of Burgundy, around 1430, now in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum. Spring power presented clockmakers with a new problem; how to keep the clock movement running at a constant rate as the spring ran down. This resulted in the invention of the stackfreed and the fusee in the 1400s, and many other innovations, down to the invention of the modern going barrel in 1760. The first record of a minute hand on a clock is 1475, in the Almanus Manuscript of Brother Paul .During the 15th and 16th centuries, clockmaking flourished, particularly in the metalworking towns of Nuremberg and Augsburg, and in France, Blois. Some of the more basic table clocks have only one time-keeping hand, with the dial between the hour markers being divided into four equal parts making the clocks readable to the nearest 15 minutes. Other clocks were exhibitions of craftsmanship and skill, incorporating astronomical indicators and musical movements. The cross-beat escapement was developed in 1585 by Jost Burgi, who also developed the remontoire. Burgi's accurate clocks helped Tycho Brahe to observe astronomical events with much greater precision than before.The first mechanical alarm clock was invented by the Ottoman engineer Taqi al-Din. He described the alarm clock in his book, The Brightest Stars for the Construction of Mechanical Clocks (Al-Kawākib al-durriyya fī wadh' al-bankāmat al-dawriyya), published in 1556-1559. His alarm clock was capable of sounding at a specified time, achieved by placing a peg on the dial wheel. At the requested time, the peg activated a ringing device. In the same treatise, he described a mechanical astronomical clock called the "observational clock", which was the first to measure time in minutes. He made use of his mathematical knowledge to design three dials which showed the hours, degrees and minutes. He later improved the design of his observational clock to measure time in seconds in an astronomical treatise written at his Istanbul observatory of al-Din (1577-1580). He described his observational clock as "a mechanical clock with three dials which show the hours, the minutes, and the seconds." This was an important innovation in 16th-century practical astronomy, as previous clocks were not accurate enough to be used for astronomical purposes. He further improved the observational clock, using only one dial to represent the hours, minutes and seconds, describing it as "a mechanical clock with a dial showing the hours, minutes and seconds and we divided every minute into five seconds.Another early record of a second hand on a clock dates back to about 1560, on a clock now in the Fremersdorf collection. However, this clock could not have been accurate, and the second hand was probably for indicating that the clock was working.The next development in accuracy occurred after 1657 with the invention of the pendulum clock. Galileo had the idea to use a swinging bob to regulate the motion of a time telling device earlier in the 17th century. Christiaan Huygens, however, is usually credited as the inventor. He determined the mathematical formula that related pendulum length to time (99.38 cm or 39.13 inches for the one second movement) and had the first pendulum-driven clock made. In 1670, the English clockmaker William Clement created the anchor escapement, an improvement over Huygens' crown escapement . Within just one generation, minute hands and then second hands were added.A major stimulus to improving the accuracy and reliability of clocks was the importance of precise time-keeping for navigation. The position of a ship at sea could be determined with reasonable accuracy if a navigator could refer to a clock that lost or gained less than about 10 seconds per day. This clock could not contain a pendulum, which would be virtually useless on a rocking ship. Many European governments offered a large prize for anyone that could determine longitude accurately; for example, Great Britain offered 20,000 pounds, equivalent to millions of dollars today. The reward was eventually claimed in 1761 by John Harrison, who dedicated his life to improving the accuracy of his clocks. His H5 clock is reported to have lost less than 5 seconds over 10 days.The excitement over the pendulum clock had attracted the attention of designers resulting in a proliferation of clock forms. Notably, the longcase clock (also known as the grandfather clock) was created to house the pendulum and works. The English clockmaker William Clement is also credited with developing this form in 1670 or 1671. It was also at this time that clock cases began to be made of wood and clock faces to utilize enamel as well as hand-painted ceramics.On November 17, 1797, Eli Terry received his first patent for a clock. Terry is known as the founder of the American clock-making industry.Alexander Bain, Scottish clockmaker, patented the electric clock in 1840. The electric clock's mainspring is wound either with an electric motor or with an electro-magnet and armature. In 1841, he first patented the electromagnetic pendulum.The development of electronics in the twentieth century led to clocks with no clockwork parts at all. Time in these cases is measured in several ways, such as by the vibration of a tuning fork, the behaviour of quartz crystals, the resonance of polycarbonates., or the quantum vibrations of atoms. Even mechanical clocks have since come to be largely powered by batteries, removing the need for winding. How clocks work The invention of the mechanical clock in the 13th century initiated a change in timekeeping methods from continuous processes, such as the motion of the gnomon's shadow on a sundial or the flow of liquid in a water clock, to repetitive oscillatory processes, like the swing of a pendulum or the vibration of a quartz crystal, which were more accurate. All modern clocks use oscillation.Although the methods they use vary, all oscillating clocks, mechanical and digital and atomic, work similarly and can be divided into analogous parts. They consist of an object that repeats the same motion over and over again, an oscillator, with a precisely constant time interval between each repetition, or 'beat'. Attached to the oscillator is a controller device, which sustains the oscillator's motion by replacing the energy it loses to friction, and converts its oscillations into a series of pulses. The pulses are then added up in a chain of some type of counters to express the time in convenient units, usually seconds, minutes, hours, etc. Then finally some kind of indicator displays the result in a human-readable form. This provides power to keep the clock going. In mechanical clocks, this is either a weight suspended from a cord wrapped around a pulley, or a spiral spring called a mainspring. In electric clocks, it is either a battery or the AC power line. Since clocks must run continuously, there is often a small secondary power source to keep the clock going temporarily during interruptions in the main power. In old mechanical clocks, a maintaining power spring provided force to turn the clock's wheels while the mainspring was being wound up. In quartz clocks a backup battery or capacitor is often included to keep the clock going if the power cord is unplugged. The timekeeping element in every modern clock is a harmonic oscillator, a physical object (resonator) that vibrates or oscillates repetitively at a precisely constant frequency.In mechanical clocks, this is either a pendulum or a balance wheel. In some early electronic clocks and watches such as the Accutron, it is a tuning fork. In quartz clocks and watches, it is a quartz crystal. In atomic clocks, it is the vibration of electrons in atoms as they emit microwaves. In early mechanical clocks before 1657, it was a crude balance wheel or foliot which was not a harmonic oscillator because it lacked a balance spring. As a result they were very inaccurate, with errors of perhaps an hour a day.The advantage of a harmonic oscillator over other forms of oscillator is that it employs resonance to vibrate at a precise natural resonant frequency or 'beat' dependent only on its physical characteristics, and resists vibrating at other rates. The possible precision achievable by a harmonic oscillator is measured by a parameter called its Q, or quality factor, which increases (other things being equal) with its resonant frequency. This is why there has been a long term trend toward higher frequency oscillators in clocks. Balance wheels and pendulums always include a means of adjusting the rate of the timepiece. Quartz timepieces sometimes include a rate screw that adjusts a capacitor for that purpose. Atomic clocks are primary standards, and their rate cannot be adjusted. Synchronized or slave clocks Some clocks rely for their accuracy on an external oscillator; that is, they are automatically synchronized to a more accurate clock:Slave clocks, used in large institutions and schools from the 1860s to the 1970s, kept time with a pendulum, but were wired to a master clock in the building, and periodically received a signal to synchronize them with the master, often on the hour. Later versions without pendulums were triggered by a pulse from the master clock and certain sequences used to force rapid synchronization following a power failure. Synchronous electric clocks don't have an internal oscillator, but rely on the 50 or 60 Hz oscillation of the AC power line, which is synchronized by the utility to a precision oscillator. This drives a synchronous motor in the clock which rotates once for every cycle of the line voltage, and drives the gear train. Computer real time clocks keep time with a quartz crystal, but are periodically (usually weekly) synchronized over the internet to atomic clocks (UTC), using a system called Network Time Protocol. Radio clocks keep time with a quartz crystal, but are periodically (often daily) synchronized to atomic clocks (UTC) with time signals from government radio stations like WWV, WWVB, CHU, DCF77 and the GPS system.Controller This has the dual function of keeping the oscillator running by giving it 'pushes' to replace the energy lost to friction, and converting its vibrations into a series of pulses that serve to measure the time. In mechanical clocks, this is the escapement, which gives precise pushes to the swinging pendulum or balance wheel, and releases one gear tooth of the escape wheel at each swing, allowing all the clock's wheels to move forward a fixed amount with each swing. In electronic clocks this is an electronic oscillator circuit that gives the vibrating quartz crystal or tuning fork tiny 'pushes', and generates a series of electrical pulses, one for each vibration of the crystal, which is called the clock signal. In atomic clocks the controller is an evacuated microwave cavity attached to a microwave oscillator controlled by a microprocessor. A thin gas of cesium atoms is released into the cavity where they are exposed to microwaves. A laser measures how many atoms have absorbed the microwaves, and an electronic feedback control system called a phase locked loop tunes the microwave oscillator until it is at the exact frequency that causes the atoms to vibrate and absorb the microwaves. Then the microwave signal is divided by digital counters to become the clock signal. In mechanical clocks, the low Q of the balance wheel or pendulum oscillator made them very sensitive to the disturbing effect of the impulses of the escapement, so the escapement had a great effect on the accuracy of the clock, and many escapement designs were tried. The higher Q of resonators in electronic clocks makes them relatively insensitive to the disturbing effects of the drive power, so the driving oscillator circuit is a much less critical component. Counter chain This counts the pulses and adds them up to get traditional time units of seconds, minutes, hours, etc. It usually has a provision for setting the clock by manually entering the correct time into the counter.In mechanical clocks this is done mechanically by a gear train, known as the wheel train. The gear train also has a second function; to transmit mechanical power from the power source to run the oscillator. There is a friction coupling called the 'cannon pinion' between the gears driving the hands and the rest of the clock, allowing the hands to be turned by a knob on the back to set the time. In digital clocks a series of integrated circuit counters or dividers add the pulses up digitally, using binary logic. Often pushbuttons on the case allow the hour and minute counters to be incremented and decremented to set the time.Indicator This displays the count of seconds, minutes, hours, etc. in a human readable form. The earliest mechanical clocks in the 13th century didn't have a visual indicator and signalled the time audible by striking bells. Many clocks to this day are striking clocks which chime the hours. Analog clocks, including almost all mechanical and some electronic clocks, have a traditional dial or clock face, that displays the time in analog form with moving hour and minute hand. In quartz clocks with analog faces, a 1 Hz signal from the counters actuates a stepper motor which moves the second hand forward at each pulse, and the minute and hour hands are moved by gears from the shaft of the second hand. Digital clocks display the time in periodically changing digits on a digital display. Talking clocks and the speaking clock services provided by telephone companies speak the time audibly, using either recorded or digitally synthesized voices.Types Clocks can be classified by the type of time display, as well as by the method of timekeeping. Time display methods Analog clocks Analog clocks usually indicate time using angles. The most common clock face uses a fixed numbered dial or dials and moving hand or hands. It usually has a circular scale of 12 hours, which can also serve as a scale of 60 minutes, and 60 seconds if the clock has a second hand. Many other styles and designs have been used throughout the years, including dials divided into 6, 8, 10, and 24 hours. The only other widely used clock face today is the 24 hour analog dial, because of the use of 24 hour time in military organizations and timetables. The 10-hour clock was briefly popular during the French Revolution, when the metric system was applied to time measurement, and an Italian 6 hour clock was developed in the 18th century, presumably to save power (a clock or watch chiming 24 times uses more power).Another type of analog clock is the sundial, which tracks the sun continuously, registering the time by the shadow position of its gnomon. Sundials use some or part of the 24 hour analog dial. There also exist clocks which use a digital display despite having an analog mechanism—these are commonly referred to as flip clocks.Alternative systems have been proposed. For example, the TWELV clock indicates the current hour using one of twelve colors, and indicates the minute by showing a proportion of a circular disk, similar to a moon phase. Digital clocksDigital clocks display a numeric representation of time. Two numeric display formats are commonly used on digital clocks: the 24-hour notation with hours ranging 00–23; the 12-hour notation with AM/PM indicator, with hours indicated as 12AM, followed by 1AM–11AM, followed by 12PM, followed by 1PM–11PM (a notation mostly used in the United States). Most digital clocks use an LCD, LED, or VFD display; many other display technologies are used as well (cathode ray tubes, nixie tubes, etc.). After a reset, battery change or power failure, digital clocks without a backup battery or capacitor either start counting from 00:00, or stay at 00:00, often with blinking digits indicating that time needs to be set. Some newer clocks will actually reset themselves based on radio or Internet time servers that are tuned to national atomic clocks. Since the release of digital clocks in the mainstream, the use of analogue clocks has dropped dramatically.Auditory clocks For convenience, distance, telephony or blindness, auditory clocks present the time as sounds. The sound is either spoken natural language, (e.g. "The time is twelve thirty-five"), or as auditory codes (e.g. number of sequential bell rings on the hour represents the number of the hour like the clock Big Ben). Most telecommunication companies also provide a Speaking clock service as well. Clocks are in homes, offices and many other places; smaller ones (watches) are carried on the wrist; larger ones are in public places, e.g. a train station or church. A small clock is often shown in a corner of computer displays, mobile phones and many MP3 players.The purpose of a clock is not always to display the time. It may also be used to control a device according to time, e.g. an alarm clock, a VCR, or a time bomb (see: counter). However, in this context, it is more appropriate to refer to it as a timer or trigger mechanism rather than strictly as a clock.Computers depend on an accurate internal clock signal to allow synchronized processing. (A few research projects are developing CPUs based on asynchronous circuits.) Some computers also maintain time and date for all manner of operations whether these be for alarms, event initiation, or just to display the time of day. The internal computer clock is generally kept running by a small battery. Many computers will still function even if the internal clock battery is dead, but the computer clock will need to be reset each time the computer is restarted, since once power is lost, time is also lost. Ideal clocks An ideal clock is a scientific principle that measures the ratio of the duration of natural processes, and thus will give the time measure for use in physical theories. Therefore, to define an ideal clock in terms of any physical theory would be circular. An ideal clock is more appropriately defined in relationship to the set of all physical processes. An ideal clock should too measure time in consistent, for example decimalized time units.This leads to the following definitions:A clock is a recurrent process and a counter. A good clock is one which, when used to measure other recurrent processes, finds many of them to be periodic. An ideal clock is a clock (i.e., recurrent process) that makes the most other recurrent processes periodic. The recurrent, periodic process (e.g. a metronome) is an oscillator and typically generates a clock signal. Sometimes that signal alone is (confusingly) called "the clock", but sometimes "the clock" includes the counter, its indicator, and everything else supporting it.This definition can be further improved by the consideration of successive levels of smaller and smaller error tolerances. While not all physical processes can be surveyed, the definition should be based on the set of physical processes which includes all individual physical processes which are proposed for consideration. Since atoms are so numerous and since, within current measurement tolerances they all beat in a manner such that if one is chosen as periodic then the others are all deemed to be periodic also, it follows that atomic clocks represent ideal clocks to within present measurement tolerances and in relation to all presently known physical processes. However, they are not so designated by fiat. Rather, they are designated as the current ideal clock because they are currently the best instantiation of the definition. Navigation by ships depends on the ability to measure latitude and longitude. Latitude is fairly easy to determine through celestial navigation, but the measurement of longitude requires accurate measurement of time. This need was a major motivation for the development of accurate mechanical clocks. John Harrison created the first highly accurate marine chronometer in the mid-18th century. The Noon gun in Cape Town still fires an accurate signal to allow ships to check their chronometers.Use of an atomic clock in radio signal producing satellites is fundamental to the operation of GPS (Global Positioning System) navigation devices. In determining the location of an earthquake, the arrival time of several types of seismic wave at least four dispersed observers is dependent upon each observer recording wave arrival times according to a common clock. Specific types of clocks Alarm clock Flip clock Astronomical clock Balloon clock Bracket clock Carriage clock Cartel clock Chiming clock Clock network Congreve clock Corpus Clock Data clock for timescapes created with time-technology Doll's head clock Electric clock Floral clock Game clock Japanese clock Lantern clock Lighthouse Clock Longcase (or "grandfather") clock Master clock Mantel clock Musical clock Paper clock Pendulum clock Projection clock Quartz clock Radio clock Railroad chronometer Reference clock Rolling ball clock Sidereal clock Slave clock Striking clock Talking clock Tall-case clock Tide clock Time ball Torsion pendulum clock Tower clock Wall clock Water clock Word clock World clockSee also Allan variance American Watchmakers-Clockmakers Institute Biological clock Clock as herald of the Industrial Revolution (Lewis Mumford) Castle clock Clock face Clock signal (digital circuits) Colgate Clock (New Jersey), the world's largest clock Cox's timepiece Death Clock Department of Defense master clock (U.S.) Earth clock Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry FH Guard tour patrol system (Watchclocks) Humanclock Iron Ring Clock Jens Olsen's World Clock Jewel bearing National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors Replica watch Star clock Steam clock System time Timeline of time measurement technology Time to digital converter Watchmaker References Baillie, G.H., O. Clutton, & C.A. Ilbert. Britten’s Old Clocks and Watches and Their Makers (7th ed.). Bonanza Books (1956). Bolter, David J. Turing's Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age. The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, N.C. (1984). ISBN 0-8078-4108-0 pbk. Very good, readable summary of the role of "the clock" in its setting the direction of philosophic movement for the "Western World". Cf. picture on p. 25 showing the verge and foliot. Bolton derived the picture from Macey, p. 20. Bruton, Eric. The History of Clocks and Watches. London: Black Cat (1993). Dohrn-van Rossum, Gerhard (1996). History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226155102. Edey, Winthrop. French Clocks. New York: Walker & Co. (1967). Kak, Subhash, Ph.D. Babylonian and Indian Astronomy: Early Connections. February 17, 2003. Kumar, Narendra "Science in Ancient India" (2004). ISBN 8126120568. Landes, David S. Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World. Cambridge: Harvard University Press (1983). Landes, David S. Clocks & the Wealth of Nations, Daedalus journal, Spring 2003. Lloyd, Alan H. “Mechanical Timekeepers”, A History of Technology, Vol. III. Edited by Charles Joseph Singer et al. Oxford: Clarendon Press (1957), pp. 648-675. Macey, Samuel L., Clocks and the Cosmos: Time in Western Life and Thought, Archon Books, Hamden, Conn. (1980). Needham, Joseph (2000). Science & Civilisation in China, Vol. 4, Part 2: Mechanical Engineering. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521058031. North, John. God's Clockmaker: Richard of Wallingford and the Invention of Time. London: Hambledon and London (2005). Palmer, Brooks. The Book of American Clocks, The Macmillan Co. (1979). Robinson, Tom. The Longcase Clock. Suffolk, England: Antique Collector’s Club (1981). Smith, Alan. The International Dictionary of Clocks. London: Chancellor Press (1996). Tardy. French Clocks the World Over. Part I and II. Translated with the assistance of Alexander Ballantyne. Paris: Tardy (1981). Yoder, Joella Gerstmeyer. Unrolling Time: Christiaan Huygens and the Mathematization of Nature. New York: Cambridge University Press (1988). Zea, Philip, & Robert Cheney. Clock Making in New England – 1725-1825. Old Sturbridge Village (1992).External links Article, by a key figure in the development of quartz crystal clocks, on the history of timekeeping up to the late 1940s from The Bell System Technical Journal, Vol. XXVII, pp. 510-588, 1948 Information on Dutch clocks Science Museum - Time Measurement Search another word or see horologeon

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Koenig named director of Presbyterian ministry at the UN General Assembly Mission Council by Barry Creech Executive Office and Policy Communications The Rev. Mark Koenig has been selected as the new director of Presbyterian ministry at the United Nations. Koenig brings 30 years of experience in ministry, serving congregations, the Presbytery of the Western Reserve, and the General Assembly Mission Council. He has been on the staff of the Presbyterian Peacemaking Program, since 2002, and has served as its coordinator since 2007. "Mark brings many gifts to this ministry," said Sara Lisherness, director of Compassion Peace and Justice for the General Assembly Mission Council. "He is deeply committed to a ministry of presence in the church, connecting with and listening to the church. He values Presbyterian polity and works faithfully to interpret and implement the social witness policies adopted by the General Assembly. He is a pastor, an educator and most of all a faithful servant to the ministry of Jesus Christ." Called to inspire, equip and connect God's people as faithful disciples in the global community, the Presbyterian Ministry at the United Nations provides individuals, congregations, middle governing bodies and theological institutions with educational opportunities that encourage commitment to work for justice, compassion and peace. This ministry also serves as a witness to the nations of the world that "God sends the church in the power of the Holy Spirit to share with Christ in establishing God's just, peaceable, and loving rule in the world." (Book of Order, G-3.0300) In his work with the Presbyterian Peacemaking Program, Koenig strengthened the communications and educational resources of the program, through networking, e-mail newsletters, and blogs. He has also made it a priority to connect with the church through visits, participation in national and middle governing body events, and preaching in congregations and middle governing bodies. "This call is an honor and privilege," said Koenig. "The Presbyterian Church has a long history of significant ministry in the name of Jesus Christ at the United Nations. I am excited to have the opportunity to work with the church to identify and implement new ways of living as disciples in the global community. I look forward to working with individuals, congregations, middle governing bodies, and networks and helping them make connections between their ministries and the work of the United Nations in ways that enhance their witness to Christ's love and open the possibilities for God to work transformation." Koenig will transition to this position in mid-October. A search for an interim coordinator for the Peacemaking Program will begin immediately. presbyterian peacemaking program, Congratulations Mark! Please email me, I would love to bring our Westhampton Presbyterian Youth Group to your program at the UN. It's especially timely now. I know you are doing a fabulous job. by Linni Deihl I have looked forward to the monthly peacemaking messages from Mark. He has kept me informed on peacemaking issues and concerns. I serve as co-chair of Peace Advocates in the Presbytery of Carlisle. Our group wishes Mark Godspeed as he goes to the UN. I hope he continues to give us updates on UN happenings. by Bobbie Kitzmiller Hi Mark, Congrats! Good luck at the UN. and NYC. I know you will do a good job. Hope to see you at Ghost Ranch for some RR> by Cindy Michels Good news for the globe. Congrats Mark! by Tracy Briggs What a great move, congratulations from South Africa, decisions that are made there affect the World, represent us well Maake by Maake This is wonderful news! God's blessings . . . and mine. by Grayson Van Camp

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Paul William Matthews — Paul William Matthews, 81, passed away on Sept. 8, 2013, in Nichols Hills. He was born in Joplin, Mo., on Jan. 3, 1932, the son of Paul Newman Matthews and Bernice Sutton Matthews. He spent his early life in Neosho, Mo., before moving to Miami, and then to Guymon, where he graduated from high school. Paul entered Oklahoma A&M College (now Oklahoma State University) and majored in political science. He was active in campus politics, president of the Independent Party for two years, elected to the College Board of Publications and president of the Young Republicans for two years. He was a member of Pi Gamma Mu, national social science honor society. He met the love of his life, Rita Copeland, at her Kappa Delta sorority house. He graduated from Oklahoma A & M in 1954 with a bachelor’s degree in political science and was commissioned a second lieutenant. Following military service at Ft. Bragg, N.C., Paul entered chamber of commerce management in Mendota, Ill., and Kenosha, Wis. He received his organization management degree from Michigan State University and then entered trade association management with the National Highway Users Federation in 1962 and served the National Federation until early retirement in 1993. Paul was regional director of the HUF for the states of Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Arkansas and New Mexico. He continued to serve as executive director for the Oklahoma Federation following retirement and also served as legislative director of the Oklahoma State Grange. He was preceded in death by his parents, and his wife of 57 years, Rita. He is survived by his son Douglas Arthur Matthews and wife Judith of Glen Carb

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HomeAboutContributorsFAQSubmit an ArticleContact The PsySR Blog Psychologists for Social Responsibility: Building Cultures of Peace with Social Justice The Seven Paragraphs: Released Binyan Mohamed Abuse Evidence Poses Problems for Both British and U.S. GovernmentsBy PsySR Blog – March 3, 2010Posted in: Human Rights Stephen Soldz In a major development in the struggle to curb the abuses committed as part of the War on Terror, the British government last month released under court order previously redacted information on the abuse of Binyan Mohamed by US interrogators. Here are the seven paragraphs that were released which summarize intelligence information which both the British and US governments fought hard to suppress: It was reported that a new series of interviews was conducted by the United States authorities prior to 17 May 2002 as part of a new strategy designed by an expert interviewer. v) It was reported that at some stage during that further interview process by the United States authorities, BM had been intentionally subjected to continuous sleep deprivation. The effects of the sleep deprivation were carefully observed. vi) It was reported that combined with the sleep deprivation, threats and inducements were made to him. His fears of being removed from United States custody and “disappearing” were played upon. vii) It was reported that the stress brought about by these deliberate tactics was increased by him being shackled in his interviews. viii) It was clear not only from the reports of the content of the interviews but also from the report that he was being kept under self-harm observation, that the interviews were having a marked effect upon him and causing him significant mental stress and suffering. ix) We regret to have to conclude that the reports provide to the SyS [security services] made clear to anyone reading them that BM was being subjected to the treatment that we have described and the effect upon him of that intentional treatment. x) The treatment reported, if had been administered on behalf of the United Kingdom, would clearly have been in breach of the undertakings given by the United Kingdom in 1972. Although it is not necessary for us to categorise the treatment reported, it could readily be contended to be at the very least cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by the United States authorities. This case has aroused tremendous attention in Britain, as it clearly revealed British intelligence agents’, and the British Government’s, complicity in abuse of a British citizen. The British public, unlike much of the American, finds complicity in torture by its intelligence agents to be deeply disturbing. The court decision ordering the release of this material is causing additional outrage because it violated hundreds of years of legal precedent in allowing only one side, the British government, to suggest changes in the decision. These changes were made without an opportunity of the defense to object. The letter to the court from the government lawyers requesting the changes was released, however. That letter gives a sense of what was excluded: The master of the rolls’ observations ” will be read as statements by the court that the security service does not in fact operate a culture that respects human rights or abjures participation in coercive interrogation techniques. Thus, the British government is afraid that the lies they perpetrated in the Binyan Mohamed case will disincline future courts from believing claims that the British government can be trusted when it asserts that they are opposed to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. In other words, the court might correctly understand that the British government, like the US and many other governments, is a serial liar when it comes to abuses committed by its agents. What may be less clear to US citizens is the potential enormous impact of the released information to the anti-torture struggle in the US. Marcy Wheeler [emptywheel] has pointed out the major significance of the apparent timing of Binyan Mohamed’s abuse. It is reported to have occurred before a visit by an MI5 officer on May 17, 2002. The significance of the date is that it is before the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel memos providing a legal cover for torture were issued in august, 2002.Thus, Binyan Mohamed’s abuse, unlike later abuses, cannot be justified as being conducted in good faith under an authoritative legal opinion from the OLC. Thus, this information just might provide an opportunity for prosecuting some of the torture perpetrators. And if the perpetrators are culpable, so may be those officials, however high they may be, who authorized the abuse. Wheeler also points out that it is likely that the “expert interviewer” who designed the “new strategy” used on Binyan Mohamed was likely one of the CIA’s chief torture psychologists, James Mitchell or Bruce Jessen, or at least an associate of theirs. Thus, these architects of the CIA’s torture techniques may sweat a bit more after the release of these seven paragraphs. The material released today also has several phrases that suggest that Binyan Mohamed was being experimented upon. As the material states, the interrogations were “part of a new strategy designed by an expert interviewer.” And “The effects of the sleep deprivation were carefully observed.” Why were these effects being “carefully observed” unless to determine their effectiveness in order to see whether they should be inflicted used upon others? That is, the observations were designed to generate knowledge that could be generalized to other prisoners. The seeking of “generalizable knowledge” is the official definition of “research,” raising the question of whether the CIA conducted illegal research upon Binyan Mohamed. Last summer Physicians for Human Rights suggested that materials in the then released CIA Inspector General’s report on the “enhanced interrogation” program suggested that the CIA had an systematic program of research. Such research is patently illegal and violates the rules that have governed human research since the Nuremberg Trials convicted German doctors for illegal research. This CIA research also violates rules of the US government regulating all research on people. Similarly, bioethicist Steven Miles argued in an appendix to the second edition of his classic Oath Betrayed: America’s Torture Doctors that the detailed interrogation log of Mohammed al-Qahtan only made sense as the notes for a research protocol. This new evidence on the torture of Binyan Mohamed adds to the considerable evidence that, as part of its torture program, the CIA also had a program to systematically study the effectiveness of torture techniques. Last summer, Physicians for Human Rights called for an independent investigation of this potential CIA research. The new evidence suggesting that Binyan Mohamed may have been an unwitting research subject only adds to the urgency of an investigation. In addition to the usual human rights advocates, all those who conduct research on people — psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and biomedical researchers among others — should join the call for an investigation. For torture effectiveness research violates all the principles that guide our work, that our efforts should improve human welfare rather than degrade and destroy. We cannot allow the possibility that our society will remain one where inhumane research can be conducted with total impunity. PsySR president-elect Stephen Soldz is a psychoanalyst, psychologist, public health researcher, and faculty member at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. He edits the Psyche, Science, and Society blog and is a founder of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology, one of the organizations working to change American Psychological Association policy on participation in abusive interrogations. Stephen can be reached at [email protected]. Share this: Tags: abuse, American, Binyan Mohamed, British, Interrogation, sleep deprivation, torture, War on Terror 1 Comment Log in to Reply Gunnar Orn Ingolfsson Posted March 3, 2010 at 11:26 PM Thank you Stephen… You must be logged in to post a comment. CategoriesPsySR News Violence and War Social Health PsySR: Activism in A New Era Login or Register Register Log in Get Posts by Email Enter your email address:Delivered by FeedBurner TagsAccountability interrogations Manchester Grand Hyatt PsySR PsySR Blog RSS FeedAmerican Culture and the Psychology of Mass Shootings January 23, 2013How are we to understand the psychology of the gun violence that... 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A recent paper (pdf format) by Michael L Anderson and Donald R Perlis offers a new solution to the problem of brittleness. Brittleness, in a robot or program, is an inability to cope with unexpected developments, and the paper, no doubt rightly, says it is arguably the most important problem in Artificial Intelligence, perhaps in computer systems generally. Anderson and Perlis quote the example of a contestant in the DARPA Grand Challenge, in which robots had to negotiate their way through a real-world journey. The hapless specimen in question drove into a fence it could not see, and then continued attempting to move forward for the rest of the contest. Perhaps better sensors would have helped, but sullenly persisting in a course which isn't getting anywhere is poor behaviour for a supposedly intelligent machine. The proposed solution is the Metacognitive Loop; roughly speaking, a mechanism whereby the robot or program can notice whether or not it is achieving its goals. If not, it can then try something else, whether a carefully considered Plan B, or more or less random variations in behaviour, until it gets better results. Clearly what we are dealing with here is our old friend (or enemy) the frame problem: in fact, although they never use that phrase, Anderson and Perlis cite the paper by McCarthy and Hayes which first clearly identified the problem, and in some ways their work is in harmony with McCarthy's view that the problem would probably be resolved by new (non-monotonic) approaches to logic. The subject of consciousness notoriously exists at the junction of many different fields: psychology, philosophy, neurology and artificial intelligence to name just some. The frame problem, I think, is a leading example of how different specialists can have, and retain, a very different view of the same problem with surprisingly little cross-fertilisation. Since the issue first came to light, AI specialists have seen it as a persistent, annoying problem, but one capable of being dealt with tactically in the short term and by prudent measures in the longer run. Philosophers, in contrast, have tended to see it as a fundamental issue: one which requires a completely new approach or insights, or even rules out all possibility of artificial consciousness. Even Daniel Dennett, perhaps the philosopher most supportive of AI, has given a classic exposition ('Cognitive Wheels- the Frame Problem of AI') of his own version of the frame problem without, so far as I know, offering any solution. It must be acknowledged that on the face of it the AI fraternity frequently seem to have the more reasonable view. Some philosophers present such a gloomy case that we seem almost obliged to disbelieve in human consciousness, never mind the artificial variety; and approaches like that of Anderson and Perlis seem extremely reasonable and pragmatic. They identify three distinct problems with 'common sense' reasoning. One is 'slippage' - the facts don't hold still over time, but are liable to change while you are reasoning about them, or clinging to outdated conclusions. The second is the 'KR mismatch' problem in which the representational conventions used impose unhelpful (but unavoidable) limitations on the ability to deal with circumstances which don't match them - especially those which give rise to novel expressions not catered for in the original scheme. The third issue is how to cope with contradictions. Contradictions in the system's data are inevitable, but making decisions in their prescence is obviously problematic, especially for a system which operates by classical rules of inference, since in classical logic there is a valid inference from a contradiction to anything at all. There are two steps in the proposed solution. First, the paper advocates 'active logic'. In this approach, instead of logical inferences taking place instantly (or in an eternal Platonic realm), they follow a chronological sequence. The conclusion comes a moment after the premises, not at the same moment. This has two benign consequences. The system is not obliged to consider all the implications of every piece of data - surely an infinite task in principle anyway - and it can tolerate contradictory premises because it may not happen to be thinking about the two sides of the contradiction at any given moment. Where there is a real problem, the system will eventually derive a direct contradiction, which then serves as a useful warning that something is going wrong. This part of the argument seems dubious. In the first place, if contradictions are signs of a problem, allowing them to remain unresolved in the heart of the system is surely dangerous; by the time a direct, explicit contradiction is noticed, the damage may have been done. Second, is it actually safe to assume that a direct contradiction is necessarily a problem? In ordinary thought that may be so, but in formal logic contradictions are a useful if not indispensable part of the process of reasoning: without them many proofs are going to be hard to derive. The second step is the metacognitive loop, which seems unassailably sensible. The basic architecture is composed of two modules, one training the other, with a third overseeing both. This third module is what does the monitoring of performance against expectation, and steps in with new strategies and retraining where necessary. The authors propose three potential projects which the metacognitive loop might enable: a robotic St Bernard, able to render basic assistance in unpredictable emergency situations; a Mars explorer, which might be able to cope well with finding things its designers had not expected; and finally a GePurS - General Purpose Scout, designed to operate in many different environments, with a large reservoir of experience, much of it redundant in any given situation, but lending a particular flexibility and generality to its cognitive abilities. Indeed, such a creature would surely be intelligent on an entirely new level, comparable with sophisticated animals or even human beings. They don't, of course, predict the imminent achievement of such high-grade performance. So, is the road ahead clear? It is interesting to compare the example of the misguided DARPA challenge robot with the one described in Dennett's essay. Dennett's robot is set to retrieve its spare battery from a room where a bomb is due to go off, but singularly fails to take account of the known fact that the bomb is on the same trolley as the battery. The DARPA robot fails its task in a clear way - it isn't moving towards its goal - whereas Dennett's unfortunate robot actually succeeds in getting the battery out: failure arrives out of a blue sky from an unforeseen factor - the fact that the bomb has come along for the ride. It's hard not to feel that metacognitive loops might help the DARPA victim but wouldn't do much for Dennett's robot. If you have a module monitoring success, it has to be able to recognise success when it sees it, and this is not a trivial task. Even the DARPA robot may have had, for example, a speedometer which told it its wheels were revolving in fine style, oblivious of the fact that they weren't moving it anywhere. So long as your robot relies on logic, the only way for it to assess success is to perform a number of tests set up by the designer: but that means the designer has to anticipate everything which might go wrong - the very problem we started with in the first place. The relative weakness of formal logic as a tool for reasoning about the world is, of course, well known - and known to Anderson and Perlis, whose proposals are designed to extend its efficacy. But the AI practitioners seem always to under-rate the severity of the problem, perhaps because, when all's said and done, formal logic is still the only real tool available. Aaron Sloman, long ago, argued very persuasively that some kind of analogical reasoning is needed to make good the deficits of old-fashioned logic. There are many problems attached to processes based on analogies, and the development of a suitable formalism is itself a daunting task, requiring a breakthrough of considerable proportions. Nevertheless, it's hard not to feel that he was, broadly at least, on to something.

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DPADM CEPA CEPA Members 2006-2009 Profiles of the Members of the Committee 2006-2009 Download the complete 2006-2009 Expert Committee contact information (pdf). Mr. Luis Aguilar Villanueva (Mexico) Mr. Aguilar Villanueva is currently the General Director of Gerencia Pública, s.c., a consulting firm providing services to governments in strategic management, quality management and organizational (re)design since 1992, and Professor of Public Policy in the Autonomous Metropolitan University (UAM). He is a Doctor in Philosophy, with specialty in political philosophy (1973), a National Researcher of the "National Research System" (SNI) in the area of government and public administration, and he teaches regularly on subjects of policy analysis and public management in Mexico City and other countries. In the public sector, he served as a Vice-Minister of Political Development (1994-1995) and Chief of Staff of the Minister of Interior of Mexican Federal Government (1996-1997). He has been a member of the Executive Board of the National Institute of Public Administration (1993-1997), founding President of the Mexican Academy of Public Policy Analysis and a member of several boards of civil associations and editorial councils. Mr. Anyang' Nyong'o (Kenya) Mr. Anyang' Nyong'o was appointed the Minister of Planning and National Development of the Republic of Kenya in 2003. He specializes in the area of socio-economic and pro-poor policies. He has served as Member of the Parliament, Kisumu Rural Constituency, from 1992-1997 and presently for the term 2003-2007. He was also formerly the Chairman of the Public Investments Committee from 1994 to 1996. He previously served as Member of the Board of Directors of the Nelson Mandela Institute for the Advancement of Knowledge, Science and Technology. In 1995, he was given the German-African Award for his contribution to scholarship and democratization. This year, he received the Africa Brain Gain Award from the Kenyan American Professional Association and Career Nation for his contribution to reversing African's brain drain. He also served as the Head of Programmes for the African Academy of Science from 1987 to 1991 Mr. Ousmane BATOKO (Benin) Mr. Batoko is currently the Civil Administrator for the Government of Benin, specializing in public administration and management and installation of local authorities. He was the former Minister of Public Services. He has broad experience in administrative reform, leadership in the African public sector, local and regional development, decentralization, civil society participation and community development. He also has some experience in democratization and democracy. He has served as an Expert and Consultant for various local and international agencies that include the International Agency for French-Speaking Nations, Paris, Municipal Development for Cotonou, Benin, Sahel Club, Paris, African Civil Services Observatory (OFPA), African Training and Research Centre in Administration for Development (CAFRAD), Tanger, and the Department of Economic and Social Affairs, United Nations, New York. From 1998 to 2003, he was the President of the National Commission of Administrative Reform in Benin. [top] Ms. Marie-Françoise BECHTEL (France) Ms. Bechtel, since 2002, has served in Conseil d'Etat as a Counsellor of State, particularly in executing judgements in public law cases, administrative conflicts (highest degree), consulting for government in elaboration of laws and regulation (field: justice, institutions, education, home affairs and decentralization, and media regulation). From October 2003 to June 2004, she also served as Member and Vice-President of the jury in charge of the selection of University professors (highest degree) in administrative, constitutional, fiscal and European law. She was previously the Director of Ecole Nationale d'Administration (ENA) from September 2000 to December 2002. She has contributed to the 2003 French review of civil service (Cahiers de la fonction publique), 2004 reform of ENA and to the civil service and the merit system, selection and evaluation. Further, she has authored a book to be published by the end of 2005 on "Reform or Public Decision? About Governance in France and in the World." Dr. Rachid Benmokhtar BENABDELLAH (Morocco) Dr. Benabdellah, in June 1998, was appointed by the Late King Hassan II as the President of Al Akhawayn University. Prior to this appointment, he was Minister of Education from 1995 to 1998. He is the holder of the Albert Einstein medal for Education and Peace, Chevalier of the Ouissam Alaouite and Officer of the Legion of Honour of the French Republic. He is the President of the Moroccan Foundation for Man and Nature (FMNH). He is also a member of the World Bank Institute Advisory Council (WBI), member of Maroc-Telecom Board of trustees, member of the Advisory Group of the first Arab Regional Human Development Report of the United Nations Development Programme, and member of the Holcim Board of Trustees. Ms. Emilia BONCODIN (Philippines) Ms. Boncodin is currently a professor at the National College of Public Administration and Governance of the University of the Philippines. She is also a lecturer at various universities in the Philippines, including the Ateneo de Manila University and the Lyceum of the Philippines. She was a former Secretary of the Department of Budget and Management, where she served the Department since 1978 and occupied the following positions: Director; Assistant Director; Chief Fiscal Planning Specialist; Senior Fiscal Planning Specialist; Fiscal Planning Specialist; 1989-91, Assistant Secretary; 1991-98, Undersecretary and Chief of Staff; 1998, Secretary. She also served as Consultant/Adviser to public and private institutions and was a Professional Lecturer in various schools including the University of the Philippines and the Lyceum of the Philippines. She has been a recipient of many awards and citations attesting to her diligence and technical proficiency: the Most Outstanding Technical Employee in 1978 as well as the Most Outstanding Division Chief in 1981. She was also the Outstanding Alumna of the University of the Philippines College of Business Administration in 1992 and more importantly, an Awardee of Outstanding Women in Nation's Service in 1995. She was also the 1996 Dwight Eisenhower Fellow for the Philippines. The Honourable Jocelyne BOURGON (Canada) The Honorable Jocelyn Bourgon is the President Emeritus of the Canada School of Public Service, a Distinguished Visiting Professor of the Public Administration and Public Service Reform at the University of Waterloo as well as a Distinguished Fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation. From 2003 to 2007, she was Ambassador at the Canadian Permanent Mission to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). In 1989, she was appointed to the rank of Deputy Minister. From 1989 to 1994 she was, in turn, Deputy Minister of Consumer and Corporate Affairs, Secretary to the Cabinet for the Federal Provincial Relations Office, President of the Canadian International Development Agency, and Deputy Minister of Transport. In 1994, she was appointed Clerk of the Privy Council and Secretary to the Cabinet. She was the first woman to hold this position. She served as Clerk of the Privy Council, Secretary to the Cabinet and head of the Public Service of Canada from 1994 to 1999. In December 1998, she was summoned to the Queen's Privy Council for Canada in recognition of her contribution to the service of her country. She is an active member of various advisory boards, including the Commonwealth Association for Public Administration and Management (CAPAM), Singapore Civil Service College, Canadian Unity Council, Heart Institute (University of Ottawa), National Council on Leadership, Forum of Federations, the Public Executive Programme (Queen's University), University of Ottawa, and Opera Lyra Ottawa. Dr. Luiz Carlos BRESSER-PEREIRA (Brazil) Dr. Bresser-Pereira is currently a Professor of Economics at Getúlio Vargas Foundation in São Paulo, since 1959; President of the Centro de Economia Política and editor of the quarterly Brazilian Journal of Political Economy, since 1980; President of the Scientific Council of CLAD - Consejo Latinoamericano de Administración para el Desarrollo, since 1998; and Assistant to the President Fernando Henrique Cardoso for international affairs related to social democracy and progressive governance, since August 1999. He was Honorary Professor of the University of Buenos Aires, 1996; Visiting Professor at the École d'Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, January-February, 1990 and September-October 1993; and Visiting Professor at the Institut du Développement Economique et Social (IEDES), University of Paris I (Sorbonne), September 1977 - February 1978. He was Minister of Science and Technology (Cardoso Administration), January - July 1999; Minister of Federal Administration and Reform of the State (Cardoso Administration), 1995-1998; and Finance Minister (Sarney Administration) 29 April to 18 December 1987. Mr. Mario P. CHITI (Italy) Mr. Chiti, since 1980, has been a Professor (full Chair) of the Administrative Law at the University of Firenze, Italy, where he is also the President of the Specialized Course on European Studies, and teacher of European Administrative Law, as Jean Monnet Professor with European Chair ad personam. He is currently the President of the Italian Institute of Administrative Sciences, for the mandate 2004-2008. He has been a member of the Executive Committee, and Vice President of the Scientific Committee, of the International Institute of Administrative Sciences (IIAS) for the period 1994-2004. He has been teaching at the Universities of Pisa, Cagliari and Firenze, Visiting Professor and speaker at many European universities (London, Oslo, Madrid, Paris II, Berlin, Munich, Utrecht, etc.) and around the world, in China, India, Argentina, Mexico, etc. Mr. Chiti is Adviser of many State Departments, Regions and Local authorities. He has been a member of the Italian Statistical Institute since 1993. His main fields of interest are the general institutes of Administrative Law (procedure, judicial review, etc.), and the developing of European Administrative Law. He is also a barrister before the Supreme Court, mostly in Public Law and European Law Litigation. [top] Ms.Jennifer L. Dorn Ms. Dorn is currently the President and CEO of the National Academy of Public Administration. She has been a Fellow of the Academy since 1992, and previously served on the Academy’s Board of Directors. She has nearly 30 years of management experience, leading multi-billion dollar Federal agencies, as well as start-up and well-established not-for-profit organizations. She has been appointed by the President of the United States and confirmed by the U.S. Senate to four senior leadership posts in government. Prior to joining the Academy, she served as the U.S. representative on the Board of Directors of the World Bank. Previously, she served as the Administrator of the Federal Transit Administration. She also has served as the Assistant Secretary for Policy at the Department of Labor and as the Associate Deputy Secretary of Transportation. Her not-for-profit leadership posts include Senior Vice President of the American National Red Cross and President of the National Health Museum. Mr. Mikhail DMITRIEV (Russia) Mr. Dmitriev is currently the Research Director of the Center for Strategic Research. He was formerly the First Deputy Minister of Economic Development and Trade of the Russian Federation for the Government of Russia (2000-2004), specifically in the areas of civil service and public administration reform, regulatory reforms, social policy, pension reform, health, education, labor legislation. He also served as the First Deputy Minister of Labour and Social Development of the Russian Federation from 1997-1998. He was a Scholar at the Carnegie Moscow Centre of Carnegie Endowment for International Peace from 1998 to 2000, and specialized in the areas of civil service reform, social policy, pension reform, financial sector, macroeconomic and fiscal policy. He is also a Member of the Board of Trustees at the New Economic School (Moscow), the Independent Institute for Social Policy (Moscow) and the Bureau of Economic Analysis (Moscow). [top] Ms. Geraldine FRASER-MOLEKETI (South Africa) Ms. Fraser-Moleketi is the Minister for Public Service and Administration of South Africa (since June 1999). She previously served as Minister for Welfare and Population Development (1996-1999); Deputy Minister for Welfare and Population Development (1995-1996); and Co-Deputy Elections Coordinator of the National Elections Commission of the African National Congress (1993-1994). She has been a Member of Parliament from 1994 to date. She is a member of the National Executive Committee of the African National Congress of South Africa and a member of the Commonwealth Association of Public Administration and Management Board (CAPAM), as well as the Chairperson of the Innovation Committee of CAPAM. She was awarded a fellowship to Harvard University, Institute of Politics, Kennedy School of Government, which focused on policy analysis and investigated comparative aspects of national constitutions. Mr. Edgar Alfonso GONZALEZ Salas (Colombia) Mr. González is an administrator specialist in Public Finance, magister (schoolmaster) in Economy and specialist in systems oriented to the education. He has 20 years of experience as investigator in economic topics, of the public sector, formulation of public policies, and analyst in diverse topics of the State. He has international experience in the formulation of public policies, especially in Colombia, Nicaragua, Venezuela and the Dominican Republic. He has 21 years of experience as educator in diverse public and private universities, 15 years of experience as consultant of the state of diverse international development programmes, 15 years of experience as coordinator in diverse government programmes, and adviser in the territorial fiscal area of the Constituent National Assembly. He has served as Adviser of the Ministry of Health, Vice Minister of Health, General Secretary of the Ministry of Health, National Superintendent of Health, Director of the Administrative Department of the Public Function and Technical Director of several institutional adjustments. He is an expert in social topics including family, childhood, education, health, attention to vulnerable groups and decentralization. He has authored several books and essays on public policies, political partnership, public finances and country administration. Dr. Werner JANN (Germany) Dr. Jann holds the chair for Political Science, Administration and Organization at the University of Potsdam, Germany. He studied political science, mathematics and economics at the FU-Berlin and University of Edinburgh, Scotland (Dipl.Pol. FU-Berlin 1976) and was research fellow and associate professor at the Postgraduate School of Administrative Sciences Speyer (Dr. rer. publ. Speyer 1982), Congressional Fellow and Legislative Assistant in the House of Representatives, Washington, D.C., and research fellow at the University of California, Berkeley (Habilitation for Political Science and Administrative Science Speyer 1989). He has also served as a civil servant, as the Director of the "Denkfrabrik" (think-tank) in the Prime Minister's Office in Kiel. His main publications are in the field of Comparative Public Policy and Administration, Administrative Culture, Modernization of the Public Sector and Public Governance. He has served on a number of government commissions, and is a member of the Executive Committee of the International Institute of Administrative Sciences in Brussels, and was formerly President of the European Group of Public Administration (EGPA). Mr. Taher KANAAN (Jordan) Mr. Kanaan, since June 2004, has been the Executive Vice-President of The Higher Council for Science and Technology in Amman, Jordan and the Managing Director of the Jordan Centre for Public Policy Research and Dialogue. He was the former Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of State for Development Affairs and the Head of the Cabinet Economic Team, from August 1989 to March 1999. He served as the Minister of Planning from April 1986 to April 1989 and was a member of the Board of Higher Education of the Government of Jordan. He has been a member of the Board of Governors, Governor for Jordan, World Bank from 1986 - 1989 and the Board of Governors, Governor for Jordan, Arab Fund for Economic & Social Development, from 1986 to 1989. He has served as a Member of the United Nations Committee for Development Policy (Planning) from 1996 to 2000 and is currently a Member of the Advisory Team for the UNDP Arab Human Development Reports. Dr. Pan Suk KIM (Republic of Korea) Dr. Kim is former Secretary to the President for Personnel Policy in the Office of the President of Korea. He is currently Professor of Public Administration in the College of Government and Business at Yonsei University. He has broad experience as an expert in governmental affairs, having served as a member of the Administrative Reform Committee (ARC) and a working member of the Presidential Commission on Government Innovation (PCGI). He was also on the Policy Advisory Committee of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MOFAT), the Ministry of Government Administration and Home Affairs (MOGAHA), the Civil Service Commission (CSC), and various public advisory bodies and committees. He is currently an editorial board member of several major international journals in the field of public administration and policy. He has been the Editor-in-Chief of the Korean Policy Studies Review, the International Review of Public Administration, and the president of the Korean Association of Personnel Administration. He has been the Rapporteur-General of the 26th International Congress of Administrative Sciences in 2004 and the Sixth Global Forum on Reinventing Government in 2005. He was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar of Government at Georgetown University in 2005. Dr. Barbara KUDRYCKA (Poland) Dr. Kudrycka is a Rector of the Bialystok School of Public Administration and Professor at the School of Law, Bialystok University, Poland. She is also a Member of the European Parliament. She holds a Ph.D (1985) and venia legendi (habilitation) (1995) in administrative law and public administration from Warsaw University, School of Law and Administration. Ms. Kudrycka is a member of the Steering Committee of the Network of the Institutes and Schools of Public Administration Central and Eastern Europe (NISPAcee) and Vice-President of the Polish Association of Public Administration Education. She received awards from the British Council and NATO. She has been chairperson of the special commission mandated to develop the civil service code of ethics in Poland, and also as Rapporteur of the Workshop III "The Changing Position and Status of Civil Servants" at the Twenty-fifth International Congress of Administrative Sciences of IIAS. [top] Mr. Florin LUPESCU (Romania) Mr. Lupescu is currently the Minister Counsellor and Director of European Affairs for the Government of Romania. He previously served as the Counsellor of State for Euro Atlantic Affairs for the Office of the Vice-Prime Minister for Coordination on European Union (EU) Affairs (May 2004 to January 2005), Counsellor of State for EU Affairs and NATO to the President of Romania (January 2001 to May 2004), Consultant for the Convention on the Future of Europe (2002-2003), Counsellor and Director for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Romania (2000-2001), and Director in the Department for European Integration, Government of Romania (1997-2000). He is also currently the National Project Director of the UNDP Project on "Strengthening the Institutional Capacity of the Presidential Administration of Romania." Further, Mr. Lupescu is a Visiting Professor at the International Centre of Euro-regional Research, University of Oradea, and at the Department for International Relations and European Studies at the University of Bucharest. Mr. Anthony MAKRYDEMETRES (Greece) Mr. Makrydemetres, since 1998, has been a Professor of Administrative Science at the Department of Political Science and Public Administration, University of Athens. He also served as a Special Adviser to the Prime Minister of Greece on matters of Public Administration since 2004 and to the Secretary of State for Public Administration from 1990 to 1991. Among his notable professional activities are: Director of the Institute of In-Service Training and Development, National Centre of Public Administration (1986 to 1988), Member of the Commission for the Reform of the Public Administration and co-author (with Professor J. Anastopoulos) of the final report (1989-1990), Member of the Board of Governors of the Hellenic Institute of Administrative Sciences (since 1990) and Representative of the Greek Government to the Resumed Session of the General Assembly of the United Nations on Public Administration and Development (April 1996). Prof. Jose Oscar MONTEIRO (Mozambique) Prof. Monteiro is a law graduate, he has a Master of Arts in African Studies, University Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne), and has lectured in the Faculty of Law at University Eduardo Mondlane. He established the degree of Public Management at the same University, and is currently a Visiting Professor at the Graduate School of Public and Development Management, Faculty of Commerce Law and Management, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He advises the Ministry of Public Administration, the Ministry of Higher Education, Science and Technology, the Public Service Reform Unit, and currently chairs the Establishment Committee for the training system of Higher Education for civil servants in Mozambique. He has acted as Special Adviser to the Special Representative of the Secretary-General of the United Nations for the Peace Process in Mozambique and chaired the Steering Committee of the first two National Human Development Reports, Mozambique, 1999 and 2000, and the Steering Committee of the first Regional Southern Africa Report, 2000-2001, UNDP. Mr. Siripurapu Kesava RAO (India) Mr. Rao is currently the Principal, Administrative Staff College of India (ASCI) a management training institution for in-service administrators and managers of the public and private sectors. He was also previously employed as Economic Adviser, Ministry of Commerce, New Delhi. From 1978 to 2001, he worked at the Commonwealth Secretariat in London in various diplomatic capacities in the Economic Affairs Division, and then as Director of the Strategic Planning and Evaluation Division. He led the Strategic Planning and Evaluation Division, which sought to act as a think-tank for the Secretariat. During 1993 to 2000, he served as member of the Management Committee chaired by the Commonwealth Secretary-General, the body responsible for running the Commonwealth Secretariat. Mr. Prijono TJIPTOHERIJANTO (Indonesia) Mr. Tjiptoherijanto is currently a Professor in the Faculty of Economy at the University of Indonesia. From 2002 to 2005, he served as Secretary to the Vice President of the Republic of Indonesia, specializing in the area of public administration and public services. He also served as Assistant to the State Secretary for Governmental Affairs (March 1999 to April 2000) and was the Vice-Coordinator of the International Training Programme Coordinating Agency for National Family Planning. Among his professional affiliations are: Board of National Wages Research, Board of National Productivity, National Commission: Habitat II Minister for People's Settlement, Delegation to the ASEAN Ministerial on Rural Development and Member of the Technical Team in Strengthening Poverty Eradication Programme in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Mr. WANG, Xiaochu (China) Mr. Wang is Vice-Minister of Personnel of the People's Republic of China. He is a Board Member of the Chinese Society of Public Administration. From 1996 to 2003, he served successively as Deputy Director-General, Acting Director-General and Director-General of the Department of International Exchange and Cooperation of the Ministry of Personnel. He was the Executive Director of the Organizing Committee of the 3rd International Conference of Administrative Sciences co-sponsored by the Chinese Government and IIAS in Beijing, 1996. From 1998 to 2000, he was the Lead Shepherd of the Human Resources Development Working Group of Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation. He organized and chaired the 19th, 20th, 21st and 22nd Working Group meetings, and co-chaired the Planning Committees of the 3rd (Washington, D.C., United States, 1998) and 4th (Kumamoto, Japan, 2000) APEC Ministerial Meetings on Human Resources Development. He was the Executive Director of the Organizing Committee of the APEC High-Level Meeting on Human Capacity-Building (Beijing, 2001). From 1993 to 1996, he worked at the Chinese Mission to the United Nations in New York as a Counsellor. He was a member of the Chinese delegation from the forty-seventh through fiftieth sessions of the General Assembly of the United Nations, and representative of China to the Fifth Committee. Dr. Gwendoline WILLIAMS (Trinidad & Tobago) Dr. Williams has worked at all levels of the education system in the Caribbean. Since 1978, she has been in the post-secondary and tertiary sectors as teacher educator, lecturer and Head, Department of Management Studies and Deputy Dean in the Faculty of Social Sciences/Management Studies. She is currently an Associate Faculty at the University of the West Indies Institute of Business Teaching in the Executive and International MBA and in the Masters in Human Resource Management Programmes. She is also on the change management team of the Trinidad and Tobago Ministry of Public Utilities and the Environment and the Judiciary; as well as involved in the reform of the UN agencies of UNESCO and UNDP that is intended to lead to more results based approaches in the education and social sciences sector (gender and management). Dr. Williams specializes in management training and development in the public, private and voluntary sectors and her major focus has been on capacity-building in the areas of management development, organizational development/management of change, human resource management, and gender and youth development. She has been involved in strategic planning and mainstreaming gender in policy and planning the public sector through the Commonwealth Secretariat and DFID in the Hasemite Kingdom of Jordan, in Uganda, Malta, the Maldives and the Gambia. Dr. Williams has been a member of several project consulting teams for regional and international organizations such as the Caribbean Community Secretariat (CARICOM), the Caribbean Network of Educational Innovation for Development (CARNEID), the Commonwealth Secretariat, the Association of Commonwealth Universities (ACU), the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), the World Bank, and the British Council (DFID).

人工智能

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Ada Marie Winder Willson ELMO/ESCALANTE - Ada Marie Winder Willson, age 97, Passed away on Jan. 13, 2011 in Escalante. Ada was born the fourth of fourteen children on Oct. 26, 1913 at Desert Lake to Charles William and Caroline Elizabeth Mills Winder, she had nine brothers and four sisters. The family were Letha Elvinia Crammer (1908), Virl Evert (1910), Mildred Caroline Jensen (1912), Ada Marie (1913), Ornald William (1915), Baby boy (1916), Angus David (1917), Verdis Eugeen (1920), Harold (1923), Zina LaReata Tabor (1926), Philip (1928), Sherland Laroy "Floyd" (Twin- Girl) (1930), Van Dale (1934). All preceded Ada in death except sister Zina Tabor, Price and Brother Van Dale Winder, Bolivar, MO. She is survived by her seven children, four boys and three girls; Lewie Zera of Montrose, Colo., Marvon Ellis (Lou Jean Golding) Willson of Wellington, Polley Myrna Willson Hunt of Englewood, Colo., Pattie Bertrin of Price, Lana Lucinda (Raymond Walter) Christian of Escalante, Leland Wilbert (Lois Louise Golding) Willson of Wellington, Aurelia Beth Willson of Stansbury Park. Ada has 23 grandchildren; 58 great-grandchildren; 43 great-great-grandchildren. Preceded in death by husband, two daughters-in-law, two grandsons and one great-grandson. She attended school in Desert Lake, Victor and then in Elmo. She met her husband when they were going to school in Elmo. She lived in and around Elmo all her life except her early years she lived in Desert Lake and the last six years she lived in Escalante. She married Myron Willson On Oct. 23, 1931 in Price. Their marriage was later solemnized in the Manti LDS Temple on Sept. 25, 1939. they were married a little more then 60 years when Myron passed away on Feb. 28, 1992. Ada out lived all of her husband's brothers and sisters and their spouses. They were: Oran E. and Jane Martine, Marrion (twin to Myron) and Viola, Clarence and Rinda, Willis (twin) and Leatha, and Lilice (twin). Her parents homesteaded property on Cedar Mountain in Emery County where the family lived and worked the summers. One year they lived there through the winter. The family also homesteaded property on Shoemaker Wash near Desert Lake which became the family home. She worked hard to help the family build homes and cultivate the land, care for their animals and do the necessary things to prove up on the ground for the government to deed the properties to them. She endured many hardships and trials in her life and saw many national crises. She was just a girl when World War I broke out. She married and had her first four children during the Great Depression of the thirties. By the time World War II came her last three children were born. They experienced living on $4.00 a month and using ration stamps to provide for many necessities from gasoline to clothing and food. Then the Korean War came and her oldest son served in that war. Myron and Ada Willson together gave their family a wonderful family life. Being a hard worker all her life you could see her tending water, working in the fields, feeding and caring for the cows as well as taking care of her home until she was in her eighties. In the evening she would sit down to work on her quilting (she made hundreds for her family and others). She loved crocheting, knitting, tatting, and many other types of handiwork. There are only a few kinds of handiwork she has not been able to do. She always loved to learn new ideas and skills. She loved poetry and songs. She could recite or sing many of the old time poems and ballads, for example "Bill Venero" which is about 15 verses long she sang at her ninetieth birthday party. Myron and Ada Willson were water masters for the Cleveland Huntington Irrigation Company. Ada worked in many of the organizations of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from drama director, Primary Councelor and teacher. She was also janitor of the Elmo Ward Chapel. She has been very involved in the Daughters of Utah Pioneers. She was instrumental in obtaining the tithing granary for the Lily of the Valley Camp at Elmo, and moved it to its present location, and having a marker built which stands in the center of Elmo Town. She helped start and supported until she couldn't drive, the Annual Pheasant Hunt lunches that the D.U.P. sponsors every year. She took the responsibility of gathering names and dates of the people buried in many of the cemeteries in Emery County. She did the names for the Victor Cemetery and the Thayn Field in Desert Lake. The Elmo Cemetery she gathered the names and dates of the people buried there and those records complied a history. She then had the Cemetery surveyed, with a map of all the plots drawn up and the Cemetery dedicated. Our mother may be small in physical stature but in every way she is a giant. She is a giant in the hearts of her family. She has taught us love of family, honestly, integrity, courage, and many other values worth living by. Thanks to our mother for all her hard work as farmer, cow-girl, cook, seamstress, laundress, peacemaker, teacher and many unlisted titles. We thank you for all your love and support as well as sticking by each of us when we needed you. We your family are trying to live up to the example and hope we can live wothy to be with you and daddy in the eternities. I'm not here; Don't stand by my grave and weep, For I'm not there I do not sleep. I am a thousand winds that blow, I am the diamond glint on snow. I am the sunshine on ripened grain, I am the gentle autumn rain. When you awaken in the morning hush I am the swift uplift rush. Of quiet birds in circle flight, I am the soft stars that shine at night. Do not stand at my grave and cry, I am not there I did not die. Funeral services will be held at the Elmo LDS Chapel (199 E. Main) on Wednesday, Jan. 19, 2011 at 1 p.m. A viewing will be held on Tuesday, Jan. 18, 2011 from 6 to 8 p.m. and on Wednesday from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. both at the Elmo LDS Chapel. Interment in the Elmo Cemetery. Services are in the care of Fausett Mortuary. Friends and family may sign the guest book and share memories of Ada Marie at www.fausettmortuary.com. Print Page

人工智能

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SIGN LANGUAGE Introduction Sign Language is a naturally occurring language which develops as a result of the need to communicate among members of Deaf communities. Sign Language is a language that occurs in the visual-gestural modality. This means it is produced using the hands, face, head and upper torso and is processed by the eyes. In contrast, spoken languages are produced using the mouth, tongue and vocal chords and are processed by the ears. Different Sign Languages have developed in different countries where Deaf communities exist, for instance British Sign Language (BSL), American Sign Language (ASL), Ethiopian Sign Language (ESL), South African Sign Langu

人工智能

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« The Situation of Eating – Part II The Interior Situation of Undecided Voters » The Situation of Neuroeconomics and Situationist Economics Posted by The Situationist Staff on August 22, 2008 In July, The Economist had a nice article on the burgeoning field of neuroeconomics, titled “Do Economists Need Brains.” We’ve excerpted a few chunks from that article below. In the late 1990s a generation of academic economists had their eyes opened by Mr LeDoux’s and other accounts of how studies of the brain using recently developed techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) showed that different bits of the old grey matter are associated with different sorts of emotional and decision-making activity. The amygdalas are an example. Neuroscientists have shown that these almond-shaped clusters of neurons deep inside the medial temporal lobes play a key role in the formation of emotional responses such as fear. These new neuroeconomists saw that it might be possible to move economics away from its simplified model of rational, self-interested, utility-maximising decision-making. Instead of hypothesising about Homo economicus, they could base their research on what actually goes on inside the head of Homo sapiens. The dismal science had already been edging in that direction thanks to behavioural economics. Since the 1980s researchers in this branch of the discipline had used insights from psychology to develop more “realistic” models of individual decision-making, in which people often did things that were not in their best interests. But neuroeconomics had the potential, some believed, to go further and to embed economics in the chemical processes taking place in the brain. Early successes for neuroeconomists came from using neuroscience to shed light on some of the apparent flaws in H. economicus noted by the behaviouralists. One much-cited example is the “ultimatum game”, in which one player proposes a division of a sum of money between himself and a second player. The other player must either accept or reject the offer. If he rejects it, neither gets a penny. According to standard economic theory, as long as the first player offers the second any money at all, his proposal will be accepted, because the second player prefers something to nothing. In experiments, however, behavioural economists found that the second player often turned down low offers—perhaps, they suggested, to punish the first player for proposing an unfair split. Neuroeconomists have tried to explain this seemingly irrational behaviour by using an “active MRI”. In MRIs used in medicine the patient simply lies still during the procedure; in active MRIs, participants are expected to answer economic questions while blood flows in the brain are scrutinised to see where activity is going on while decisions are made. They found that rejecting a low offer in the ultimatum game tended to be associated with high levels of activity in the dorsal stratium, a part of the brain that neuroscience suggests is involved in reward and punishment decisions, providing some support to the behavioural theories. As well as the ultimatum game, neuroeconomists have focused on such issues as people’s reasons for trusting one another, apparently irrational risk-taking, the relative valuation of short- and long-term costs and benefits, altruistic or charitable behaviour, and addiction. Releases of dopamine, the brain’s pleasure chemical, may indicate economic utility or value, they say. There is also growing interest in new evidence from neuroscience that tentatively suggests that two conditions of the brain compete in decision-making: a cold, objective state and a hot, emotional state in which the ability to make sensible trade-offs disappears. The potential interactions between these two brain states are ideal subjects for economic modelling. Already, neuroeconomics is giving many economists a dopamine rush. For example, Colin Camerer of the California Institute of Technology, a leading centre of research in neuroeconomics, believes that incorporating insights from neuroscience could transform economics, by providing a much better understanding of everything from people’s reactions to advertising to decisions to go on strike. At the same time, Mr Camerer thinks economics has the potential to improve neuroscience, for instance by introducing neuroscientists to sophisticated game theory. “The neuroscientist’s idea of a game is rock, paper, scissors, which is zero-sum, whereas economists have focused on strategic games that produce gains through collaboration.” Herbert Gintis of the Sante Fe Institute has even higher hopes that breakthroughs in neuroscience will help bring about the integration of all the behavioural sciences—economics, psychology, anthropology, sociology, political science and biology relating to human and animal behaviour—around a common, brain-based model of how people take decisions However, not everyone is convinced. The fiercest attack on neuroeconomics, and indeed behavioural economics, has come from two economists at Princeton University, Faruk Gul and Wolfgang Pesendorfer. In an article in 2005, “The Case for Mindless Economics”, they argued that neuroscience could not transform economics because what goes on inside the brain is irrelevant to the discipline. What matters are the decisions people take—in the jargon, their “revealed preferences”—not the process by which they reach them. For the purposes of understanding how society copes with the consequences of those decisions, the assumption of rational utility-maximisation works just fine. The big question now is whether the tools of neuroscience will allow economics to fulfill Edgeworth’s vision—or, if that is too much to ask, at least to be grounded in the physical reality of the brain. Studies in the first decade of neuroeconomics relied heavily on active MRI scans. Economists’ initial excitement at being able to enliven their seminars with pictures of parts of the brain lighting up in response to different experiments (so much more interesting than the usual equations) has led to a recognition of the limits of MRIs. “Curiosity about neuroscience among economists has outstripped what we have to say, for now,” admits Mr Camerer. Still, Mr Camerer is confident that neuroeconomics will deliver its first big breakthroughs within five years. Likewise, Mr McCabe sees growing sophistication in neuroeconomic research. For the past four years, a group of leading neuroeconomists and neuroscientists has met to refine questions about the brain and economic behaviour. Researchers trained in both neuroscience and economics are entering the field. They are asking more sophisticated questions than the first generation “spots on brains” experiments, says Mr McCabe, such as “how these spots would change with different economic variables.” He expects that within a few years neuroeconomics will have uncovered enough about the interactions between what goes on in people’s brains and the outside world to start to shape the public-policy agenda—though it is too early to say how. To access the whole article, click here. For a collection of related Situationist posts click here and here. This entry was posted on August 22, 2008 at 12:48 am and is filed under Behavioral Economics, Neuroeconomics, Public Policy. Tagged: Behavioral Economics, Colin Camerer, Faruk Gul, game theory, Herbert Gintis, Neuroeconomics, The Case for Mindless Economics, ultimatum game, Wolfgang Pesendorfer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. 2 Responses to “The Situation of Neuroeconomics and Situationist Economics” José Toral, DBAc said November 13, 2008 at 3:20 pm Pesendorfer and Gul might be correct when they argue that “what matters are the decisions people take not the process by which they reach them” but, nevertheless, it seems very important to me what goes inside the brain to reach the decision. I don’t think like Pesendorfer and Gul that the science behind the process is not important, on the contrary is a new fronteer to further understand our behavior concerning for example, Giffen Goods and other market abnormalities. exhabitating said August 17, 2012 at 11:47 pm Reblogged this on Good Europeans.

人工智能

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Home > Personality From vision to Buddhism, monk finds a home at MIT By MICHAEL KUNZELMAN, Associated Press Writer, May 28, 2005 Cambridge, MA (USA) -- Tenzin Priyadarshi's path to becoming a Buddhist monk began when he was just 10 and he ran away from home in pursuit of the recurring "vision" he saw in his dreams of a monastery and an old man. Tenzin, who grew up in an upper-class Hindu family of intellectuals and bureaucrats, slipped away from his boarding school one morning with the equivalent of $5 in his pocket. He left a note for his parents that he was embarking on a "spiritual ques

人工智能

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Co.Labs Starbucks Could Use Your Social Data To Find New Locations Researchers at the University of Cambridge have found that Foursquare check-in data in New York can help businesses choose the best location to open a new Starbucks, McDonald's, or Dunkin’ Donuts. Ciara Byrne Deciding where to build a new coffee shop or fast food outlet is an expensive and risky business. Traditionally, planners use data on demographics, revenue, nearby businesses, and aggregated human flow, much of which is expensive to gather. But the expense is worth it, because when it comes to foot traffic, even a few feet can make a huge difference. “Open a new coffee shop in one street corner and it may thrive with hundreds of customers. Open it a few hundred meters down the road and it may close in a matter of months,” explains University of Cambridge researcher Anastasios Noulas and colleagues in a new paper that puts a social spin on choosing the best retail location. In addition to the usual geographical data, Noulas’s team wanted to see if adding freely available Foursquare check-in data combined with Machine Learning algorithms to the mix could help planners choose better locations. The team focused on three chains ubiquitous in New York, Foursquare’s home turf: Starbucks, McDonald's, and Dunkin’ Donuts. The researchers started by looking at features that might affect foot traffic, like what other businesses operated near a given location, including the number of competitors, and how diverse those businesses were. They also took into account nearby landmarks that help attract customers. People coming out of a train station, for example, often head to a Starbucks, so features like these were included in location descriptions. Then the team turned to Foursquare, which they used to understand how people flow between locations. By analyzing 620,932 check-ins shared on Twitter over a period of 5 months (about 25% of all Foursquare check-ins during that period), they were able to determine if an entire area is popular, instead of just one retail location, and analyze how users move from one retail location to another within an area and from outside it. For each feature they identified, the team computed a score that they used to rank each candidate location. These features and values were used to describe each location and train several different supervised Machine Learning algorithms: Support Vector Regression, M5 decision trees, and Linear Regression with regularization. Each algorithm was trained 1,000 times using a random sample of two-thirds of the locations and their known levels of popularity. The trained algorithms then tried to predict how popular the remaining third of locations would be. The result was a ranking of the locations with the optimal location at the top of the ranking. The predicted ranking was then compared with the true popularity of those locations measured via Foursquare check-ins. The team found that the check-in patterns for each of the three chains were unique. Starbucks locations had five times as many check-ins as McDonald's and Dunkin’ Donuts, a difference not entirely accounted for by the fact that Starbucks has twice as many stores as McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts in the area around Manhattan. A Starbucks was also much more likely to be located by a train station than the other two chains. The most predictive individual features of any given location also varied between chains. Competitiveness was the most predictive feature for Starbucks, indicating that the stores do better when they face less competition from nearby competitors. Incoming Flow, or customers coming from outside the retail area, was the top feature for McDonald's, whose customers will travel further for a burger. Dunkin’ Donuts, on the other hand, sees most business from customers stopping in to refresh themselves during a shopping spree. The number of customers who also checked in at nearby other local businesses was the most important feature for the chain. In spite of these differences, the study found that a combination of traditional geographical and Foursquare-based mobility features turned out the best predictions for all three chains. Using the methodology, the researchers chose locations for Starbucks with a 67% accuracy overall, and 76% when predicting the top 10% and the top 15% most popular locations. But don’t think that you can attract mores stores to your neighborhood by checking in just yet. Although their results seem to show a correlation, one possible flaw in the research is that Foursquare check-ins are used as a proxy for the popularity of a location. The researchers don’t provide evidence in the paper to show that check-in numbers translate into overall popularity. Keep reading: Who's Afraid of Data Science? What Your Company Should Know About Data Previous Updates Is Data Science Just “Sexed Up” Statistics? August 14, 2013 Superstar statistician Nate Silver recently ruffled some feathers in the data science world by proclaiming that “Data scientist is just a sexed up word for statistician.” Now IT industry analyst Robin Bloor has claimed that there is no such thing as data science, because a science must apply the scientific method to a particular domain: Science studies a particular domain, whether it be chemical, biological, physical or whatever. This gives us the sciences of chemistry, biology, physics, etc. Those who study such domains will gather data in one way or another, often by formulating experiments and taking readings. In other words, they gather data. If there were a particular activity devoted to studying data, then there might be some virtue in the term “data science.” And indeed there is such an activity, and it already has a name: it is a branch of mathematics called statistics. Statistics Versus Data Science So is data science just statistics by another name? Data scientists seem to view statistics more as a tool they use to a greater or lesser degree in their work rather than the domain of their science, as Bloor suggests. The relationship is kind of like the one between the content of the theoretical courses you’ll find in a computer science degree and what a working coder actually does day to day. Data scientist Hilary Mason (formerly of Bitly, now Accel Partners) made this comment about Silver’s claim: “I'm a computer scientist by training who explores data and builds algorithms, systems, and products around data. I use statistics in my practice, but would never claim to be an expert statistician.” O’Reilly’s Analyzing the Analyzers report seems to confirm the idea that statistics is just one tool of data science rather than the focus of the field. The study showed that data science already involves a range of roles from data businessperson to data researcher, with statistics featuring much more prominently in some roles than others. Statistics Versus Machine Learning Commenters on Bloor’s post also pointed to the extensive use of machine learning, and not just statistics, in the data science world. The overlaps and differences between machine learning and statistics is in itself a contentious issue, as both fields are interested in learning from data. They just have different objectives and go about it in different ways. Data scientist and Machine Learning for Hackers author Drew Conway explains the difference this way: Statisticians approach their work by first observing some phenomenon in the world, and then attempting to specify a model -- often formally -- to describe that phenomenon. Machine learners often begin their work by possessing a large number of observations of some real world process, i.e. data, and then impose structure on that data to make inferences about the data generating process. The online debate implies that statisticians are interested in the causality and the interpretability of the formal models of the world they create. The more engineering-oriented machine learning community uses statistical methods in some of its algorithms, but is more interested in solving a practical problem in an accurate way even if the model built by the machine learning algorithm is not easily understandable. Data scientist John Mount described the distinction as follows: The goal of machine learning is to create a predictive model that is indistinguishable from a correct model. This is an operational attitude that tends to offend statisticians who want a model that not only appears to be accurate but is in fact correct (i.e. also has some explanatory value). But data scientists don’t see statistics or machine learning as encompassing the entirety of their discipline. Mount goes on to say: Data science is a term I use to represent the ownership and management of the entire modeling process: discovering the true business need, collecting data, managing data, building models and deploying models into production. Machine learning and statistics may be the stars, but data science the whole show. Data Science Versus Natural Science Finally, the comments on Bloor’s post dove into the prickly point of whether the word "science" should be used at all in this context given that it implies repeatability and peer review, neither of which may apply to data science done in commercial companies. Here, it’s useful to again point to the differences between theoretical computer science and then the everyday work of the average hacker, which is more engineering than lab work. Drew Conway captures this distinction nicely: As data science matures as a discipline I think it will be closer to a trade discipline than a scientific one. Much in the same way there are practicing physicians, and research physicians. Practicing doctors have to constantly review medical research, and maintain their understanding of new technologies in order to best serve their patients. Conversely, research physicians run experiments and build knowledge that other doctors can implement. Data scientists will implement the work of statisticians, machine learners, mathematicians, computer scientists etc., but very likely spend little to no time building new models or methods. Much like computer science, the data science landscape may eventually diverge into two distinct, but cooperative research and practical branches. When that happens, we may need another name, like data engineering, to describe the practical side of the field. For now, the debate over defining data science says more about the nascent, evolving nature of the field than it does the actual differences between branches. Riot Looters Actually Behave Like Shoppers, Says Data London was engulfed by five days of riots in August 2011, the worst civil unrest the U.K. had seen in 20 years. The looting, arson, and violence during the riots resulted in five deaths, many injuries, and a property damage bill of up to £250 million ($380 million). A new video from mathematician Hannah Fry explains the patterns in rioters’ behavior and how police can use them to quell future unrest. “We found three very simple patterns. These patterns are incredibly important since we can use them to predict how a riot will spread, help the police to design better policing strategies and ultimately stop them from spreading.” The model of the riots created by Fry and her team, which is further described in a Nature paper, used crime data provided by London’s Metropolitan Police covering the period August 6-11th, 2011 for offenses associated with the riots, a dataset of 3,914 records. This was combined with geographical and retail data and a set of mathematical equations capturing the patterns the researchers used to try and model the behavior of rioters. Some newspapers at the time dubbed the riots “shopping with violence.” It seems they weren’t far from wrong. The first pattern is comparing rioters to everyday shoppers. Over 30 percent of rioters travelled less than a kilometer from where they lived to where they offended but they were prepared to go a bit further if there was a riot site which was really big or they had very little chance of getting caught or there was a lot of lootable goods. This picture is exactly what you see when you look at a similar picture of retail spending flows. Most people shop locally to where they live but they are prepared to travel a bit further to a really attractive retail site. We know an awful lot about how people shop since this information is invaluable to retailers, being able to predict where people will spend their money. Riots broke out in many parts of the city, but while some areas were heavily hit, others remained completely unscathed. Fry’s team hypothesized that this was partly due to the shopping behavior described above, but also the interaction of police and rioters and how the idea of rioting spread throughout the city. The researchers guessed that rioters would be attracted to sites which not only offered good looting opportunities but also fewer police or more rioters, making them less likely to get caught. If police were heavily outnumbered at a particular site, the Metropolitan police has stated that “decisions were made not to arrest due to the prioritization of competing demands…specifically, the need to protect emergency services, prevent the spread of further disorder and hold ground until the arrival of more police resources.” So once a riot site spiraled out of control, even if police were on the ground, rioters were unlikely to be caught when they were present in large numbers. The Nature paper concluded that the speed and numbers in which police arrived at a particular riot site was crucial in quelling violence. The team’s simulations also showed that around 10,000 police would have been needed to suppress disorder. Only 5,000 were deployed during the first days of the riots. Combining the shopping and “predator-prey” analogy of police and rioters, the team’s model predicted pretty accurately which areas would be hardest hit by the riots. Map a) shows actual riot behavior while map b) shows the result of a simulation using the model. 26 of the 33 London boroughs in the simulation showed rioter percentages in the same or adjacent bands as the crime data. Fry describes the final pattern in the team’s model--how the idea to riot spread through the city: Imagine you have one young guy who walks past a Foot Locker getting raided and he runs in and gets himself some new trainers. He then texts a couple of his friends to come down to join him. They then text a couple more of their friends, who text more of their friends. Suddenly, one spur of the moment decision by one person has grown into a huge outburst of criminal behavior. Before we talked about places which are more susceptible to rioting. Now we are talking about people who are more susceptible to the idea of rioting. The clearest link here is deprivation. The people who were involved in the riots came from some of the most deprived areas of the city, the places with the worst schools, the highest unemployment rates and the lowest incomes. The boroughs who were the worst hit by the riots were also the boroughs which had the biggest cuts in the recent government funding, and in particular disproportionate cuts in youth services. The data points to the fact that a spark was lit in a vulnerable community, and this spark ignited to engulf the entire city and eventually the country. How Forensic Linguistics Uncovered J.K. Rowling’s Secret Book On Sunday, U.K. newspaper The Sunday Times revealed that J.K. Rowling was the true author of crime thriller The Cuckoo's Calling, which she published several months ago under the name Robert Galbraith. The paper was first alerted by an anonymous Twitter tip-off and Time reports that the paper called in Pittsburgh-based professor of computer science Patrick Juola, to help them determine whether the text had indeed been written by Rowling. Joula specializes in forensic linguistics, also known as “stylometry,” which can help attribute an author to a text. Juola has been researching the subject--now called forensic linguistics, with a focus on authorship attribution--for about a decade. He uses a computer program to analyze and compare word usage in different texts, with the goal of determining whether they were written by the same person. The science is more frequently applied in legal cases, such as with wills of questionable origin, but it works with literature too. Joula is one of the developers of the catchily titled Java Graphical Authorship Attribution Program (JGAAP), which he used to extract the 100 most commonly used words in Rowling’s text, not including character names. What the author won’t think to change are the short words, the articles and prepositions. “Propositions and articles and similar little function words are actually very individual,” Juola says. “It’s actually very, very hard to change them because they’re so subconscious.” Author attribution is not a precise science. In a 2006 paper Joula and co-author John Sofko described statistical and computational methods for authorship attribution as “neither reliable, well-regarded, widely-used, or well-understood.” JGAAP was the authors’ response to the “unorganized mess” of author attribution and is intended for use by non-specialists. JGAAP implements several steps: canonicalization, identification of events, culling, and then analysis using a Machine Learning algorithm. Canonicalization converts data that has more than one possible representation into a standard form. In the case of text, this will mean doing things like converting all capital letters into lower case and removing punctuation. An event in a text may be the occurrence of a word, character, or part of speech. Culling reduces the number of events to, say, the 100 most common words, and uses this as a representation of the source text. Finally, a Machine Learning classification algorithm like a Support Vector Machine, or K-Nearest Neighbors, uses this representation to compare the unknown text with texts by known authors in a training set and predicts which one was most likely to have written it. Joula reveals in the Time interview that Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy, Ruth Rendell’s The St. Zita Society, P.D. James’s The Private Patient, and Val McDermid’s The Wire in the Blood were the other texts used in training--a pretty small sample. If an author not on this list had written The Cuckoo's Calling, then JGAAP could not have identified him but only the known author closest in style. Joula determined that Rowling was the most likely of these four authors to have written the book and Rowling later admitted that this was the case. GitHub Reveals A Formula For Your “Hacker Persona” July 11, 2013 Last year, Google developer Ilya Grigorik and GitHub marketeer Brian Doll did a talk at O’Reilly Strata on what makes developers happy and angry, programming language associations, and GitHub activity by country and language. All were results from the first GitHub Data Challenge and the activities of researchers using GitHub’s public timeline data. Github has now announced the results of the second challenge. The data was made available via an API and as a Google BigQuery dataset. BigQuery is a Web service that lets you do interactive analysis of massive datasets in an SQL-like query language. Grigorik’s favorite winning entry is the Open Source Report Card, which uses clustering and a simple expert system to generate a natural language description of your hacker personality and a weekly work tempo, and to identify other Github users who are similar to you. You can see an extract from Grigorik's report card below and generate your own. The Open Source Report Card was developed by astro-phycisist Dan Foreman-Mackey. He calculated statistics summarizing the weekly activity of a GitHub user and then clustered them to find groups like the “Tuesday tinkerer” and “Fulltime hacker.” I extracted the set of weekly schedule vectors for 10,000 "moderately active" GitHub users and ran K-means (with K=12) on this sample set. K-means is an algorithm for the unsupervised clustering of samples in a vector space. Foreman-Mackey then summarized the behavior of each user in a 61-dimensional vector, which includes features like the number of contributions, active repositories and languages used, and he ran an approximate nearest neighbor algorithm to identify other users who are similar to you based on your behavior. The final step was generating a natural language description of a particular hacker. “I made up a bunch of rules (implemented as a spaghetti of nested if statements) that concatenate strings until something like English prose falls out the other end,” he says. The data challenge is just one aspect of the work being done with Github’s timeline data. Brian Doll explains: A dozen or so academic research papers have been written in the last year that use the GitHub timeline data as their primary data source. Some of the research papers tried to better understand what makes software projects popular. They analyzed activity, time frames, and language across several projects to see if they could determine factors that make projects more likely to be widely adopted. GitHub is also looking at packaging the data in alternative ways to a stream of activity ordered by time. What many researchers want instead, is a package of specific projects, with all of its public history, along with the actual software repository data itself, to be bundled up together. I'm planning on releasing large data bundles like this to the public later this summer. What Kind Of Data Scientist Are You? For a profession whose entire “raison d’etre” is quantitative analysis, the role of the data scientist has been surprisingly hard to pin down. Now a new e-book from O’Reilly, Analyzing the Analyzers, has surveyed 250 Data Scientists on how they see themselves and their work. The authors then applied the tools of their trade, in this case a Non-negative Matrix Factorization algorithm to cluster the data, revealing the four archetypes of the data scientist. It also found that most Data Scientists, no matter which group they fell into, “rarely work with terabyte or larger data.” We think that terms like “data scientist,” “analytics,” and “big data” are the result of what one might call a “buzzword meat grinder.” We’ll use the survey results to identify a new, more precise vocabulary for talking about their work, based on how data scientists describe themselves and their skills. So who are these new data scientists? A Data Businessperson is focused on how data insights can affect a company’s bottom line or “translates P-values into profits”. This group seems very similar to the old-school Data Analyst, whose skills have sometimes been unjustly discounted in the pursuit of the more fashionable Data Scientist. In fact, only about a quarter of this group described themselves as Data Scientists. Nearly a quarter are female, a much higher proportion than the other types, and they are most likely to have an MBA, have managed other employees or started a business. The Data Creatives have the broadest range of skills in the survey. They can code and have contributed to open source projects, three quarters have academic experience and creatives are even more likely than Data Businesspeople to have done contract work (80%) or have started a business (40%). Creatives closely identify with the self-description “artist”. Psychologists, economists and political scientists, popped up surprising often among Data Researchers and Data Creatives. Data Developers build data infrastructure or code up Machine Learning algorithms. This group is the most likely to code on a daily basis and have Hadoop, SVM or Scala on their CV. About half have Computer Science or Computer Engineering degrees. Data Researchers seem closest to “scientists” in the sense that their work is more open ended and most are lapsed academics. Nearly 75% of Data Researchers had published in peer-reviewed journals, and over half had a PhD. Statistics is their top skill but they were least likely to have started a business, and only half had managed an employee. Although we hate to disappoint the majority of the tech press, who seem to conflate the terms “Big Data” and “Data Science,” most of the Data Scientists surveyed don’t actually work with Big Data at all. The figure below shows how often respondents worked with data of kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte, terabyte, and petabyte scale. Data Developers were most likely to work with petabytes of data, but even among developers this was rare. How Machine Learning Helps People Make Babies How far will you go to have a baby? That's the question facing the one in six couples suffering from infertility in the United States, fewer than 3% of which undergo IVF. A single round of IVF can cost up to $15,000, and the success rate for women over 40 is often less than 12% per round, making the process both financially and physically taxing. According to the CEO of Univfy, Mylene Yao, the couples with the highest likelihood of success are often not the ones who receive treatment. “A lot of women are not aware of what IVF can do for them and are getting to IVF rather late,” says Yao. ”On the other hand, a lot of women may be doing treatments which have lower chances of success.” Yao is an Ob/Gyn and researcher in reproductive medicine who teamed up with a colleague at Stanford, professor of statistics Wing H. Wong, to create a model that could predict the probability that a live birth will result from a single round of IVF. That model is now used in an online personalized predictive test that uses clinical data readily available to patients. The main factor currently used to predict IVF success is the age of the woman undergoing treatment. “Every country has a national registry that lists the IVF success rate by age group,” Yao explains. “What we have shown over and over in our research papers is that method vastly underestimates the possibility of success. It's a population average. It's not specific to any individual woman and is useful only at a high-level country policy level.” Many European countries, whose health services fund IVF for certain couples, use such age charts to determine the maximum age of the women who can receive treatment. Yao argues that, instead, European governments should fund couples with the highest likelihood of success. “People are mixing up two ideas. Everyone knows that aging will compromise your ability to conceive, but the ovaries of each woman age at a different pace. Unless they take into consideration factors like BMI, partner's sperm count, blood tests, reproductive history, that age is not useful. In our prediction model, for patients who have never had IVF, age accounts for 60% of the prediction; 40% of the prediction comes from other sources of information. A 33-year-old woman can be erroneously led to believe that she has great chances, whereas her IVF prospects may be very limited and if she waits further, it could compromise her chance to have a family. A 40-year-old might not even see a doctor because she thinks there is no chance.” In a 2013 research paper Univfy showed that 86% of cases analyzed did not have the results predicted by age alone. Nearly 60% had a higher probability of live birth based on an analysis of the patients’ complete reproductive profiles. Univfy's predictive model was built from data on 13,076 first IVF treatment cycles from three different clinics and used input parameters such as the woman's body mass index, smoking status, previous miscarriages or live births, clinical diagnoses including polycystic ovarian syndrome or disease, and her male partner's age and sperm count. “If a patient says 'I have one baby,' that's worth as much as what the blood tests show,” says Yao. Prediction of the probability of a live birth based on these parameters is a regression problem, where a continuous value is predicted from the values of the input parameters. A machine-learning algorithm called stochastic gradient boosting was used to build a boosted tree model predicting the probability of a live birth. A boosting algorithm builds a series of models, in this case up to 70,000 decision trees, which are essentially a series of if-then statements based on the values of the input parameters. Each new tree is created from a random sample of the full data set and uses the prediction errors from the last tree to improve its own predictions. The resulting model determines the relative importance of each input parameter. It turned out that while the age of the patient was still the most significant factor at more than 60% weighting, other single parameters like sperm count (9.6%) and body mass index (9.5%) were also significant. Another Univfy model used by IVF clinics predicts the probability of multiple births. Some 30% of women receiving IVF in 2008 in the U.S. gave birth to twins since clinics often use multiple embryos to increase the chances of success. “Multiple births are associated with complications for the newborn and the mother, “ says Yao. “So for health reasons, clinics and governments want to have as few multiple births as possible. It's a difficult decision whether to put in one or two embryos.” Univfy's results showed that even when only two embryos were transferred, patients' risks of twins ranged from 12% to 55%. “The clinic can make a protocol that when the probability of multiple births is above a certain rate, then they will have only one embryo, and also identify patients who should really have two embryos. Currently there's a lot of guesswork.” When the G8 meet in Northern Ireland next week, transparency will be on the agenda. But how do these governments themselves rate? Open data campaigners the Open Knowledge foundation just published a preview of an Open data Census which assessed how open the critical datasets in the G8 countries really are. Open data doesn’t just mean making datasets available to the public but also distributing them in a format which is easy to process, available in bulk, and regularly updated. When the regional government of Piemonte, Italy was hit by an expenses scandal last year, the government published the expense claim data from the previous year in a set of spreadsheets embedded in a PDF, a typical example of less than accessible “open data.” More than 30 volunteer contributors from around the world (the foundation says they include lawyers, researchers, policy experts, journalists, data wranglers, and civic hackers) assessed the openness of data sets in 10 core categories: Election Results, Company Register, National Map, Government Budgets, Government Spending, Legislation, National Statistical Office Data, Postcode/ZIP database, Public Transport Timetables, and Environmental Data on major sources of pollutants. The U.S. topped the list for openness according to the overall score summed across all 10 categories of data, indicating that the executive order “making open and machine readable the new default for government information” announced by president Barack Obama in May this year has had some effect. The U.K. was next, followed by France, Japan, Canada, Germany, and Italy. The Russian Federation limped in last, failing to publish any of the information considered by the census as open data. Postcode data, which is required for almost all location-based applications and services, is not easily accessible in any G8 country except Germany. “In the U.K., there's quite a big fight over postcodes since Royal Mail sells the postcodes and makes millions of pounds a year,” said Open Knowledge Foundation founder Rufus Pollock. Data on government spending was also patchy in France, Germany, and Italy. Many G8 countries scored low on company registry data, a notable point when the G8’s transparency discussions will address tax evasion and offshore companies. “Government processes aren't always built for the digital age,” said Pollock. “I heard an incredible story about 501(c)3 registration information in the U.S. where they get all this machine-readable data in and the first they do is convert it to PDF which then humans transcribe.” The data was assessed in line with open data standards such as OpenDefinition.org and the 8 Principles of Open Government Data. Each category of data was given marks out of six depending on how many of the following criteria were met: openly licensed, publicly available, in digital format, machine readable (in a structured file format), up to date, and available in bulk. The assessment wasn’t entirely quantitative. “We strive for reasonably 'yes or no' questions but there are subtleties,” says Pollock. With transport and timetables there's rail, bus, and other public transport. What happens if your bus and tram timetables are available but not train? Or is a certain format acceptable as machine readable?” The preview does not show how many data sets were assessed in each category but more information will be included in the full results covering 50 countries will be released later this year. For further information on the methodology of the census see the Open Knowledge Foundation’s blog post. Olly Downs runs the Data Science team at Globys, a company which takes large-scale dynamic data from mobile operators and uses it to contextualize their marketing in order to improve customer experience, increase revenue, and maximize retention. Downs is no data novice: He was the Principal Scientist at traffic prediction startup INRIX, which is planning an IPO this year, and Globys is his seventh early-stage company. Co.Labs talked to him about how to maximize the ROI of a data science team. How does Globys use its Data Science team? The Telco space has always been Big Data. Any single one of our mobile operator customers produces data at a rate greater than Facebook. Globys is unique in terms of the scale with which we have embraced the data science role and its impact on the structure of the company and the core proposition of the business. Often data scientists in an organization are pseudo-consultants answering one-off questions. Our data science team is devoted to developing the science behind the technology of our core product. You trained in hard sciences (Physics at Cambridge and Applied Mathematics at Princeton). Is Data Science really a science? How we work at Globys is that we develop technologies via a series of experiments. Those experiments are designed to be extremely robust, as they would be in the hard sciences world, but based on data which is only available commercially, and they are designed to answer a business question rather than a fundamental research question. The methodology we use to determine if a technology is useful has the same core elements of a scientific process. What has come along with the data science field is this cloudburst of new technologies. The science has become mixed in with mastering the technology which allows you to do the science. It's not that surprising. The web was invented by Tim Berners Lee at CERN to exchange scientific data in particle physics. Out in the applied world, the work tends to be a mixture of answering questions and finding the right questions to ask. It's very easy for a data science team to slip into being a pseudo-engineering team on an engineering schedule. It's very important to have a proportion of your time allocated to exploratory work so you have the ability to go down some rabbit holes. How can a company integrate a data scientist into their business? With Big Data, the awareness in the enterprise is high and the motivation to do Big Data initiatives is high, but the cultural ability to absorb the business value, and the strategic shift that might bring, is hard to achieve. My experience is if the data scientist is not viewed as a peer-level stakeholder who can have an impact on the leadership and the culture of the business, then most likely they won't be successful. I remember working on a project on a “Save” program where anyone who called to cancel their service got two months free. The director who initiated that program had gotten a significant promotion based on its success. It wasn't a data-driven initiative. The anecdotes were much more positive than the data. What I found, after some data analysis, was that the program was retaining customers for an average of 1.2 months after the customer had been given the two months free. Every saved call the customer was taking, which included the cost of the agent talking to the customer, was actually losing them $13 per call. We came with a model-based solution which allowed the business to test who they should allow to cancel and who they should talk to. That changed the ROI on the program to plus-$22 per call taken. That stakeholder then made it from general manager to VP, and ultimately was very happy, but it took a while to make the shift to seeing that data was ultimately going to improve the outcome. Can't you fool yourself with data as well as with anecdotes? As a data scientist, it's hard to come to a piece of analysis without a hypothesis, a Bayesian prior (probability), a model in your mind of how you think things probably are. That makes it difficult to interrogate the data in the purest way, and even if you do, you are manipulating a subset of attributes or individuals who represent the problem that you have. Being aware of the limitations of the analysis is important. A real problem with communicating the work you have done is that while scientists are very good at explaining the caveats, the people listening are not interested in caveats but in conclusions. I remember doing an all-day experiment when I was at Cambridge to measure the Gravitational constant to four decimal places of precision. I measured to four levels of precision but the result was incorrect in the constant by more than a thousand times. You can fool yourself into thinking you have measured something with a very high level of accuracy and yet the thing you were measuring turned out to be the wrong thing. How do measure the ROI (Return on Investment) of a data science team? The measure of success is getting initiatives to completion, addressing a finding about the business is a measurable way. At Globys our business is around getting paid for the extra retention or revenue that we achieve for our customers. Recently, we have been leveraging the idea of every customer as a sequence of events--every purchase, every call, every SMS message, every data session, every top-up purchase--which allows us to take Machine Learning approaches (Dynamic State-Space Modeling) which otherwise do not apply to this problem domain of retaining customers. This approach outperforms the current state of the art in churn prediction modeling by about 200%. When you run an experiment to retain customers, the proportion of customers you are messaging to is biased in favor of those with a problem.

人工智能

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Mystic River directed by Clint Eastwood (Warner Brothers, 2003) As kids, Jimmy Markum and Sean Devine watched their best friend, Dave Boyle, disappear down the street in the back of an unmarked police car. Or so they thought. Four days later they learned the truth: Boyle, who'd supposedly been picked up for destroying municipal property, was actually abducted by a pair of pedophiles. He eventually escaped, physically at least, on his own. Thirty years later, Devine (Kevin Bacon) is in the homicide division of the Massachusetts state police, Markum (Sean Penn) is an ex-con convenience store operator and Boyle (Tim Robbins) is an underemployed, slightly boozy husband and father of one, still living, as does Markum, in the old neighborhood, a working-class section of Boston not far from the Mystic River. But the image of Boyle disappearing down the street in the back of the old sedan is still with them -- and it quickly bubbles to the surface when Markum's 20-something daughter turns up dead. Yet as complicated as that all seems, it's only the opening salvo of Clint Eastwood's award-winning film Mystic River, which seems to find no end to the depths of misery suffered by each of its protagonists. Boyle, of course, has the longest and most visible scars, best captured in his slightly hunched-over walk. His shame is gone, but not forgotten, as evidenced by the difficulty he has, despite his best efforts, relating to his wife (Marcia Gay Harden) and son, Michael (Cayden Body), or his inablity to tell the truth or even offer up consistent stories about why he came home bloodied the night Katie was killed. Still, he can't seem to outsuffer Markum, whose loss of his first daughter draws him back into a paradigm of bloodletting and revenge worthy of the worst Shakespearean lord. And between them is caught Devine, wh

人工智能

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Revision as of 16:14, February 24, 2009 by Ixthis888 (Talk | contribs) Psalm 137 (Greek numbering: Psalm 136) is one of the best known of the Biblical psalms. Its opening lines, "By the rivers of Babylon..." (Septuagint: "By the waters of Babylon...") have been set to music on several occasions. The psalm is a hymn expressing the yearnings of the Jewish people in exile following the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem in 586 BC. The rivers of Babylon are the Euphrates river, its tributaries, and the Chebar river (possibly the river Habor, the Chaboras, or modern Khabour, which joins the Euphrates at Circesium). In its whole form, the psalm reflects the yearning for Jerusalem as well as hatred for the Holy City's enemies with sometimes violent imagery. Rabbinical sources attributed the poem to the prophet Jeremiah, and the Septuagint version of the psalm bears the superscription: "For David. By Jeremias, in the Captivity." The early lines of the poem are very well known, as they describe the sadness of the Israelites, asked to "sing the Lord's song in a foreign land". This they refuse to do, leaving their harps hanging on trees. The poem then turns into self-exhortation to remember Jerusalem. It ends with violent fantasies of revenge, telling a "Daughter of Babylon" of the delight of "he who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks." (New International Version). 1 Liturgical Use Liturgical Use Psalm 137 (which is known by its Septuagint numbering as Psalm 136) is a part of the Nineteenth Kathisma (division of the Psalter) and is read at Matins on Friday mornings thr

人工智能

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Top 10 Points of Interest Mining Claims News.bytes California Desert Field Office Jurisdictions BLM>California>Bakersfield>What We Do>Carrizo Plain National Monument>Carrizo Proclamation Bakersfield Field Office Proclamation. Carrizo Plain National Monument THE WHITE HOUSEOffice of the Press SecretaryJanuary 17, 2001For Immediate Release ESTABLISHMENT OF THE CARRIZO PLAIN NATIONAL MONUMENTBY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICAA PROCLAMATIONFull of natural splendor and rich in human history, the majestic grasslands and stark ridges in the Carrizo Plain National Monument contain exceptional objects of scientific and historic interest. Since the mid-1800s, large portions of the grasslands that once spanned the entire four hundred mile expanse of California's nearby San Joaquin Valley and other valleys in the vicinity have been eliminated by extensive land conversion to agricultural, industrial, and urban land uses. The Carrizo Plain National Monument, which is dramatically bisected by the San Andreas Fault zone, is the largest undeveloped remnant of this ecosystem, providing crucial habitat for the long-term conservation of the many endemic plant and animal species that still inhabit the area.The monument offers a refuge for endangered, threatened, and rare animal species such as the San Joaquin kit fox, the California condor, the blunt-nosed leopard lizard, the giant kangaroo rat, the San Joaquin antelope squirrel, the longhorn fairy shrimp, and the vernal pool fairy shrimp. It supports important populations of pronghorn antelope and tule elk. The area is also home to many rare and sensitive plant species, including the California jewelflower, the Hoover's woolly-star, the San Joaquin woolly-threads, the pale-yellow layia, the forked fiddleneck, the Carrizo peppergrass, the Lost Hills saltbush, the Temblor buckwheat, the recurved larkspur, and the Munz's tidy-tips. Despite past human use, the size, isolation, and relatively undeveloped nature of the area make it ideal for long-term conservation of the dwindling flora and fauna characteristic of the San Joaquin Valley region.The Carrizo Plain National Monument also encompasses Soda Lake, the largest remaining natural alkali wetland in southern California and the only closed basin within the coastal mountains. As its name suggests, Soda Lake concentrates salts as water is evaporated away, leaving white deposits of sulfates and carbonates. Despite this harsh environment, small plant and animal species are well adapted to the setting, which is also important to migratory birds. During the winter months the lake fills with water and teems with thousands of beautiful lesser sandhill cranes, long-billed curlews, and mountain plovers.The Carrizo Plain National Monument owes its existence to the geologic processes that occur along the San Andreas Fault, where two of the Earth's five great tectonic plates slide past one another, parallel to the axis of the Plain. Shifting along the fault created the Plain by rumpling the rocks to the northeast into the Temblor Range and isolating the Plain from the rest of the San Joaquin Valley. The area is world-famous for its spectacular exposures of fault-generated land forms Stream valleys emerge from the adjacent mountains, only to take dramatic right-angle turns where they intersect the fault. Ponds and sags form where the ground is extended and subsides between branches of the fault. Benches form where the fault offsets valley walls. Many dramatic landscape features are products of the interplay between very rapid fault movement and slower erosion. The dry climate of the area produces low erosion rates, thereby preserving the spectacular effects of fault slip, folding, and warping. On the Plain, these fault-related events happen intermittently, but with great force. In 1857, the strongest earthquake in California's recorded history ripped through the San Andreas Fault, wrenching the western side of the Carrizo Plain National Monument thirty-one feet northward.The area is also distinguished for its significant fossil assemblages. The Caliente Formation, exposed on the southeast side of the Caliente Range, is host to abundant and diverse terrestrial fossil mammal remains of the Miocene Epoch (from 13 million to 25 million years ago). Fossils of five North American provincial mammalian ages (Arikareean, Hemingfordian, Barstovian, Clarendonian, Hemphillian) are represented in sedimentary rocks in that formation. These terrestrial fossil remains are interlaced with marine sedimentary rocks bearing fossils of mollusks, pectens, turitellas, and oysters.In addition to its geologic and biological wealth, the area is rich in human history. Archaeologists theorize that humans have occupied the Carrizo Plain National Monument area since the Paleo Indian Period (circa 11,000 to 9,000 B.C.). Bedrock mortar milling features, village middens, and elaborate pictographs are the primary manifestations of prehistoric occupation. Some of these, such as the Painted Rock and Sulphur Springs rock art sites, are recognized as world class. European expeditions through the area date back to the late 1700s, with settlement beginning in the 1850s. Livestock ranching, farming, and mining activities in the last century and a half are evidenced by numerous artifacts and historic ranch properties within the area.Section 2 of the Act of June 8, 1906 (34 Stat. 225, 16 U.S.C. 431), authorizes the President, in his discretion, to declare by public proclamation historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest that are situated upon the lands owned or controlled by the Government of the United States to be national monuments, and to reserve as a part thereof parcels of land, the limits of which in all cases shall be confined to the smallest area compatible with the proper care and management of the objects to be protected.WHEREAS it appears that it would be in the public interest to reserve such lands as a national monument to be known as the Carrizo Plain National Monument:NOW, THEREFORE, I, WILLIAM J. CLINTON, President of the United States of America, by the authority vested in me by section 2 of the Act of June 8, 1906 (34 Stat. 225, 16 U.S.C. 431), do proclaim that there are hereby set apart and reserved as the Carrizo Plain National Monument, for the purpose of protecting the objects identified above, all lands and interests in lands owned or controlled by the United States within the boundaries of the area described on the map entitled "Carrizo Plain National Monument" attached to and forming a part of this proclamation. The Federal land and interests in land reserved consist of approximately 204,107 acres, which is the smallest area compatible with the proper care and management of the objects to be protected.All Federal lands and interests in lands within the boundaries of this monument are hereby appropriated and withdrawn from all forms of entry, location, selection, sale, or leasing or other disposition under the public land laws, including but not limited to withdrawal from location, entry, and patent under the mining laws, and from disposition under all laws relating to mineral and geothermal leasing, other than by exchange that furthers the protective purposes of the monument. For the purpose of protecting the objects identified above, the Secretary shall prohibit all motorized and mechanized vehicle use off road, except for emergency or authorized administrative purposes.Lands and interests in lands within the proposed monument not owned by the United States shall be reserved as a part of the monument upon acquisition of title thereto by the United States.The Secretary of the Interior shall manage the monument through the Bureau of Land Management, pursuant to applicable legal authorities, to implement the purposes of this proclamation.The Secretary of the Interior shall prepare a management plan that addresses the actions, including road closures or travel restrictions, necessary to protect the objects identified in this proclamation.The establishment of this monument is subject to valid existing rights.Nothing in this proclamation shall be deemed to enlarge or diminish the jurisdiction of the State of California with respect to fish and wildlife management.There is hereby reserved, as of the date of this proclamation and subject to valid existing rights, a quantity of water sufficient to fulfill the purposes for which this monument is established. Nothing in this reservation shall be construed as a relinquishment or reduction of any water use or rights reserved or appropriated by the United States on or before the date of this proclamation.Laws, regulations, and policies followed by the Bureau of Land Management in issuing and administering grazing permits or leases on all lands under its jurisdiction shall continue to apply with regard to the lands in the monument.Nothing in this proclamation shall be deemed to revoke any existing withdrawal, reservation, or appropriation; however, the national monument shall be the dominant reservation.Warning is hereby given to all unauthorized persons not to appropriate, injure, destroy, or remove any feature of this monument and not to locate or settle upon any of the lands thereof.IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this seventeenth day of January, in the year of our Lord two thousand one, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and twenty-fifth. WILLIAM J. CLINTON Carrizo Plain National MonumentPlan Your Visit Directions Recreation OpportunitiesThings To Know Before You GoGateway CommunitiesFAQPhotos & MediaPhoto GallerySelf-Guided Tour Brochures & MapsHistory & CulturePeoplePlacesPresidential ProclamationNature & Science AnimalsWildflowers & PlantsEnvironmental IssuesNatural Features & EcosystemsMonument NewsMonument ManagementPartnershipsPlanningAdvisory CommitteeMission Statement & Fact SheetWhy National Monuments?BLM California National MonumentsCalifornia CoastalCarrizo PlainFort OrdSanta Rosa and San Jacinto Mountains National Landscape Conservation System Male pronghorn. Sprague Hill Road. Photo by Al Schmierer. Yellow wildflowers on rolling hills. Selby Rocks in the foreground, Painted Rock in thebackground, Soda Lake in the distance. Goodwin Education Center complex with sign in front. Overview of Soda Lake Hunters on Caliente Mountain San Andreas Fault appears as a gash in the land at Wallace Creek on the Carrizo Plain. Bureau of Land ManagementBakersfield Field OfficeCarrizo Plain National MonumentGoodwin Education CenterPhone: (805) 475-2131Open: December 1 - May 31.Hours: 9 a.m. - 4 p.m., Th. - Su.Contact us by EmailBureau of Land ManagementBakersfield Field Office3801 Pegasus DriveBakersfield, CA 93308Phone: (661) 391-6000Fax: (661) 391-6041Hours: 7:30 a.m. - 4:15 p.m., M-FContact us by Email Last updated: 11-10-2011

人工智能

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Research Notes in Shaykhi, Babi and Baha'i Studies,Vol. 4, no. 2 (November, 2000) S�leyman Nazif’s Nasiruddin Shah ve Babiler: an Ottoman Source on Babi-Baha’i History. [With a Translation of Passages on Tahirih*] Necati Alkan S�leyman Nazif (1870-1927) was an eminent Turkish poet who nowadays is neglected. He mastered Arabic, Persian and French and worked for several government posts during the reign of Sultan Abdulhamid II. In 1897 he fled to Europe, including Paris where he wrote in favour of a constitutional government. After returning from Europe, Abdulhamid gave him a post as chief secretary of a ministry in Bursa; at the same time he was an exile because of his political publications in Paris. He returned to Istanbul in 1908 after the Young Turk revolution, and held the office of governor in different cities. Nazif wrote an extensive number of nationalistic articles for newspapers. As a result of a speech in January 1920 (when Istanbul was being occupied by the Allied Powers after WW I) in favour of the French turcophile Pierre Loti, who displeased Britain, Nazif was banished to Malta, where he stayed twenty months with more than a hundred other enemies of Britain. S�leyman Nazif died in Istanbul. Among other published works of S�leyman Nazif is this little book Nasiruddin Shah ve Babiler (“Nasiru’d-Din Shah and the Babis”).[1] In his own words, it is not an important historical account but a mere record of personal encounters and memoirs. Nazif says that it was his duty not to be indifferent and insensitive towards important events that took place in the last hundred years in Persia and the Ottoman Empire. He regards the emergence and changing situation of two people as the worthiest events to be reflected upon in the Near East since the dawn of history in Asia. According to his own words, he received the first substantial information on the Babis during his stay in Paris, from the poet Catulle Mend�s.[2] The latter asked him how he viewed the Babis, stating that since Nazif was a Turk and spoke Persian, he must know more about them than Westerners. Nazif notes that until then, like many other Easterners, he had no substantial knowledge or good opinion about the Babis, and that when he heard the name “Babi” he imagined “a pair of bloodthirsty black eyes and a bloodstained dagger”. His reply to Mend�s was that he had not studied the Babis and that in his country people spoke with fear about them, adding that “anarchist” in the West was equal to “Babi” in the East. To Mend�s, this answer was insufficient. After talking about the works on the Babis he had read and summarising those, Mend�s said with excitement that it is a pity that the Easterners, and in particular the Iranians, have misunderstood the Babis. Nazif concludes that this was a big mistake, and Nasiru’d-Din Shah, that poor ignorant, paid for this mistake with his blood because for fifty years he stubbornly refused renewal (p. 14). In his book, S�leyman Nazif places Babi-Bahai history in the context of Iranian and Ottoman history. He recounts the genesis, development and fate of the Babi movement in Iran and the Ottoman Empire. He regards Ali Muhammad Shirazi, the Bab, as a true Muslim who preached the Islamic shari‘a and was faithful to it; later his followers distorted his teachings and established a tariqa in his name, probably as a result of and out of protest to what they experienced at the hands of the Iranian government. The brothers Sayyid Hasan and Sayyid Husayn, who were imprisoned with him but abandoned him after being released, were more fanatical Babis than Ali Muhammad Shirazi himself. They presented a more exaggerated Babism (ghulat-i Babiyya) than the Bab and and even wrote a Qur’an on his behalf without his knowledge (p. 49). A special concern of Nazif is his admiration of Tahirih’s person, her beauty, and her virtues, expressed with magnificent words intended to eternalise her (see translation below). Contrary to official sources on Tahirih’s death, Nazif says that she was burned alive at the fortress in Tehran. Interestingly, he describes her as the “youhtful Turkish woman from Qazvin”. Nazif also dwells on the personality of ‘Abdu’l-Baha, and conveys to the reader his encounter with him in 1917 in Haifa. Abbas Efendi, “son and successor of the famous Baha’u’llah”, who had withdrawn from Babism[3] and established an independent mezheb/madhhab and, as stated by himself, a tarikat/tariqa, moved from ‘Akka to Haifa after the Second Constitution (Young Turk coup d’etat, 1908). Because his words and statements were for the most part distorted, ‘Abdu’l-Baha initially received visitors with suspicion. But then he was assured of Nazif’s sincerity and talked about all the events since his childhood (p. 18). In connection with the exile of Mirza Yahya Subh-i Azal to Cyprus, Nazif notes that at that time the famous poet Ziya Pasha was governor of Cyprus. Here, as maintained by some Western historians, he had met Subh-i Azal and laid the foundations of the contacts between the Babis and the “Young Ottomans”[4], yet there is nothing to support this. Nazif remarks that “The more the Babis retreated towards the West, the goals and fundamentals they pursued also changed. The religious movement in Iran gradually took a social form”. He moreover relates that ‘Abdu’l-Baha was acquainted with Ziya Pasha and had communicated with him and Namik Kemal, another reform-minded and important figure among Ottoman literati of the Tanzimat (“reordering”) era: “When I met ‘Abbas Efendi… he told me with complete sorrow that he had an extensive correspondence with Kemal Bey but that out of worry over the investigation and persecution in the time of Sultan Abdulhamid II, he had burnt those letters” (pp. 52-53). A few months after the publication of the book Beyrut Vilayeti[5], in the first volume of which twelve pages deal with the authors’ three meetings with ‘Abdu’l-Baha, Nazif met him in Haifa; the Baha’i leader complained that his statements and ideas were misrepresented there or not properly understood. Nazif confirms that some statements in those pages are not congruent with the “manifest intelligence” of ‘Abdu’l-Baha, and adds: “I do not know how real ‘Abbas Efendi’s sincerity towards me was. I have not witnessed anything that corresponded to his insincerity” (p. 87). S�leyman Nazif ends the story of his encounter with ‘Abdu’l-Baha with the latter’s words that “We have no belief that is contrary to true Islam. Our judgment (ijtihad) is in accord with the spirit of Islam, let alone contrary”. Finally, in a letter written to Nazif in Turkish and appended to the book, ‘Abdu’l-Baha complains about some articles on him, published in the newspaper Tasvir-i Efk�r[6]; he says that the information was received second hand by Westerners from certain persons in Istanbul who outwardly appear as Babis. Nazif, ‘Abdu’l-Baha states, who is a lover of truth and has studied the writings of Baha’u’llah, should scrutinise his replies to European and American newspapers and his Tablet to the Hague that contains the fundamentals of the Baha’i movement, and thus free himself from various kinds of prejudices[7]. Nazif assures the reader that he wrote down what he read about ‘Abdu’l-Baha and had witnessed himself without alteration, and that, after studying the letter and the newspapers ‘Abdu’l-Baha had sent to him, it is not his to write in favour or against his madhhab or tariqa. Although S�leyman Nazif’s work has some factual errors, it can be regarded as an important primary source with regard to first-hand information that was not accessible before to the Western reader. Like other Ottoman sources from the 1910’s and 1920’s on the Babi and Baha’i religions, Nazif’s book is also highly positive and unbiased, something that modern Turkish academic literature fails to achieve. Notes: * I am much indebted to Sholeh A. Quinn for proof-reading and revising this paper. No part of it may be reproduced and cited except with the express permission of the author. [1] Written in 1919 as dated in the foreword, published 1923 (Ottoman script, 103 pages; Kanaat K�t�phanesi Matbaasi, Istanbul). Nazif appended a poem of Tahirih and a letter in Turkish by ‘Abdu’l-Baha to him. [2] French poet and writer, 1844-1909. [3] Nazif, p. 53: “Abbas Efendi had told me clearly and emphatically that he was not a Babi”, and: “Abbas Efendi withdrew from Babism and even was praying to God to guard him from it… It is also true that Subh-i Azal was surrounded by the company of the wicked and degenerated Babis. The power and grandeur was on Baha’u’llah’s side, as it is only Baha’u’llah’s still well established creed (mezheb) and order (tarikat) that is esteemed and influential in Europe and America” (p. 53, 54). [4] First generation of Ottoman reformist intellectuals who advocated a liberal constitutional regime after European and Islamic ideals. Under the leadership of Midhat Pasha they succeeded in drafting the first constitution (meshrutiyet) in 1876. Their ideas were later inherited and developed by the “Young Turks”. [5] A saln�me (yearbook) of the Beirut district, written by Mehmet Refik (Temimi)/ Mehmet Behcet (Yazar); 2 vols., Vilayet Matbaasi: 1335/1917; 1:10-15, “Babiler ve Babizm” (The Babis and Babism), and 1:269-80 “Babiler ve Babizm Hakkinda Tedkik�t-i Mahalliye” (A Regional Study of the Babis and Babism). The authors approached ‘Abdu’l-Baha having heard that he is hiding the truths of his tariqa and appeared as a true Muslim; their observation after leaving the third meeting with him is: “Isn’t he a good actor?”. [6] This book was first published in installations in this newspaper from 5 -28 January [7] The letter (dated 17 Sha‘ban 1338, signed ‘Abbas-i Irani) was entrusted to Nazif after his exile in Malta and ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s death by some Baha’is. Appendix Translation of passages on Tahirih; S�leyman Nazif: Nasiruddin Shah ve Babiler (Kanaat K�t�phanesi: Istanbul 1923); pp. 35, 44-49. A young woman accepted Babism and became the disciple of the new Messiah. Her name was Zarrin Taj. But the people, being attracted to her countless virtues, gave her the title “Qurratu’l-‘Ayn” [solace of the eyes]. This exceptional woman who was extraordinarily intelligent, erudite, a poetess, mature, eloquent and resolute, also was, with regard to her chastity and decency, uncorrupted - even to the extent that she forced her enemies to confirm and admit [her eminence]. Her first followers conferred upon her the attribute “Tahirih” [the pure]; she was addressed and remembered by this name. Among the masters of poetry in Iran, the poems of Qurratu’l-‘Ayn in our day no doubt rank high. The minds and thoughts of those hesitating to support Babism were bewildered and captivated in the presence of Tahirih by her desire-inflaming beauty, her indisputable excellence, her particular eloquence and firmness and courage. She entered every place unveiled, and through her sermons about the new sect, in a brief time established a community with numerous members. … This exceptional woman, in my opinion, is the world’s staunchest and most virtuous lady. When this exceptional woman was born, her parents gave her the name “Zarrin Taj” [golden crown]. She indeed was a golden crown. She was born with a diadem of beauty and grace and an endless treasure of talent for knowledge. After dedicating her merits and virtues, whether inherited or acquired, for the salvation of the people, they deemed the title “Qurratu’l-‘Ayn” as worthy for her. Zarrin Taj became a light of gladness and a flame of hope for every weary eye. In addition to such a beauty and courage, she was so chaste and decent that even her most pitiless arch-enemies could not question the attribute “Tahirih” conferred upon this exceptional woman by those gathered under the banner of her judgment, and those intending to kill her received confirmation and were treated with respect in the presence of her fame and honour. This symbol of chastity that valiantly and enthusiastically asso-ciated with everyone remained unstained from the corruption of passion. Like the eloquence of her discourse that dominated the minds and consciences, her desire-inflaming beauty and grace consisted only of the excitement of her love for an eternally worshipped one who was her object and holy goal, on whose path she ultimately gave up her life. Not only were the abandoned, the down-trodden and those people in need of help enchanted by her virtues, but also the great ones of that time. Even the highest rank police commander in Tehran was earnestly striving to mitigate the incarceration of this unique heroine and to liberate her completely. However, resolute and dignified as she was, Qurratu’l-‘Ayn rejected this proposed amnesty and, as she was faithful to her own honour, remained loyal to her noble principles. In the palace, the vicinity of which the plot against Nasiru’d-Din Shah took place, a great multitude of princes, important officials and notables was present while Zarrin Taj was being interrogated. At the same time that she was once again in the presence of these people declaring, without fear or doubt, her adherence and attraction to the Babi sect, she did not hesitate to include in her confession that she was ready to give up her life for the sake of her religion. Nothing could weaken her determination, neither her executioners’ threat nor the requests and tears of her husband and father who were present. The history of the world has hardly ever recorded [the story of] a woman, or even a man, who died such a tragic death with such fortitude. Zarrin Taj was born beautiful, and Qurrat'ul-Ayn wanted to die a great death. Zarrin Taj was burned alive at the fortress in Tehran, and they threw her ashes into the winds of the horizons. Qurratu’l-‘Ayn illustrated the last page of her life in this verse; who knows, she might have recited these two lines at that historical moment: Be a salamander, be a moth, I do not say; Yet brave, if you wish to be burned, stay. This verse composed in two languages [Persian-Arabic] shows what eternal rapture for divine love she was in: The gleaming of your cheeks has risen; And the light of your countenance arisen. Why don’t you cry out “Am I not your Lord?” Cry out, “Yea, yea”. Whether a sect or a religion; whether based on illusions or superstitions; whether resulting from the need of the age for renewal and development, it is very likely that Babism will revive either in its old condition or in another form. And again it is very likely that it will totally perish in the narrow ditch kicked into it by the Iranian shahs. But Qurratu’l-‘Ayn’s name and memory is always alive and fascinating. Nothing whatsoever, no might and no onslaught can destroy this name. If the goal for the sake of which she gave up her life is destined to be windswept and annihilated, it is written on her grave; but if life and power is promised and facilitated by God then Zarrin Taj’s dream and name will eternally flash like lightning on her glorious and noble stone: She is more authentic, more genuine and more eminent, and a greater heroine than Jeanne d’Arc, so much so that from Eve to the last of Eve’s daughters to be born, every member of the noble community [Muslims], when remembering this youthful Turkish woman from Qazvin, will be moved to tears and swell with pride. Ah! Alas, Qurratu’l-‘Ayn! You were worth a thousand Nasiru’d-Din Shahs… a thousand Qajar dynasties. The executioners have not scattered your ashes to the horizons of Tehran, but from those horizons into the hearts of mankind. Every heart is your shrine, Tahirih!… During Qurratu’l-‘Ayn’s interrogation the other imprisoned Babis were also present. All, including the young girls and boys among the arrested, were happy and at ease. They witnessed how Tahirih left for the place of execution without saying a word, not even words of farewell. When these wretched one’s turn came, both those involved in the plot and those not involved, without exception, admitted that they were Babis and, blessing moreover the name of Bab Ali Muhammad Shirazi, whom they addressed with “Hazrat” [His Holiness], and the names of the other Babi disciples and martyrs and adding their plea “May God sanctify them”, said that they were ready to face everything. … The uprising in Mazindaran [Shaykh Tabarsi] and Qurratu’l-‘Ayn’s impetus were the greatest cause for these sudden changes. Zarrin Taj passed only a few month of this interval for the propagation of the sect and spent most of the time in prison. If she had been free and in more favourable circumstances, Iran for sure would have seen much better days. 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